Sixty-two years ago, St. John’s University (SJU) in New York City became the site of the first major faculty strike in U.S. history — a year-long conflict that followed the firing of 33 teachers, including three priests, without due process. Now, the struggle over labor conditions has forced the faculty to once again mobilize, a move precipitated by the current college administration’s abrupt announcement that it will no longer recognize two faculty unions or continue negotiations to hash out a new contract.

St. John’s president, Rev. Brian J. Shanley, and Provost and Senior Vice President Simon Geir Møller, told the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) that the move was necessary to give the college “the flexibility required to innovate … and deliver on our promise to our students.”

But faculty members, who had been demanding improved wages and greater transparency in how their share of health insurance premiums are calculated, call it union busting.

And while the university’s administrators did not respond to Truthout’s multiple requests for an interview, they told NCR that the decision rests on a 2020 decision promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That decision, Bethany College, 369 NLRB No. 98, removed NLRB jurisdiction over most of the 849 religiously affiliated colleges and universities in the country and prompted at least eight predominantly Catholic schools — Bethany and Boston Colleges, and Duquesne, Edward Waters, Loyola Marymount, Marquette, St. Leo and Wilberforce universities — to end union recognition on campus.

Critics see this as part of a general rightward trend in higher education.

“The anti-union arguments that have emerged coincide with the appointment of conservative board members and trustees who do not want to deal with unions,” Joseph A. McCartin, executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told Truthout. “College and university board members at religiously affiliated institutions are heavily weighted to the financial sector, which does not work with unions and sees them as a nuisance. But the moral principles that guide the church have a clear message about workplace justice. These colleges need to be asked how they reconcile their actions with the church’s stated values.”

To wit, McCartin cites a pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, that was written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1986. The 40-year-old document centers “social justice and the Biblical and ethical principles that support it” and demands that Catholic colleges and universities be “exemplary” in providing “a sufficient livelihood and social benefits” to workers. The document further demands that Catholic institutions “fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively … through whatever association or organization they freely choose.”

Theology professor Chris Denny is president of the St. John’s Faculty Association, which, along with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has represented the full- and part-time faculty on St. John’s Jamaica, New York, campus since 1970.

“Catholicism is not a lapel pin you take out of a drawer and put on when you want to showcase your faith,” Denny told Truthout. “Simply put, the university’s treatment of faculty and students does not embody Catholic social justice teachings. The Vincentian tradition at St. John’s follows the model set by St. Vincent de Paul.” SJU, he says, was founded on this tradition. “It does not comport with lavish spending on athletics and team sports while the rest of the campus is a shambles. Our students understand that our workplace conditions are their learning conditions so they understand what’s at stake here.”

Denny argues that the Bethany decision may not have bearing on St. John’s. “We are governed by the New York State Employment Relations Act, which is overseen by the state Public Employees Relations Board (PERB),” he says. “PERB covers private entities like St. John’s and we’re now in a standoff with the administration over PERB’s role in governance.”

But the matter of jurisdiction is currently subject to some legal contestation. The question of whether the PERB or the NLRB has standing over employer-employee relations at St. John’s will be at the heart of an Unfair Labor Practices claim that the Faculty Association and AAUP plan to file. They will ask PERB judges to adjudicate this issue if the administration continues to stonewall and does not return to the bargaining table.

But the unions are hoping it won’t come to that.

Sophie Bell, acting president of the campus AAUP chapter, says that the union was surprised by the February suspension of bargaining and the decision to end union recognition. “This was my second time bargaining for a contract and in the earlier negotiation I felt like management was a real partner at the bargaining table,” she told Truthout. “This time it felt different and I got the impression that Shanley does not want a union.”

Nonetheless, she says that the bargaining team — 12 union members and a slightly smaller number of managers and attorneys — had been meeting regularly since the spring of 2025 and was making slow progress. “We’ve been working without a contract since July 1. We became concerned when management hired Proskauer Rose, an anti-union law firm, to represent them, but we were still talking,” she says.

