As the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) pushes to amend its collective bargaining guidelines, university faculty fear that the changes will disadvantage them.

At its quarterly meeting last Friday, the Board of Regents — the 13-member elected body that oversees NSHE and determines budgets for Nevada’s eight public universities — postponed to October its vote on the changes, citing the need for further community input.

Though NSHE administration has maintained the changes only serve to “clarify and reinforce existing requirements,” in public comments at the meeting and in interviews with The Nevada Independent, faculty raised concerns that the proposed revisions will gridlock what they call an already-biased bargaining process. 

Faculty advocates have complained for years that the current system gives an unfair amount of control over the bargaining rules to management — university presidents, the NSHE chancellor and the Board of Regents. The regents’ handbook grants faculty the right to organize, but their rights are limited compared to other public employees. 

Four of the state’s eight public education institutions have formed collective bargaining units: the College of Southern Nevada, Truckee Meadows Community College, Western Nevada College and Nevada State University, which unionized in April. The Nevada Faculty Alliance (NFA), the higher education faculty union, says it represents approximately 960 faculty members across the four institutions.

If NSHE’s proposed changes are approved, collective bargaining agreements with faculty would not be ratified until the state Legislature appropriates funds for all contract items worth more than $2,000. 

Higher education system leaders maintain the changes are not meant to reshape the bargaining process. 

“While we have received significant public comment related to legislative approval and appropriation … it is important to understand that this is NOT a new requirement,” Board of Regents Chair Byron Brooks wrote in a statement to The Nevada Independent.

But the NFA is worried that the $2,000 threshold is so low — and the ratification process so unclear — that the changes will place routine contract items into the part-time Legislature’s hands and thereby weaken faculty’s ability to secure a fair contract.

The higher education system’s proposed changes would amend language in the Regents’ handbook that currently states that any provision in a bargaining agreement “which requires the expenditure of funds” is not effective until funds are appropriated by the Legislature. The updated language sought by the system would instead require any bargaining contract provision greater than $2,000 (the threshold under state law requiring a fiscal note) to be “expressly conditioned” through legislative appropriations.

Amy Pason, a UNR professor and longtime faculty alliance member, wrote in a September op-ed that she was worried the Legislature would now be required to authorize small-scale contract items such as “first aid kits” or “professional development funds,” which Pason said are generally covered by university funding.

At last week’s meeting, NHSE Chief General Counsel James Martines and Deputy General Counsel Carrie Parker argued that the revisions only clarify existing requirements.

“This language is clearer,” Martines told the board. “It’s not saying something different.”

The system lawyers also argued that the new wording makes collective bargaining more flexible for faculty. 

“It is actually less restrictive … because it allows for the discretion to negotiate items less than what the Legislature sets for the fiscal note,” Parker said.

Staci Walters, NFA president and a professor at Nevada State, sees it differently. She said that since the last update to that section in 1990, the conventional wisdom was that the requirement for the Legislature to approve funding before an agreement is ratified only concerned increases in salary or benefits.

The new language would upend that understanding, Walters claimed, requiring specific legislative appropriations for any contract provisions that cost over $2,000. 

“So when NSHE says the change will make [it] less restrictive — that is just new people interpreting this language without understanding the history, the context and even what NSHE itself has said about it in prior years,” Walters said.

Union members are especially nervous they will have little recourse if the state Legislature does not appropriate funds for certain provisions. Collective bargaining would become “very unpredictable and unstable,” according to Ruben Garcia, the director of UNLV’s Workplace Law Program and an NFA member. 

“The point of the agenda item, as I understand it, is NSHE and the Board of Regents trying to make it possible to turn around and say, actually, we don’t have money to do the things we agreed to,” he said.

Causing further worry among faculty is the system’s proposed changes to the handbook section outlining how regents ratify collective bargaining agreements. 

Walters said the changes appear to reverse the traditional bargaining order, where contracts are first ratified by the Board of Regents, then included in the higher education system’s budget requests to the Legislature. 

Under the system’s changes, university presidents would instead be required to submit detailed fiscal impact reports to the Board of Regents that in part outline whether collective bargaining agreements have secured legislative appropriations before their ratification. 

At the quarterly meeting last week, Martines defended the proposed updates as an effort to provide the Board of Regents with more information about collective bargaining agreements.

But faculty alliance members believe the changes flip the negotiating process on its head. Pete Martini, a psychology professor and president of the alliance’s chapter at Nevada State, predicted that the change “sets up a really impossible scenario” where university presidents must secure legislative appropriations, what he calls a new responsibility. 

Walters, the NFA president, said the proposed changes lack “recognition of the fact that this cannot be completed by the university presidents. It will put this entire process into bureaucratic gridlock.”

The debates are part of longer-running tensions over the faculty bargaining process being controlled by NSHE, an agency independently established in the state Constitution and sometimes referred to as the state’s “fourth branch of government.”

Previous system leaders have posited that the separate nature of Nevada’s higher education system enables it to remain independent from political debates — especially as groups have unsuccessfully sought to take the system out of the Constitution via ballot question. 

Faculty members argue it creates an uneven playing field. The regents’ handbook sets and interprets the terms of negotiation, according to Kent Ervin, a chemistry professor at UNR who previously served as the alliance’s president. Unionized faculty lack a third-party arbiter and cannot appeal to the state’s Government Employees Management Relations Board, which resolves labor disputes for other state employees.

This setup means the system is “judge, jury and executioner,” said Martini.

For three legislative sessions in a row, the faculty alliance has introduced legislation to grant higher education staff the same bargaining rights as other state employees. Although NSHE remained publicly neutral on all three bills, each failed to pass or was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican. The alliance plans to bring forth similar legislation again in the 2027 session.

In a statement, system Chancellor Matt McNair pointed out that by law, the bargaining process for most other public employees “also requires such nonappropriation clauses before collective bargaining agreements may obligate the expenditure of unappropriated public funds.”

But Walters argued the system’s attempt to change the handbook’s language only shows how important it is for faculty to get full bargaining rights. “This shows all of our rights are just policies that can be changed on a whim,” she said.

Especially unsettling for alliance affiliates was a briefing paper issued by the board suggesting that more changes to collective bargaining regulations may be coming. 

“Why not just present these proposals comprehensively, so everyone can see the much clearer process that they’re promising?” asked Pason.

Regents themselves acknowledged the need for more faculty engagement at their recent meeting. “I thought we believed in shared governance, and we haven’t gotten the stakeholders together to talk about this,” Regent Carol del Carlo said. “I would rather see what we’re going to do come all at once, and not be piecemealed.”

Representatives of NFA and NSHE have emphasized their openness to discussing the proposed changes before October. McNair said in a statement after the meeting that “we appreciate the feedback we’ve heard from faculty and campus leaders. The Board’s decision to move the item to a future meeting gives everyone more time to work through the details.” 

Regardless of the outcome, union members remain committed to the larger fight to strengthen their collective bargaining rights. 

“We’re playing the long game,” said Ervin.