Faculty Strike at 2-Year College Advances Negotiations

Three and a half years after faculty at Harrisburg Area Community College voted to unionize, they still don’t have a contract. But a two-day strike last week—and the threat of another one this week—is getting them closer to a deal.

The strike activity at HACC exemplifies a growing national labor movement within the higher education sector, spurred by issues such as stagnant pay, weakened job security and the erosion of shared governance. Over the past decade, graduate students, faculty and other higher education workers have increasingly turned to unionization to improve and codify their working conditions.

But when administrators push back on union demands, strikes—and strike threats—can be effective avenues for advancing labor negotiations.

In 2025 alone, faculty walkouts at the University of San Diego, Wellesley College and Tufts University have precipitated new labor contracts. At numerous other institutions, including Illinois State University, the University of Oregon and Portland State University, the mere threat of a strike was enough to pressure administrators into negotiating a contract.

Ratifying a contract is also the end goal for the faculty at HACC, a five-campus two-year college in Pennsylvania that serves roughly 12,600 students. In April 2022, 68 percent of faculty voted to unionize amid mounting frustration with college leadership, including a move in 2018 to cut about 20 full-time faculty positions.

“Our institution was operating for about 50 years under shared governance. But shared governance takes trust and adherence to the promises of institutional policies [because] it’s not legally binding,” said Amy Withrow, an English professor at HACC and lead negotiator for the faculty union, known as the Harrisburg Area Community College Education Association. “Unfortunately, under this current administration we found that policies were not being adhered to consistently or sometimes at all.”

After unionizing, faculty called for a contract that includes pay increases, more control over the curriculum and class sizes, and an expanded grievance process, among other things. Although the administration has stalled those collective bargaining efforts for years, faculty say they’ve tried to keep negotiating in good faith.

“We care about our students, so it goes against our core nature as educators to strike [and disrupt classes],” Withrow said. “Some faculty were insistent that we [explore] every single option the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board offered us to resolve this without a strike, and we did that. But in doing that, it prolonged the process.”

Frustration over those stalled negotiations has become untenable, in part because the union says they haven’t received a raise since the 2022–23 academic year, despite all other college staff receiving a minimum of 3 percent pay increases each of those years. Faculty are seeking back pay for those missed raises as part of their contract.

“Because this has gone on for so long, the risks of continuing to prolong this are now outweighing any benefit of our patience,” Withrow said. “We have faculty in key programs that could make a substantial amount of money in their industries. We don’t want to get to the point of losing quality faculty out of frustration.”

‘Enough Is Enough’

In an effort to pressure the administration into serious negotiations, more than 200 HACC faculty went on strike last Monday and Tuesday at the Lancaster campus, but they paused the labor action after scheduling two meetings with HACC administrators. When both of those meetings lasted a little more than 10 minutes with no progress on a contract, faculty announced plans to go back on strike Wednesday morning.

But another meeting Tuesday evening changed things. After seven hours of productive negotiations, administrators asked faculty to cancel the strike they had planned for Wednesday.

“We agreed to that with the understanding that the remaining issues would need to be fully addressed—we want a tentative agreement—in our negotiation meeting scheduled for Thursday at 2 p.m.,” Withrow said. “We’re starting to make progress, but we’re not quite there yet. It could still go very sideways on Thursday.”

HACC did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s specific questions about why it has stalled negotiations for years or its intent to reach a tentative agreement with the union this week. The college instead referred to a series of webpages with updates about the strike and union negotiations. On a page answering common student questions about faculty demands, the college gave a list of reasons explaining why it hasn’t agreed to a contract.

“The union’s demands will cost HACC approximately $4.2 million per year,” they wrote, claiming that tuition would also increase. HACC also wrote that if they accepted the union’s contract, “our viability as an institution can erode in as little as five years” and accused the union of “seeking managerial control” in addition to higher pay.

But if the union and the college don’t reach a tentative agreement on Thursday, faculty are prepared to go back on strike.

“Enough is enough,” Withrow said. “This has been an unnecessarily long process and our patience is gone. This needs to end.”

A strike may be the thing to finally make that happen, said William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.

“A strike threat usually brings the issues to the table much quicker because neither side wants to shut down teaching and research. It puts the onus on the institution to get much more serious about negotiations,” he said. “If the negotiations are unsuccessful in reaching a resolution, a strike then increases pressure to reach an agreement.”