Council of Scholars

The National Center Council of Scholars is comprised of labor and employment scholars with different areas of expertise and emphasis. The purpose of the Council is to promote and rekindle interdisciplinary academic scholarship concerning higher education, collective bargaining and labor relations including identifying potential contributors to the National Center's Journal, Collective Bargaining in the Academy.

Ernst Benjamin
Ernst Benjamin is a senior consultant to the AAUP and a consultant member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Prior to his retirement he served AAUP twice as General Secretary (2006–08 and 1984– 94) and as Director of Research (1995–2001). Benjamin taught at Wayne State University from 1965 to 1984 where he was AAUP chapter chief negotiator, chapter president 1975–79, and a director and dean (1981–84). He was chair of the national AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress (1976–80) and a member of the AAUP National Council. His publications include ” Academic Freedom: An Everyday Concern” (with Don Wagner), 1994; and Exploring the Role of Contingent Instructional Staff in Undergraduate Learning, 2004; and Academic Collective Bargaining (ed. with Michael Mauer), 2006.·

Timothy R. Cain
Tim Cain is an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education. He has degrees from Duke University (A.B.), The Ohio State University (M.A.), and the University of Michigan (Ph.D.); from 2005-2013 he was a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work explores historic and modern issues involving academic freedom, unionization and professionalization, the changing faculty, student speech rights, and related issues. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as Establishing Academic Freedom (Palgrave, 2012), Campus Unions: Organized Faculty and Graduate Students in US Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2017), and, with colleagues at the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2015). He is currently writing a book on the history of college faculty unionization.

Valerie Martin Conley
Valerie Martin Conley is the Dean of the College of Education at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is a nationally recognized University administrator, higher education researcher, author, and professor of 27 years. She holds the M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from the University of Virginia, and the Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Virginia Tech. She served as Chair for the Department of Counseling and Higher Education at Ohio University where she also taught courses on institutional research, assessment, management of higher education and policy. She has extensive experience in university administration, research, and private industry. Dean Conley has specialized in quantitative applications for educational policy and research, drawing upon her experience as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). A former institutional researcher, she has served on the board of directors for the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) and chaired the association's Higher Education Data Policy Committee. In June 2007, she received the Ohio University Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award.

Samuel Estreicher
Samuel Estreicher is Dwight D. Opperman Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, director of its Center for Labor and Employment and co-director of its Opperman Institute of Judicial Administration. He has published over a dozen books including casebooks in labor law and employment discrimination and employment law; written treatises in employment law and in labor law; edited global issues in labor law, global issues in employment law, global issues in employment discrimination law, and global issues in employee benefits law; edited conference volumes on sexual harassment, employment ADR processes, and cross-global human resources; and authored over 150 articles in professional and academic journals. He received his A.B. from Columbia College, his M.S. (Industrial Relations) from Cornell University and his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. After clerking for the late Harold Leventhal of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, practicing for a year with a union-side law firm, and then clerking for the late Lewis F. Powell, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, Estreicher joined the NYU faculty in 1978. He is the former Secretary of the Labor and Employment Law Section of the American Bar Association, a former chair of the Committee on Labor and Employment Law of the Association of the Bar for the City of New York, and chief reporter of the new Restatement of Employment Law, sponsored by the American Law Institute. In 2010, the Labor and Employment Relations Association awarded Professor Estreicher its "Susan C. Eaton Outstanding Academic-Practitioner Award.” Estreiher has delivered named lectureships at UCLA, Chicago-Kent, Case Western and Cleveland State law schools, testified twice before Secretary of Labor Reich's and Secretary of Commerce Brown's Commission on the Future of U.S. Worker-Management Relations, and has run over 100 workshops for federal and state judges, U.S. Department of Labor lawyers, NLRB lawyers, EEOC lawyers, court law clerks, employment mediators and practitioners generally. Among his many teaching offerings, he has started NYU Law's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.· He is also of counsel to Schulte Roth· in their l employment and employee benefits· practice group. His practice focuses on the wide range of issues affecting the employment relationship, including designing ADR systems, training supervisors for performance-based management and employee involvement initiatives, advising clients in OFCCP, EEO and labor relations compliance and representing clients in individual, global HR management, and class EEO and Wage and Hour litigation.· Mr. Estreicher's appellate practice includes victory in the Supreme Court in the Circuit City v. Adams litigation, broadening the availability of employment arbitration; victory in the Second Circuit overturning an interest arbitration award in The Daily News litigation; amicus representation of international law experts and oral argument in the Second Circuit's Talisman Energy opening up the issue of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute and a similar representation of international law experts in the Kiobel litigation in the Supreme Court. He has also engaged in other amicus representation (before the NLRB and in the Supreme Court) of the American Civil Liberties Union, Cato Institute, the Center for Public Resources, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Society for Human Resources Management, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the American Jewish Committee, and the Council for Employment Law Equity. Mr. Estreicher is also a member of the arbitration/mediation panels of the American Arbitration Association and Center for Public Resources, and is a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. He has been recognized in Human Resources Executive, Superlawyers and Best Lawyers in America publications.

