Beleaguered CUNY Professors Appeal to SCOTUS for Relief from Union They Claim Is Antisemitic 

A sextet of public-college professors have filed a petition for writ of certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up an appeal of their ongoing First Amendment case — Goldstein v. Professional Staff Congress/CUNY — where the scholars charge their rights are violated because they are forced to be represented by a government union which they contend is “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.” 

Under New York State’s 1967 Taylor Law, public employees are bound to exclusive representation by their government union, in this case the leftist Professional Staff Congress, which represents over 30,000 teachers and staff at New York City’s expansive public-college system, which includes the once-prestigious City University of New York.  

The beleaguered petitioners — Avraham Goldstein, Michael Goldstein, Frimette Kass-Shraibman, Mitchell Langbert, Jeffrey Lax, and Maria Pagano, five of whom are Jewish  and self-described “ardent Zionists” — say they “want nothing to do with PSC” after the union, which they “detest,” passed a controversial resolution in 2021 supporting the anti-Israel “Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanction” movement. The professors say this “vilifies Zionism, disparages the national identity of Jews, and seeks to destroy Israel as a sovereign state.” 

Their opposition to the union has led to their being “ostracized on campus based on their identities, religious beliefs, and support for Israel.” That hostility prompted the academics to seek relief in the federal courts, an effort launched in 2022 with legal support from the Fairness Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, whose lead counsel, William Messenger, described  Goldstein as “a modern example of an old problem with compulsory union representation.” 

The appeal to SCOTUS, filed on July 19, comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in March that the important 1984 collective-bargaining case, Minnesota Board of Community Colleges v. Knight, did not preclude mandatory exclusive representation, even in the face of claims of religious-freedom violations. 

The cert petition says the heart of their complaint is the question, “Can the government force Jewish professors to accept the representation of an advocacy group they rightly consider to be anti-Semitic?” They claim that various Supreme Court rulings, including Janus and NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., articulate their First Amendment right to “eschew association for expressive purposes” and “boycott entities to express a message.” 

The petition charges the lower courts have misinterpreted Knight, saying that ruling “did not sanction a state forcing Jewish faculty members who are ardent Zionists to accept the representation of a union that supports policies they consider anti-Israel,” and urges the Court to grant to petition to “clarify Knight and make clear that the First Amendment protects individuals’ right to dissociate themselves from advocacy groups that support policies contrary to their deeply held beliefs.” 

The petition also cites the landmark Janus ruling, which declared “not just once, but twice, that ‘[d]esignating a union as the employees’ exclusive representative substantially restricts the rights of individual employees.’” 

Unless the “lower courts’ expansive interpretation of Knight” is overruled, the CUNY professors predict that states will be allowed to “vest advocacy groups with exclusive authority to speak and contract for individuals for any rational basis” and “free to politically collectivize entire professions or industries under the aegis of a state-favored interest group.” 

The Fairness Center president Nathan McGrath, who drafted the petition, said Goldstein “puts in stark terms the First Amendment problems with allowing public-sector union officials to force an entire bargaining unit to accept their representation. No one should have to associate with a union they believe hates them.”