Shortly before the holidays in December, agricultural researcher Harbans Bhardwaj walked into a meeting with Virginia State University leadership expecting to discuss a reorganization in his department.
Instead, Bhardwaj — a tenured faculty member with over three decades of experience at the Petersburg university — was told it was his last day of work. He was presented with severance documents and told that if he didn't sign them on the spot, he would be denied severance entirely.
Bhardwaj told VPM News he was too shaken to read the documents at the time and requested additional time for review. But Bhardwaj said a human resources representative took the papers from his hands.
After that, he was forced to surrender his campus ID, keys and work laptop before he was escorted by campus police to his car.
"Treating me like a criminal, walking me off campus … and saying 'Go away, and don't come back,' that hurts," Bhardwaj told VPM News last month. "That hurts."
He was among a handful of Virginia State University faculty terminated without warning. Education advocacy groups, including the American Association of University Professors, say the situation is a prime example of what can happen when university workers cannot collectively bargain.
"With a union, this would not happen," said Ian Mullins, with the University of Virginia chapter of United Campus Workers during a February press conference calling for the reinstatement of those VSU faculty. "We would be able to defend ourselves."
Right now, two pieces of legislation (HB1263 and SB378) are moving forward in the Virginia General Assembly that would allow public sector employees to collectively bargain. However, those bills exclude employees at state colleges as well as home health workers paid through Medicaid. (A 2020 law allowed individual localities to make their own decisions about collective bargaining.)
Some state lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D–Fairfax), are still pushing to allow those employees to unionize. Negotiations will continue in closed-door meetings before the session ends sine die on Saturday.
During a recent town hall discussion about collective bargaining, Surovell described his experience working in the dining hall preparing food as a James Madison University student in the early 1990s.
"If I'd had a union," Surovell said, "I guarantee I would've been able to make more money and have better working conditions."
Virginia is among nearly a dozen states that prohibit or limit some higher education faculty from collectively negotiating their employment contracts. Meanwhile, 25 states explicitly permit faculty to collectively bargain — and 14 are silent on the matter.
The state law banning collective bargaining is a relic of the commonwealth's Jim Crow era: It started as a state policy enacted by segregationist politicians in 1946, after a group of Black employees at UVA's hospital organized to push for better working conditions and pay.
"We must overturn this racist legacy in Virginia," said Margarette Moore, a custodian at William & Mary, during a February press conference.
National AAUP President Todd Wolfson said there's been a concerted effort among campus workers nationwide to organize after many lost their jobs during the pandemic.
There's been a separate trend of colleges moving away from tenured faculty positions toward non-tenure track faculty members: In 1987, about half of faculty members held tenure or tenure-track positions. By 2023, that figure had dropped to just under 32%. (Tenured positions typically provide greater job security).
"The workers overall in the sector are increasingly insecure financially — and in terms of their status of their work," Wolfson told VPM News. "And so there's a desire for collective bargaining rights so we can further protect ourselves."
Policies under President Donald Trump's administration have further compounded anxiety and uncertainty among some, he said.
Without public bargaining, William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining and Higher Education, said protections for faculty vary from university to university. Unionizing can provide additional protections beyond what standard individual employment contracts and university policies stipulate.
"If you look at a school which has had a long-term collective bargaining relationship, you'll see very rich kinds of protections," Herbert told VPM News. "It's about creating a process of democracy in the workplace."
Collective bargaining can also strengthen enforcement of a university's tenure system. For example, when an employee is terminated, collective bargaining agreements can establish what's called an arbitration grievance system.
That resolution process involves a third party to hear a grievance and come to a determination about whether procedures were followed or academic freedom was violated.
Otherwise, university presidents are the final arbiters in review hearings — like at Virginia State University. (The fired VSU faculty members are hoping for an appeals hearing led by the school's faculty senate.)
AAUP representatives and the impacted VSU faculty members have asked Virginia House Speaker Don Scott and the office of Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi to intervene, too.
VPM News reached out to a dozen public universities to ask about their position on faculty or school employees unionizing.
Most said they don't comment on pending legislation. George Mason University spokesperson John Davis Hollis said in an email: "we will work with whatever the General Assembly and the governor ultimately agree to."
Some did not respond, including VSU.
Although, Christopher Newport University faculty member Darlene Mitrano said officials there have been lobbying against the collective bargaining legislation.
Mitrano, who spoke with VPM News as an individual and not in her official capacity as a professor, said CNU President Bill Kelly mentioned in a recent meeting with faculty senate members that he opposed collective bargaining because it would be too expensive for the university.
(A CNU spokesperson told VPM News via email that the school "doesn't comment on pending legislation.")
Mitrano said she's disappointed in the Newport News university's lack of support for the issue.
"Just giving somebody the legal right to collectively bargain doesn't mean there's going to be an uprising, everyone's going to join the union and ask for raises across the board. That's not what we want," Mitrano said. "What we want is a seat at the table, to be recognized, and for our voices to be heard."
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