About

The purpose of this site is to preserve and document an event in the history of higher education that is in danger of being lost and forgotten.

The faculty strike at the University of Bridgeport (1990-1992) has been called “the Gettysburg of the faculty union movement,” and surely the Civil War metaphor is well chosen. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the strike tore the institution apart, decimated its programs, stained its reputation, destroyed long-standing friendships, and ruined the lives and careers of scores of faculty members. It ended with the University bankrupt, losing its prized law school, and selling control of its board of trustees to a branch of the Unification Church to avoid closing its doors forever.

So what was it about? Wikipedia, the internet reference of choice, and the one most often quoted, has only this to say about it:

To cut costs, the University decided to terminate 50 tenured faculty, and asked the other faculty to accept a 30% wage cut. In addition, the University decided to eliminate its liberal arts college, alienating many students. This led to the longest faculty strike in the history of American higher education. Dr. Greenwood, the president at the time, quit abruptly, and around 1000 students left the school, contributing to the crisis.

If you tore a few pages at random from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, cut a few sentences from each page and then pasted them into a paragraph, you would have about as coherent a history as this one offers. There are some facts in it, but so garbled and out of context as to be useless for an understanding of what happened. I am especially sensitive to this point, because I participated in some of the events it attempts to describe.

2010 marks the strike’s twentieth anniversary, and presents a unique opportunity to revisit its causes in a methodical, chronological way. My goal is to write a daily entry on this blog, under the heading “20 Years Ago Today,” and describing events as they unfolded in 1990, from the University’s declaration of “financial exigency” on March 12 through to the “point of no return” in the Fall of that year. The entries will be archived in sequence, so that hopefully anyone who wants to follow it will by the end have a clear understanding of how and why things evolved. I am also compiling a glossary of terms on the Reference page, to be followed by a Timeline, and access to the bargaining chapter’s Newsletter and publications, to be available in pdf format.

I believe the effort to follow this narrative will be time well spent. It is a rare, sometimes shocking look behind the curtain into a bizarre episode in American higher education. It is an event that should not be forgotten. It also a highly unusual, surprising, and entertaining story.