1979 Boston University strike

The 1979 Boston University strike was a labor strike involving employees at Boston University, a private university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The strike, involving faculty members, clerical workers, and librarians, began on April 5 and was fully ended by April 23.

The strike has its background in the presidency of John Silber, who became president of the university in 1971. Over the next few years, Silber made many changes that proved unpopular with the university's faculty, and in 1975, the university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (BU-AAUP) voted to act as a collective bargaining unit. Silber initially challenged the legality of the union, but by 1978, a court ruling mandated that the university had to commence negotiations with the union. Over the next few months, neither side came to a solid agreement, with pay increases being a particular point of contention.

In early 1979, the union began preparing for strike action, and on April 5, following a disagreement over a tentative agreement that had previously been reached, the union went on strike. That same day, clerical workers and librarians (unionized under the Distributive Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union, respectively) also voted to go on strike, partially in an act of solidarity with the AAUP and partially as a way to receive union recognition. The strike resulted in the cancellation of several hundred classes and particularly affected the College of Liberal Arts. On April 14, the faculty voted to end the strike after the university agreed to the previous tentative agreement, with the provision that they not perform any sort of sympathy strike with other unions. The clerical workers and librarians remained on strike for several more days despite this, and some professors tried to hold classes on locations away from the university as a show of solidarity with the strikers. They finally ended their strike on April 23 after the university agreed to recognize the two unions.

A year after the strike, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that faculty at private universities were not protected to unionize under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and as a result, when the BU-AAUP's contract expired in 1982, the union became decertified. For this reason, historian Gary Zabel calls the strike a Pyrrhic victory for the faculty.