But now that the talking has stopped, Bell says that the AAUP has three demands for Shanley and the Board of Trustees: Resume contract negotiations; recognize the bargaining unit’s right to a fair, equitable contract; and establish open lines of communication between faculty and Trustees.

As of late March, little headway has been made toward these goals. Nonetheless, the union has continued organizing — bringing hundreds of demonstrators to Madison Square Garden during an NCAA basketball championship game that featured St. John’s, and garnering support from a raft of community and labor organizations, elected officials, and progressive religious leaders.

Anti-Union Fervor Had Been Building on Campus

That support has been encouraging, first-year writing instructor David G. Farley tells Truthout. At the same time, he says that faculty are on edge since no one anticipated that the union would be totally rebuffed by management. Still, Farley said rumors about administration proposals that would worsen labor conditions — including reduced research leave, increased teaching loads, and the development of a robust online course catalog that will be heavily reliant on artificial intelligence — have swirled for several years.

“Last spring, [St. John’s University administrators] announced the elimination of 18 majors across the colleges including languages, chemistry, physics, toxicology, and hospitality management,” Farley says. “At about the same time they announced a new partnership with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for courses in security studies.”

At that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been ramping up its raids in communities throughout the country and, Farley says, “as concerned faculty, we quickly responded and got a petition going. We circulated it to current students, alumni, and staff, to say, ‘Don’t do this. It goes against the university’s social justice mission.’ In February, after less than a year, the [CBP] partnership was dissolved. This victorious campaign was galvanizing for faculty and we created connections to one another in a way that we had not done before.”

Jeanette C. Perron, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical science, agrees that the CBP campaign was significant. Nonetheless, she says that it took attending an open bargaining session to kickstart her union activism. “It was clear that we were spinning our wheels,” she told Truthout. “I could see that the people on the other side of the table did not respect the union. I thought our bargaining team had come up with some really good ideas about ways to save money, but everything they suggested was dismissed. That was eye-opening to see.”

Moreover, management contempt for both the Faculty Association and the AAUP, Perron and Farley say, has been the glue uniting faculty, many of whom see what is happening on their campus as emblematic of the attacks on higher education more generally.

“The Shanley administration has taken a profit-driven, corporatist approach to education,” Lara Vapnek, a history professor who has been at St. John’s for 20 years, tells Truthout. “Until Shanley came in 2020, the mission of the school was to serve the poor and promote social justice. Shanley has taken the school in a different direction and it is crushing.” She calls the summer 2025 hiring of EAB, a consulting firm hired to help the Board of Trustees “restructure” the school, and the hiring of anti-union lawyers from Proskauer Rose, turning points. “It seems as if the administration wants to turn St. John’s into an athletic franchise with an online university,” she quips.

Still, like others on campus, Vapnek is heartened by the faculty activism in response to what’s happened on campus, from the amount of community support they’ve received to the organizing that is taking place on and beyond the St. John’s campus. “The kind of top-town, ‘Let’s just wreck it and act like everything is okay’ mentality is very DOGE-like,” she says. “It fits with the attacks on women, people of color, and the queer community, attacks on the teaching of history, and attacks on the National Institutes of Health.”

“Basically, I see what’s taking place as a rejection of knowledge,” Vapnek concludes. “The faculty at St. John’s are great but we are all being treated as expendable. We think we’re providing value to students and to the university but the administration is treating us as if we’re standing in the way of progress.”

That said, Vapnek and her colleagues concede that union busting at St. John’s and other colleges and universities may be the point. They refer to a 2025 audit commissioned by the AAUP and conducted by Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan State University.

The survey found St. John’s to be in “solid financial condition” but noted that the school has the highest management salaries in the country, and perhaps predictably, Bunsis reported that faculty salaries have not kept pace with inflation.

Meanwhile, Bunsis reported that basketball coach Rick Pitino’s six-year contract provides an annual salary of $3.3 million, with athletic spending far outpacing instructional spending. The average annual faculty salary is $80,757.

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