Higher education’s future seems bleak. The national decline in enrollment has forced countless colleges and universities to tighten belts and make hard choices. Penn State — where enrollment is down 30% since 2010 –recently announced plans to close several of its 20 campuses across the commonwealth.

Naturally, Penn State faculty feel vulnerable. But their desperation may push them into the wrong hands.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the nation’s most powerful government unions, is in the early stage of “organizing” these faculty members. The Centre Daily Times reported that Local 668, the Pennsylvania-based SEIU affiliate, will ask the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board to hold an election as soon as it convinces 30% of faculty to support the union. Local 668 took over a local group and is going by the name “Penn State Faculty Alliance.”

The updated branding makes sense. SEIU doesn’t traditionally represent higher education professionals. Instead, SEIU members work predominately in health care and other blue-collar professions, such as janitors, security guards and food service employees.

There’s a reason behind SEIU’s broader net: its ongoing hemorrhage of members and money. Since 2018, SEIU’s national membership is down 4% — the equivalent of more than $26 million in lost dues. SEIU knows beggars can’t be choosers, and it’s not alone in this strategy. Increasingly, government unions have crept into unfamiliar workforces, including undergraduate and graduate students.

Meanwhile, government unions specifically geared toward college faculty aren’t without shady records. In 2022, six City University of New York (CUNY) professors sued their union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) (an American Federation of Teachers affiliate), for questionable political activity. The professors, many of whom are Jewish, vehemently disagreed with the union’s public condemnation of Israel, calling PSC’s stance anti-Semitic. Because of exclusive representation, unions’ political agenda doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of employees.

Government unions, like SEIU, funnel significant amounts of member dues toward politics and lobbying. Famously, SEIU was “all in” for former Vice President Kamala Harris, funding a seven-figure ad buy as part of a $200 million “investment” in Harris’s campaign. From 2022 to 2024, SEIU directed $31.4 million toward national politics, with 99 percent going to Democrats.

Even the left questions SEIU’s commitment to workers over politics. David Moberg, a former senior editor of the progressive magazine In These Times, dinged SEIU for its “coziness with big employers, limits on internal democracy, excessive deference to Democratic party leaders and frequent clashes with other unions.”

Penn State faculty can expect to fund not only politics but also union overhead. According to its most recent reports filed with the federal government, SEIU Local 668 reported over $12.2 million in revenue. The union spent $3.6 million (just shy of 30%) on “representational activities” — the bread-and-butter activities, such as collective bargaining and employee representation, commonly associated with labor unions. However, it recorded $7.8 million for general overhead, union administration, employee benefits and payments to its parent organization. Simply put, SEIU spends twice as much on overhead as it does on representing its members.

Unfortunately, SEIU isn’t setting professors up for success. In an apparent bid to collect dues from all 7,600 faculty members, SEIU wants to simultaneously represent tenured- and non-tenured faculty — both full- and part-time. As faculty members well know, the interests of these groups do not necessarily align and, sometimes, conflict with one another.

At nearby Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), this representational recipe hasn’t produced anything for faculty members who voted to unionize in 2022. After nearly three years of collective bargaining, the union has yet to produce a contract with HACC, meaning the same financial position for faculty, as if the union had never shown up. Otherwise, faculty may even be worse off: Conflict between the union and the community college resulted in two arrests in 2023, and faculty members have put in extra time to attend union rallies.

Everyone should have the right to join a union or to decide against union membership. But SEIU’s takeover of faculty members’ local effort makes that decision difficult, even for those optimistic about unionization. The truth is Penn State faculty would be better off without SEIU.

David R. Osborne is the senior fellow for labor policy with the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank.