The UAW has a long history representing workers in higher education. At Wayne State University, clerical and professional workers started joining UAW in the late 1960s. This was then followed by workers at Northern, Eastern, and Central Michigan Universities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, inspired by the 9 to 5 movement, workers at Cornell, Columbia, Boston University organized, as did workers in New York City at Barnard, Teachers College and Union Theological Seminary.

Student teaching and research assistants began organizing with the UAW in the mid-1980s. The first student worker units to organize with UAW were at the University of California and the University of Massachusetts. In 2002, the first adjunct professor unit at a private university organized with the UAW.

As we moved into the 21st century, an increasingly broad spectrum of higher education workers began to organize with UAW, at an increasingly faster rate. In the legal battles, student workers were deemed workers, twice! Postdocs formed their first union in 2008 and then in 2022 went on strike for the first time. Throughout the 2000s, 2010s, and in the last five years, higher education workers in the UAW have had a long list of groundbreaking firsts.