BY JOHN K. WILSON

I was intrigued by a Facebook post yesterday from the National Association of Scholars which announced, “Want a promotion? Too bad; you’re not a union member, says St. Cloud State.”

That’s a shocking claim. Or it would be, except that there’s no evidence that it’s true. The post linked to an NAS post a month ago which announced, “Academic Unions: Join or Say, ‘Goodbye to Your Career,’”

The NAS, which offers no evidence for this, was promoting its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Uradnik v. Inter Faculty Organization, et al., at St. Cloud State, which for right-wing organizations is the sequel to the Janus ruling, and an effort to undermine “exclusive representation,” which means that the union bargains on behalf of all the workers in the unit.

Wood complained about the Janus decision. “But the ruling left open several widespread abuses, including the power of faculty unions to trample the rights of individual faculty members to speak for themselves. Some unions enjoy the ability to represent their opinions as the exclusive views of all faculty members, including those who don’t even belong to the union. This is wrong.”

No, Wood is wrong. There is no union that claims their opinions are “the exclusive views of all faculty members, including those who don’t even belong to the union.” In this Orwellian formulation, if unions express their views, it will “trample the rights” of individual professors to disagree. This is utter nonsense. All professors are free to express their individual views, whether they’re a member of the union or not.

Yet Wood declared, “When faculty unions declare their support for one side of a contentious political or philosophical debate, and represent this view as the collective wisdom of the whole faculty, they force those faculty members who hold different views to conform. This is what the courts call ‘compelled speech,’ and it violates both academic freedom and the spirit of the First Amendment.”

There is no compelled speech here at all. I’ve never heard any union claim that their political views are those of the “whole faculty” and unions certainly never “force” faculty members who disagree to conform.

The NAS position is an insult to professors, because it claims that faculty are unable to think for themselves or disagree with what an organization says. I would never say that members of the NAS are forced to fabricate stories and make terrible arguments just because they belong to an organization that has done so in this one instance. No one imagines that professors must agree with everything said by their union, their university, their party, or any other organization they belong to. Yet Wood claims without any evidence that all unions are “strong-arming non-members into ideological conformity by exclusive representation.”

The NAS argument demands massive repression of free speech. After all, if the mere expression of an opinion by a union silenced the rights of faculty, then getting rid of exclusive representation would hardly solve the problem, since the faculty remaining in the union would be still be silenced. No, the only solution would be for the government to ban unions from ever expressing an opinion or taking a position on anything unless every member of the union agreed with it. And that would have the effect of banning all unions.

And by the NAS logic, we would have to ban all Faculty Senates, since they take positions and express opinions that some professors might disagree with.

The AAUP is also a target of the NAS. The NAS amicus brief complains that the “AAUP’s commitment to academic freedom did not prevent its Collective Bargaining Congress from endorsing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for President of the United States in 2016,* combatting academic freedom legislation in state legislatures, and giving their political activism the slogan ‘One Faculty, One Resistance.’” Whether you think these positions are good or bad, where is the evidence that the AAUP imposed it on any faculty? Exactly when did the AAUP punish professors who dared to criticize Clinton, supported bad legislation, or failed to recite “One Faculty, One Resistance” during the infamous AAUP meetings where faculty are compelled to chant AAUP slogans in perfect harmony?

First, the far right came to steal the money from unions in Janus, and now they want to silence the political speech of unions and strip them of any power to negotiate. Why does the NAS want the government to silence the AAUP and all other unions?

*Editorial note: Neither the AAUP nor the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress endorsed Hillary Clinton or any other candidate during the 2016 election.