Three weeks after Tulane University’s non-tenure track professors’ union announced their historic first contract, I met professor and bargaining team member Matt Toups at a cramped PJ’s Coffee in the heart of Tulane’s Uptown campus. Over a picnic table in the center of the campus’ labyrinthian greens and courtyards, Toups explained that his union connections go back to his childhood in New Orleans. “From kindergarten through 12th grade, all my teachers were part of the United Teachers of New Orleans. This is an important part of our identity in New Orleans—there’s a lot of history of labor organizing here,” said Toups, a computer science professor.
The professors’ union, part of the national union Workers United, have now made history of their own. At a rainy May Day rally in downtown New Orleans attended by students, pro-Palestine and immigrant rights activists, and UMC nurses coming from their latest strike, Tulane Workers United announced they had wrapped contract negotiations, the first non-tenure track professors’ (NTT) union contract at a private university in Louisiana history. Although successful union elections often attract well-deserved attention, it is the collective bargaining agreements that actually codify union-negotiated workplace improvements. Contract negotiations with Tulane stretched over a year and a half as the workers bargained for better pay, improved job security, and guarantees for academic freedom—the right to teach their students without political or institutional interference. With their new contract, workers secured new wage minimums for NTTs (sometimes called “professors of practice”), signing bonuses, standardized contract renewal procedures, as well as protections for academic freedom for the unionized professors. The union voted unanimously in favor of approving the contract.
“For us it was a pretty easy [decision to] unionize… we are doing meaningful work and we should be appreciated, we should be recognized,” said Amy George, a Spanish and linguistics professor who first came to Tulane from rural New Hampshire on a scholarship as a first-generation college student. She later earned her Ph.D. at Tulane and, after a brief stint elsewhere as an adjunct, has been teaching at Tulane for the last 20 years.
For her, one of the best parts of her job is supporting other first-generation college students. “Interestingly, a lot of the football players from rural Mississippi, rural Louisiana, Texas—the kids who are recruited into the football program from rural communities—we often have a lot more in common than they would necessarily expect. Tulane has the possibility to be a really special place, [but] I don’t think that it always realizes that possibility,” said George.
Within the hallowed halls of academia, the professorial workforce has suffered the same degradation of working conditions and pay as workers in myriad other professions around the country. A recent report by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) noted a widening pay gap between faculty and top-level administrators, and pay increases that fail to keep pace with rising inflation. Inequities also abound between departments, with humanities professors often making far less than those in engineering fields. “Tenure track” professorships (a status within the profession where a quasi-permanent job appointment is granted and the worker can only be fired under extenuating circumstances) have declined from the majority to an estimated one-third to one-fifth of the profession. Meanwhile, non-tenured appointments often pay less than tenured roles, have fewer opportunities for advancement, and face inconsistent terms of employment at their schools.
Though Tulane has a multi-billion dollar endowment, Toups reports that its teacher pay is comparable to his previous post at UNO. According to George, Tulane began hiring full-time, non-tenure track professors after a series of post-Katrina professional reorganizations. When she was hired in 2006, she was part of the first round of full-time NTTs at Tulane, and says that the rules and expectations for the new class of professors seemed to be made up as they went along. According to George, NTTs were not invited to faculty meetings and had limited control over class scheduling and the types of administrative workloads they were expected to manage.
“Through a number of different administrators, a lot of those things did change, but really, really slowly, and always because something really big and distressing and disturbing happened that pushed us to need to change something,” she said. Both Toups and George highlighted the new connections that they had forged with NTTs in other schools within the university.
“We had all these little segmented pieces of non-tenure-track faculty all over the university, who were fighting about different things of concern to their particular group of people. But without having this union and having the discourse across departments and across schools, we didn’t realize that a lot of us had shared concerns,” said George.
On June 19, 2024, the professors won their union in a landslide election, voting 146-29 in favor of unionizing. After their election, they elected bargaining representatives (representing schools within Tulane) and began bargaining in November of the same year. According to Tulane Workers United, this was the first union contract Tulane had negotiated with employees, and Tulane’s reaction to the union was hardly enthusiastic—the contract was negotiated within 19 months, a slightly longer-than-average time for first contract negotiations, which are often dismally long. One prominent union organizer, Patrick Butler, had a promotion rescinded and was not asked to return to teach. After Butler filed a case with the National Labor Relations Board, Tulane eventually settled and paid Butler over $37,000 in back pay. During the negotiations process, Tulane worked with both Ogletree Deakins and Jackson Lewis, two firms well-known for being aligned with employers and against unions. Tulane Workers United filed multiple unfair labor practice complaints (ULPs) with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging bad faith bargaining, and at one point called Tulane’s wage minimum counterproposal “insulting.” In their email statement, Tulane said, “We appreciate the time and commitment of the many faculty and administrators who showed up in good faith for the negotiations and we look forward to the continued contributions of our teaching faculty in preparing Tulane students for future success.” Eventually, both sides agreed to a salary minimum that constituted a roughly 20% raise for professors who were paid in the lowest quintile. The contract also includes a standardized procedure for renewing individual NTT’s appointments.