Ruben J. Garcia
Ruben J. Garcia is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Workplace Law Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research at the UNLV Boyd School of Law. Prior to joining the UNLV faculty in 2011, he was Professor of Law and Director of the Labor and Employment Law Program at California Western School of Law in San Diego, where he taught for eight years. He also has held academic appointments at the University of California, Davis School of Law, the University of Wisconsin Law School, and at the University of California, San Diego. Before beginning his teaching career in 2000, Garcia worked at Rothner, Segall and Greenstone as an attorney for public and private sector labor unions and employees in the Los Angeles area. He is a graduate of Stanford University, received his Juris Doctor from UCLA School of Law, and has a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he was a William H. Hastie Fellow. His scholarship has appeared in a number of leading law reviews, including the Hastings Law Journal, the Loyola Law Review, the University of Chicago Legal Forum and the Florida State University Law Review, and peer-reviewed publications such as the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal and the Annual Reviews of Law and Social Science. His book Marginal Workers: How Legal Fault Lines Divide Workers and Leave Them Without Protection was published by New York University Press in 2012.  From January 2014 to January 2016, he served as the Co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), and has served on the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Nevada.   He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Constitution Society (ACS), a national nonprofit organization, and an advisor to the Boyd Law Student and Las Vegas Lawyer Chapters of the ACS.  In 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers based on his twenty-plus years record as a labor lawyer and academic in the field of Labor and Employment Law.

Jeffrey Michael Hirsch
Jeffrey Michael Hirsch joined the University of North Carolina faculty in 2011, after teaching for several years at the University of Tennessee College of Law. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University Law School. Prior to teaching, Professor Hirsch was a litigator in the Appellate Court Branch of the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C. and served as a judicial clerk for the Judge Haldane Mayer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Judge Robert Beezer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Hirsch writes extensively on labor and employment law issues. He is also a contributing editor of the Workplace Prof Blog, an editor of Jotwell's Work Law Section, and a Research Fellow at the New York University Center for Labor and Employment Law. In 2006, Professor Hirsch received the University of Tennessee’s Marilyn V. Yarbrough Faculty Award for Writing Excellence for his article “Taking State Property Rights Out of Federal Labor Law.” Moreover, his article “Regulatory Pragmatism at Work” was selected for the 2008 Seton Hall Annual Labor & Employment Law Scholars’ Forum, and his co-authored article “Comparative Wrongful Dismissal Law: Reassessing American Exceptionalism” was selected for the 2012 Seventh Annual Comparative Law Works in Progress Workshop, at Princeton University. Professor Hirsch is currently Chair of the American Association of Law Schools’ Labor Relations and Employment Law Section. He also serves as Deputy Executive Director and Program Formatting Chair for the Southeastern Association of Law Schools.

Daniel J. Julius
Daniel J. Julius is the Senior Vice President and Provost at New Jersey City University and an affiliated faculty member at the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, the University at Albany, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. He has been actively involved in collective bargaining in higher education since the early 1970’s when he was appointed the first Research Associate at the National Center. His book, with the late Margaret K. Chandler, on Management Rights and Union Interests, published by the National Center in the late 1970’s, provided the first analysis of all higher education collective bargaining agreements then in existence.

Gary D. Rhoades
Gary D. Rhoades is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education. He also is director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education, a virtual think tank of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. Rhoades’ research focuses on the restructuring of academic institutions and professions, as reflected in his books Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (SUNY Press, 1998) and Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (with Sheila Slaughter, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Susan J. Schurman
Susan J. Schurman is Distinguished Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations and Dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where she also serves as Dean of the University College Community.·From 1997-2007 she served as the founding president of the National Labor College.·She received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where she served as Director of the Labor Studies Center and Research Investigator in the School of Public Health.·She is a past president of the United Association for Labor Education and was recently reelected to a second term as president of the·International Federation of Workers' Education Associations (IFWEA). She is also a board member of the Labor and Employment Research Association. She has served on numerous non-profit boards and government commissions including as a member of the Board of Trustees of Morris Brown College. Her research and teaching focus on labor union effectiveness including strategy, structure and governance as well as constructive labor-management relations. She is also an expert on workplace safety and health – especially on the effects of occupational stress on physical and mental health.· In 2012, Dean Schurman earned high praise from both sides for mediating the merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Hollywood’s two largest actors unions.·For additional profiles of Dean Susan J. Schurman, please read the February 2012 article in the L.A. Times and the February 2008 issue of Rutgers Focus.

Sara Slinn
Sara Slinn joined the Osgoode faculty in 2007, after five years at Queen’s Faculty of Law. Professor Slinn’s research interests are in the areas of labour and employment law, focusing on different approaches and impediments to collective employee representation, and the intersection of Charter rights and labour law. Reflecting her interdisciplinary graduate work, including a PhD in Industrial Relations from the University of Toronto, Professor Slinn’s research is interdisciplinary and uses empirical methods of analysis. She has also practised labour and employment law with both the British Columbia Labour Relations Board and a private law firm in Vancouver. Research Interests: Labour Law, Employment Law, Industrial Relations, Constitutional Law, Contracts.