Writing this week’s Clarion Call for the Pope Center, professor emeritus Charles Baird argues that faculty unionization is not a good thing. It tends to undermine academic standards and breeds discontent, he maintains.
Furthermore, faculty unionization suffers from the same moral defect that unionization in general does under American law — it is coercive. By forcing all workers to accept the preference of a majority for representation by a particular union, it violates the rights of those who do not want such representation. Majority rule is necessary in politics, but elsewhere individual choice should prevail. There is no justification for making A accept a union just because B and C happen to want it.