According to multiple sources, one of the most acrimonious topics during negotiations was academic freedom—the ability for professors to teach and research without political or institutional interference.
“That part of our contract was one of the most contentious of the whole bargaining process,” said Toups. “And it really shouldn’t have been, because Tulane already has academic freedom policies in the faculty handbook that are pretty good. The question is, will they actually follow them?” Toups said. According to multiple sources, when the union proposed putting the language from the handbook directly into the contract, the university refused.
“The provost told me, verbatim, ‘academic freedom is not one size fits all,’” said Kimberly Terrell, an environmental researcher formerly employed by the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, who resigned in 2025 after she says funders put pressure on the administration to silence her research into environmental racism. During “Tulane Day” at the state capitol last year—where Tulane representatives tout the school’s economic impact and lobby for state funding—Terrell reports that the school’s provost arrived ready to solicit funding for Tulane’s $700 million renovation of the derelict Charity Hospital, but became incensed at Terrell when “somebody accused Tulane of being anti-chemical industry because of my study.” Terrell’s study showed what many people across Louisiana already know—that high-paying petrochemical jobs are disproportionately awarded to white candidates. In a statement to AP news regarding Terrell, Tulane spokesperson Michael Strecker said Tulane “is fully committed to academic freedom and the strong pedagogical value of law clinics.” After Tulane Day, the law school dean imposed restrictions on Terrell’s ability to communicate with anyone outside of Tulane, such that she says it became impossible to do her job. A few weeks later, she resigned.
“It was devastating,” said Terrell, who completed her undergraduate studies at Tulane and was affiliated with the school for over 20 years. She says she hopes that the NTT’s new contract will help them fight against attacks on academic freedom.
“I hope that it adds another layer of protection. We need to hold the university accountable when it ignores written protections, and all of this illustrates why [despite] the university’s reassurance that faculty are protected, that’s not enough. We need special protections for non-tenured faculty. We need special protections for staff, and when the university ignores written protections, everybody needs to come together and rally around that,” said Terrell. She says that the university administration—and especially its president Michael Fitts, who collected a reported $3,312,000 in compensation in 2024—have a responsibility to protect academic freedom, even when its funding is threatened. “I think once you allow funding to dictate research and education agenda, there’s no end to that, right? So I think you just need to ask yourself, how much money is it going to take to buy out academic freedom and integrity at this university?”
Professor Amy George
Threats to academic freedom have emerged not from a singular source, but from a constellation of factors. There’s the oily corruption at the state level, pressure from donors, and the Trump administration, which has launched a series of devastating attacks targeting academic freedom: restricting student visas, slashing funding for climate research, and attacking Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in schools. And Tulane is far from immune.
“When the presidential administration shifted, there were some substantial shifts in the support networks on [Tulane’s] campus… the queer student organizing space has been removed,” said Amy George. She says that the school’s DEI inclusion group has been “rebranded” to avoid the charged term. “The same people are still in place, but they’re not allowed to use the progressive language.” But Tulane’s promotional materials reflect a different reality. “They like to put them in the admissions [materials], but I have a lot of classes that do not have Black or brown students, or have, like, one in a class of 15.” She says these moves by the administration amount to an erasure of these students and their experiences.
On March 10, 2025, the Trump administration issued a threatening letter to 60 colleges and universities, alleging “antisemitic harassment” and Title VI Civil Rights Act violations. The “antisemitic harassment” was a thinly-veiled allusion to pro-Palestinian encampments and protests that had sprung up on college campuses around the country—and the letter was a clear warning that schools should show no leniency to students who were critical of the U.S.’ involvement in the Israeli army’s agression. Among the letter’s recipients was Tulane, which in the previous year, had broken up their student encampment in less than two days, allowing police and a SWAT team on campus to clear students. This led to the arrest of 14 people (including Tulane and Loyola students), though all were later acquitted of charges at trial.
In particular, multiple sources highlighted the Tulane administration’s reaction to students and workers who supported the pro-Palestinian protests. “There were some Tulane employees who, after those protests, were really treated harshly, and were singled out in a way. That’s when you need the support of your coworkers—also known as a union,” said Toups. The NTTs’ new contract now contains a provision that requires Tulane to honor its faculty handbook’s stated policy of academic freedom, as well as protections for NTTs to exercise their first amendment rights in their personal lives.
