“The spike in academic unionism documented in the 2024 Directory is both the product of long-running trends and contemporary developments. From the beginnings of modern academic unionism, collective bargaining has generally appealed to those most excluded from the prestige and material benefits of the academy’s ivory towers. While it was community college professors who once comprised the bulk of the organized professoriate, a new underpaid and overworked academic precariat composed of contingent or fixed-term instructors and researchers, as well as student employees, have increasingly sought union representation. “