The last few years at the University of California (UC) have been marked by labor militancy. In 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz launched a wildcat grading strike to address the soaring cost of living in the coastal enclave, an effort soon joined by many across the UC system. In 2021, with their contract negotiations dragging through a second year, nontenured adjunct faculty represented by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) voted to authorize a two-day strike, reaching a midnight deal only after they authorized a strike. And late last year, forty-eight thousand graduate workers, postdocs, and academic researchers in four United Auto Workers (UAW) locals walked off the job for six weeks in the largest strike in the United States in 2022 — and the largest higher education strike in history.

In each case, tenured faculty at the UC have found themselves in something of a bind. While they enjoy the great security offered by tenure, they are not themselves unionized, having foregone the opportunity to affiliate with a union after state law allowed them to do so in the 1970s. When graduate students threatened to withhold grades during last year’s strike, this lack of union representation became salient, with the university threatening its tenured professors with discipline and possible docked pay if they collaborated with striking workers.

There is one group of tenured faculty with union representation in the UC system, however: Santa Cruz’s professors formed the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (SCFA) in 1981, and have remained organized since. The SCFA is one chapter of the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), a coordinating organization with chapters statewide. But it is the only chapter that is also a recognized union. All tenure-line faculty are meanwhile a part of the Academic Senate, by which faculty engage in shared governance duties within the school.