United University Professions

Tells the story of the nation's largest higher education union from its earliest years to its role today as a powerful organization promoting the interests of faculty, staff, and the entire SUNY community.

Public education, from pre-K through higher education, and labor unions, particularly those representing public sector workers, are today under attack from those who question the very need to have such basic institutions. United University Professions is a history of United University Professions (UUP), which grew from humble beginnings to become the nation's largest higher education union, representing some 35,000 academic and professional staff within the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Nuala McGann Drescher, William E. Scheuerman, and Ivan D. Steen chronicle how UUP built upon its early accomplishments at the bargaining table and in the political arena to become a national leader in the struggle to preserve academic freedom and the institution of tenure, the bedrock of academic freedom. More broadly, they argue, UUP in microcosm confirms the importance of unionization not only for the members it represents, but to core American values and American democracy itself.

Nuala McGann Drescher is Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the State University of New York College at Buffalo and a retired UUP president. She is the author of Engineer for the Public Good: A History of the Buffalo District US Army Corps of Engineers. William E. Scheuerman is Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Oswego, retired President of the National Labor College, and retired UUP president. He is the author (with Sidney Plotkin) of Private Interest, Public Spending: Balanced-Budget Conservatism and the Fiscal Crisis. Ivan D. Steen is Associate Professor of History Emeritus at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Urbanizing America: The Development of Cities in the United States from the First European Settlements to 1920.