




































[Expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 1-3]  Expositions ISSN: 1747–5376 

 

 

Yeshiva, Thirty Years Later 

BERNARD G. PRUSAK 

Center for Liberal Education 

Villanova University 

 

 

Thirty years ago, the United States Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 5 to 4, that the full-time 

faculty of Yeshiva University should be categorized as “managerial employees” and, as such, 

excluded from the benefits of collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act. The 

majority opinion in what has come to be known as the Yeshiva decision noted that “the faculty at 

each school [at Yeshiva University] effectively determine its curriculum, grading system, 

admission and matriculation standards, academic calendars, and course schedules.”
1
 Moreover, 

“The faculty at each school make recommendations to the Dean or Director in every case of 

faculty hiring, tenure, sabbaticals, termination, and promotion,” and “the overwhelming majority 

of faculty recommendations are implemented.”
2
 These facts led the majority to reflect that, 

whereas “[t]he [National Labor Relations] Act was intended to accommodate the type of 

management-employee relations that prevail in the pyramidal hierarchies of private industry,” 

contemporary universities are in the main organized quite differently, with a “system of „shared 

authority‟ evolved from the medieval model of collegial decision-making, in which guilds of 

scholars were responsible only to themselves.”
3
 Given the persistence of the collegial model, the 

majority reasoned, Yeshiva‟s full-time faculty “exercise authority which, in any other context, 

unquestionably would be managerial.”
4
 Since managerial employees are charged with 

representing management interests and so excluded from the benefits of collective bargaining 

under the Act, the Court‟s conclusion followed that full-time faculty are excluded as well. 

In this iteration of “Overheard in the Academy,” we have asked four faculty – one scholar-

activist, one adjunct with experience in faculty governance bodies, and two former 

administrators now returned to teaching and research – to reflect on the relationship, thirty years 

after Yeshiva, between faculty and administrators in the American colleges and universities that 

our contributors have come to know. In other words, we have asked our contributors to think 

about the current conditions of collegiality, an oft-invoked word on academic campuses, though 

one whose meaning all too often reduces to “niceness.” (If words are like pockets into which we 

stuff meanings, as Friedrich Nietzsche once claimed, then the word “collegiality” has had its 

pocket picked.) 

The majority opinion in Yeshiva has been contested from the day of its delivery, perhaps 

nowhere more forcefully than in Justice William Brennan‟s minority opinion. According to this 

opinion, “the Court‟s perception of the Yeshiva faculty‟s status is distorted by the rose-colored 

lens through which it views the governance structure of the modern-day university…. [T]he 

university of today bears little resemblance to the „community of scholars‟ of yesteryear,”
5
 



Yeshiva, Thirty Years Later  2 

 

instead having become “big business,” subject to the same corporate imperatives as “any large 

industrial organization.”
6
 Arguably due in part to the Yeshiva decision – after which the faculty 

union movement of the 1970s came quickly to a standstill, and many collective bargaining 

arrangements between faculty and administration broke down
7
 – the status of faculty at “the 

university of today” has also changed markedly since 1980. According to recent research, 

whereas in the late 1960s “fewer than 5 percent of full-time faculty hires nationally were for non-

tenure-track positions,” in 2008 “over half of full-time hires [were] for non-tenure-track 

positions.”
8
 So-called contingent faculty – full-time non-tenure-track, post-docs, adjuncts, and 

graduate students – have become the majority faculty nationwide, constituting nearly sixty-nine 

percent of faculty at all degree-granting institutions in 2007, as opposed to forty-three percent in 

1975.
9
 Finally, it is worth noting that, with the prioritization of research at many institutions, 

tenure-track and tenured professors have become “more likely to identify with their disciplines 

than with their campuses.”
10

 So it is not surprising that, “[i]n 1989, forty percent of professors 

reported that they felt loyalty to their institutions; seventy percent said they felt loyalty to their 

discipline.”
11

 What would be surprising is if the first number were not now lower and the second 

yet higher. 

What do these trends mean for the future of American higher education? Whose view of the 

role of the faculty in the present-day university is closer to the reality, that of the majority in 

Yeshiva, or that of the minority? And what special considerations and issues are there for 

institutions, like Catholic colleges and universities, with distinctive missions and commitments, 

for example to the principles of Catholic social teaching? 

Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University and the 

founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Jeanne Brody is an adjunct 

professor of Art History at Villanova University and formerly chair of its Adjunct Faculty 

Committee. John W. Carlson is a professor of Philosophy at Creighton University and formerly 

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Scranton, Dean and Academic 

Vice President at Le Moyne College, and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Creighton. 

John J. Johannes is a professor of Political Science at Villanova University and formerly Dean of 

the College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University and Vice President for Academic 

Affairs at Villanova. 

 

Notes 

 

1. National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, 444 U.S. 672, 676 (1980). 

2. 444 U.S. 672, 677 (1980). 

3. 444 U.S. 672, 680 (1980). 

4. 444 U.S. 672, 686 (1980). 

5. 444 U.S. 672, 702 (1980). 

6. 444 U.S. 672, 703 (1980). 

7. See on these developments Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the 

Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 111–114. 



3  Prusak 

 

 

8. Michael J. Dooris, David H. Monk, and Rodney A. Erickson, “Building, Sustaining and Developing 

Research University Faculty” (unpublished), 4, delivered at the 35
th
 Annual Conference of the 

Northeast Association for Institutional Research, Providence, RI, November 2008. Dooris is 

Director of Planning Research at Penn State; Monk is the Dean of the College of Education there; 

Erickson is the Executive Vice President and Provost. They cite as evidence for this claim work by 

M. J. Finkelstein and J. H. Schuster. 

9. See the document “Trends in Faculty Status, 1975–2007,” compiled by the American Association of 

University Professors (AAUP) from information culled from the federal government‟s Integrated 

Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS): http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/7D01E0C7-

C255-41F1-9F11E27D0028CB2A/0/ TrendsinFacultyStatus2007.pdf. 

10. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New 

York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 144. 

11. Menand, Marketplace of Ideas, 122. 


