Four controversial tenure denials at Carroll College in Wisconsin have spurred professors there to try to organize a union.

The proposed union, which would represent the 90 full-time faculty members at the private college, would be affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. Organizers will have to overcome the U.S. Supreme Court's 1980 decision involving Yeshiva University, in which the justices ruled that professors held managerial roles and therefore were not covered by federal labor law.

Gary W. Stevens, president of the faculty at Carroll, said he believed that he and his colleagues could clear that hurdle. "I don't think faculty voices are considered in any substantive way in any important decision making," he said.

A union, support for which has already grown among professors, would help return academic integrity and shared governance to the college, he argued. The recent tenure denials by the Board of Trustees, after the bids had been approved at every step along the way, demonstrate that shared governance "has totally broken down," he said (The Chronicle, October 31).

According to a statement released by the college, administrators "will fully participate in the representation processes" under federal labor law but feel that Carroll's "collegial consultative model of academic governance" is superior to collective bargaining. The president and the board believe that collective bargaining is unlikely to improve the quality of education at the college and merely "introduces a third force, with its own outside agenda," the statement said.

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At Emerson College, in Boston, the bad blood between the faculty union and President Jacqueline W. Liebergott continues to flow. Pointing to the Yeshiva ruling, she has called for professors to either disband the union or give up their rights to participate in governance at the private college.

In response, Emerson's full-time professors voted 59 to 1 declaring no confidence in Ms. Liebergott and the college's vice president for finance.

The president declined to comment, but David Rosen, a spokesman, said that administrators had not been told of the vote in advance, and that it was meaningless, merely a part of a negotiation process "that has become heated and personal at a very early stage." He dismissed the no-confidence vote as a "calculated tactic" to win support from trustees and students.

The skirmish comes amid other labor tensions at Emerson. Part-time professors have formed a union but. after months of negotiations, have not reached a contract agreement with the administration.

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The push to organize graduate students continues as the United Automobile Workers announced that it would organize 5,300 teaching assistants, tutors, and graders in the California State University System. The new union, called the California Alliance of Academic Student Employees, has petitioned the state labor board to require the university to recognize it.

The new group would be the second-largest such union in the nation. About 10,000 graduate assistants in the University of California system are also represented by the UAW.

Xochitl Lopez, a spokeswoman for the union and a theater student at California State University at Sacramento, said "an overwhelming majority" of prospective members had signed representation cards, although she declined to say how many. The union would bargain for better pay and benefits, which now vary widely across Cal State's 23 campuses, she said.

Colleen Bentley-Adler, a spokeswoman for the system, said the administration was considering the petition, evaluating the potential bargaining unit, and determining whether any other campus unions could claim the graduate employees for their own memberships.

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Part-timers at the University of Vermont voted in December to form a new union. Full-timers there organized in 2001. The new adjuncts' union is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors. ... Faculty members at Pennsylvania's 14 state-owned universities are still threatening to strike. Administrators and the faculty union, which represents 5,500 professors, have been negotiating on and off for months but remain far apart on raises and health benefits. Professors authorized a strike in October, and union leaders prepared for a walkout by setting up off-campus offices in January. A strike decision may come in early February. ... Across the Delaware River, in New Jersey, professors and graduate assistants at Rutgers University are still without a contract. The university system, after initially offering no pay increases, has changed its mind but is pushing for some portion of the raises to be based on merit. The previous contract expired in June. Professors picketed the first University Senate meeting of the semester in January; their boycott kept the body from having a quorum necessary to conduct business.