Full-time professors and teaching staff at Anne Arundel Community College are officially unionized, becoming the latest in a growing tide of collective bargaining efforts at Maryland’s 16 institutions.
The union, called Riverhawk Educators United, earned recognition from the state employee relations board late last week with 62% of faculty in support. Now, the group will start negotiating its first official contract.
Nicole Williams, chair of the human services department, said she’s hoping the union will bring more structure and clarity.
“We have policies, but we need more policies. There's structure, but we need more structure,” Williams told WYPR. “We’ve got to do something to fix some of these deficits that are not being addressed. So looking at having a contract that can be specific to say, ‘This is what you're responsible for.’”
Most Maryland community college staff gained the right to unionize in 2022 after state lawmakers passed a bill giving the green-light. With Anne Arundel’s move, only five community colleges are without a faculty union — all of them smaller, more rural schools that weren’t able to move forward until September 2023 because of budget concerns.
Adjunct professors at Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) unionized in 2023. But Williams said some full-time faculty feared a union would make relationships with school leaders “more contentious.”
In 2015, AACC’s president openly expressed her “distaste” for unions. But a spokesperson told The Baltimore Banner last week that administrators are committed to “good faith negotiations” and a “collaborative relationship” with faculty.
Williams said administrator viewpoints vary, usually based on experience with unions at previous workplaces.
“But I think the reality is it's not about me as a person, it's about us as educators and what we have been called to do,” she said. “To have the space and the time to not just do it, but to do it well for the students, because that's why we're here.”
Williams said a key step to bettering faculty experience will be outlining different policies that exist in different departments.
For example, some AACC departments offer “release time” for professors to work on duties outside of teaching during the day, like serving on different research committees. But the amount of time given to faculty varies widely, leading to confusion and imbalance workloads.
“Things don't have to be the same, but they need to be equitable,” Williams said. “We need some guidelines so that we can understand what choices we have in certain situations.”
