HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) – A national teachers union has rebuked Quinnipiac University for abolishing a faculty union.

At its convention in Boston last weekend, the American Federation of Teachers called on Quinnipiac to restore union bargaining rights. The private university won a National Labor Relations Board ruling to decertify the union earlier this year.

The NLRB granted the university’s petition to reclassify about 240 full-time faculty as managerial employees and disband the Quinnipiac Faculty Federation.

The AFT resolution censured the Hamden school for what the union called a “shameful attack on the rights of Quinnipiac faculty.” The union represented university employees for more than three decades. Its most recent contract expired July 1.

The NLRB relied largely on a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court ruling classifying faculty at Yeshiva University as managerial employees and denying their right to unionize.

Many public colleges and universities operate under state labor laws that allow faculty members to organize unions.

The Yeshiva decision virtually ended unions among faculty on private campuses, labor experts say. Private colleges account for less than 6 percent of the nation’s unionized faculty, according to the City University of New York’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

Lynn Bushnell, a spokesman for Quinnipiac, citing the Yeshiva case, said the NLRB and U.S. Supreme Court – not Quinnipiac – dissolved the faculty union.

“If the AFT wants to censure someone, it should be the U.S. Supreme Court or the NLRB, not Quinnipiac,” she said in a statement.

Rob Callahan, an AFT national representative, said the AFT plans to organize public pressure on Quinnipiac, which has an enrollment of about 7,300 full-time and part-time students, to restore bargaining rights. It could include advising prospective students about what the AFT calls an “attack on faculty.”