Terrell’s pushback from the Tulane administration due to her research on the fossil fuel industry and the administration’s attitude around discussions of Palestine may seem like two unrelated threats to academic freedom. But perhaps it is part of our gray and grief-shaded 21st century reality to reckon with the fact that these two seemingly disparate issues are in many ways intertwined. After all, researchers found that Israel’s bombing campaign in the first two months of the genocide alone released around 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than the annual carbon footprint of 20 countries. A more recent study estimated the current carbon footprint of the genocide is 33.2 million tons of carbon emmisions, coming from bombing campaigns, jet fuel, deforestation, and the Israeli army’s obliteration of Gaza’s infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is itself a major polluter—the single largest polluter of any institution in the world, according to research published by the University of Utah. At the same time, the U.S. sends billions to Israel’s military each year, and a new provision in a bill before Congress called “the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” would further integrate the U.S. military with Israel’s.
Tulane itself presents a microcosm of the ties between the U.S. government and Israel’s. As reported in the student newspaper the Tulane Hullabaloo (whose articles about the union and academic freedom were invaluable resources for this piece), Tulane board member Michelle Diener is married to Bob Diener, a former national board member of the lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In 2014 Tulane hosted the inaugural U.S.-Israel Energy Summit (then-senator Mary Landrieu touted the event as a way “to help Israel secure its energy independence and security for years to come and to boost economic opportunities along America’s working coast.”). In 2018, Tulane president Michael Fitts visited Israel with a coterie of other U.S. college presidents in a bid to encourage “bilateral academic research and exchange opportunities,” according to a blog post about the visit on Tulane’s official site. Two years later, Tulane was selected as one of three U.S. locations as part of a partnership with the U.S. and Israel’s departments of energy to research offshore natural gas extraction. Daniel Shantz, the Entergy Chair in Clean Energy Engineering at Tulane University, was tapped to lead Tulane’s component of the partnership, dubbed the “fossil energy consortium.”
Professor Matt Toups
Tulane, with two new unions on its campus (the NTTs and the newly-unionized librarians, who are currently in contract negotiations), is arguably at the beginning of building worker power on campus through organized labor. For a more seasoned perspective, I also spoke with representatives from Rutgers University in New Jersey, one of the most unionized university systems in the country, with 20 different unions representing roughly 20,000 workers altogether. In 2023, all three professors’ unions, representing about 9,000 workers—NTTs, tenured professors, and part-time adjuncts—went on strike, cancelling classes for 67,000 students. The strike ended with a deal that gave adjuncts a 43% raise. Rutgers’ unions have also come out swinging against attacks on academic freedom: In October of 2025 the Rutgers professors’ unions issued a statement that condemned what they understood to be the Trump administration’s demand for academic fealty to their agenda. Members of the adjunct faculty union recently helped draft an academic freedom bill currently moving through the New Jersey legislature.
While the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses predates the second Trump administration, Hank Kalet, a veteran of higher education labor organizing at Rutgers, says that federal attacks on academic freedom have worsened “significantly” since Trump reassumed office. “[They’re] suing public and private institutions, sanctioning them, defining all, for instance, pro-Palestinian protests as anti-Semitic. It’s a chilling threat to speech.” Kalet is the vice president of Rutgers’ part-time faculty union, and co-chair of his union’s academic freedom committee. He says that one of the main ways that the adjunct’s contract protects their academic freedom and freedom of speech is to protect job security in a field that is often characterized by inconstant employment.
“What we have to defend here at Rutgers, and what we should be defending in the academy around the country, is the independence of faculty to speak their mind, to follow the research where it goes. Our goal is the pursuit and the dissemination of knowledge. And if we can’t do that, then what we would be producing is propaganda,” said Kalet.
There is an old union song by the legendary folk artist Pete Seeger. Its lyrics are lifted directly from the introductory verse at the beginning of the 1864 Constitution and Laws for the American Miners’ Association, and it goes: “Step by step, the longest march / can be won, can be won. / Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none. And by union what we will / can be all accomplished still.” I think of those lines when I am hopeful, and when I am sad. Tulane’s successful contract negotiation is a rare victory in a landscape pitted by senseless war and increasing unaffordability. Their right to academic freedom and job security, enshrined in a legally binding document with a powerful institution such as Tulane, represents a palpable gain for workers in New Orleans. Where the threats to academic freedom include Louisiana’s petrochemical industry, and the multi-billion-dollar war machine and its allies, a first contract is only a first step, but a vital one.
“There will be future fights about academic freedom,” said Toups, “and we will always have to be fighting for it. Any sort of freedom in this world, you have to stand up for. But we have tools to defend ourselves now that we did not have before. And that’s the crucial difference.”
Top photo: Tulane Workers United members gather with UMC nurses and others on May 1 (International Workers’ Day) outside of Tulane University School of Medicine in the CBD. (Photo courtesy Tulane Workers United)
Professors Amy George and Matt Toups photos by Katie Sikora
illustration by Airily Arts
