Graduate Student Unions Fight the Corporate University

...Since 1995, the number of graduate student unions in the country has grown from ten to twenty-seven, and an estimated 20 percent of all graduate employees are now covered by union contracts—a level comparable to the most highly organized states in the country and 50 percent above the national norm...

...T T HE ARGUMENT that most strains credulity may be that of Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman, who suggested in the pages of the New York Times that a union might stunt the intellectual development of its members...

...Ironically, in the private sector, the same corporate ethos that has redefined the university may serve to reinstate the Labor Board's recognition of faculty as employees rather than managers, restoring the right of private university professors to organize...

...an undergraduate signing up for an introductory English class has less than a oneinfour chance of being taught by a tenuretrack professor...

...Moreover, it will be hard for a new board to formulate a logic for reversing itself, since the recent decisions fit so much more appropriately with the reality of university operations than do the rulings from the mid-1970s that had previously restricted private-sector organizing...

...The reality that now faces many of them seems very different...

...In 1998, NYU itself made history when it became the first university in the country to establish a for-profit subsidiary devoted to capturing the distance-learning market...

...Nevertheless, Columbia administrators now cite the Yale case as an instance of unions threatening a hallowed right of academic freedom...

...Ultimately, he stresses that "we're talking about differences at the margin...the difference is not between night and day" Yet the fact that Kronman is prepared to make such ostentatious arguments on the basis of such subtle concerns suggests, again, that deeper motives may lurk beneath the rhetorical surface...

...By forcing graduate students to negotiate with those who hold the most immediate power over their coursework, grades, and ultimate career prospects, administrators seek to gain an edge in intimidating graduate employees into substandard settlements...

...If there were a single 68 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS group comprising the essential heart of management," Yeshiva's lawyers insisted, "it would be the faculty...

...In a series of landmark rulings, the Labor Board rejected the arguments of these scions of higher education and opened the door to a new wave of organizing on the nation's campuses...

...What accounts for the increased requirement in Spanish...

...THIS SPRING, graduate students at New York University made history when they won recognition for the first graduate student union at a private university...

...As we look to the future, there is every sign that the recent boom in graduate student unionization will continue...

...Nationally, it is estimated that between 50 percent and 70 percent of all teaching hours are now performed by graduate students and other contingent teachers...

...Anti•unionism and "Academic Freedom" For twenty years, administrators across the country have relied on a common set of arguments to oppose granting their graduate students the same rights afforded secretaries and librarians: that graduate teachers and researchers are "students, not employees," that the tasks they carry out are "training, not work," and that DISSENT / Fail 2001 n 65 GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS unionization would destroy the collegiality of campus relations...

...Indeed, as universities look to identify market winners, most faculty are likely to be squeezed out of the virtual university...

...In the minds of campus administrators, then, the principle of "academic freedom" has been reformulated along frighteningly Orwellian lines...

...In the 1980 National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University case that largely banned faculty unions at private universities, Justice William Brennan's dissent warned of the dangers of leaving academia a union-free environment...

...through open discussion and mutual agreement . . . [and] removes whatever deterrent value [labor law] may offer against unreasonable administrative conduct...

...The university already negotiates over terms of employment with individual graduate students, the board noted, as individuals are free to reject teaching positions if they deem the salary inadequate...

...Increasingly, these anti-union campaigns have threatened the liberties of faculty as well as graduate students...

...The single most counter-intuitive argument launched against unionization is the proposition that unions threaten academic freedom...

...Perhaps the most prescient advice comes from leaders of the California state legislature...

...The bottom line, in the Labor Board's words, is that "the undergraduate students at NYU, qua customers, pay for the services they receive, which are provided to a large degree by the graduate assistants...

...Both graduate student unions and faculty unions have been conducting negotiations for decades...

...Administrators' anti-unionism has too often led them to impose the equivalent of an academic state of emergency, in which the DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 67 GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS normal protections of faculty and graduate ERHAPS THE most ominous such instance students are suspended, with everything subject to the single goal of beating back organizing efforts...

...Not surprisingly, the number of tenure-track faculty was cut by 10 percent between 1975 and 1995—a period during which overall enrollment was expanding significantly—while the number of graduate teaching assistants inDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 63 GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS creased by nearly 40 percent...

...Outside the confines of the nation's campuses, it is impossible to get highly educated scientists to do rigorous work for sixty hours a week at $20,000 per year...

...Thus, NYU's real concern was to avoid negotiating terms of employment collectively rather than individually, presumably based on the fear that collective bargaining would prove more expensive...

...We have made a commitment— these people are part of our union— and law or no law we will stick with it to make sure there is a fair contract for graduate teachers...

...Thus, unless universities actually reverse the trends of the past three decades, dramatically cutting graduate teaching and boosting tenure-track hires, administrators appear to be stuck...

...The notion that unionization might prevent individuals from finding their own intellectual voice requires such a dramatic suspension of belief that one almost feels insulted by the demand to treat this as a serious proposition...

...One might view this as a noble defense of the mentoring relationship...

...Professor Bono explained, "I was not going to turn to threatening my students...

...At some point, a new faculty union will force this principle to be reheard in federal court...

...If graduate assistants are instrumental to the delivery of large lecture classes on campus, their importance will be multiplied when popular courses are marketed to tens of thousands of students around the globe...

...an overwhelming majority reported similarly that graduate student unions had not created an adversarial relationship, and that the union had not inhibited their ability to advise or mentor their own students...

...Indeed, all the arguments about academic freedom ring hollow for a simple reason: this problem has already been solved...

...On the final day of NYU's forty-two-day hearing before the Labor Board, the school's attorneys rushed into evidence a plan to make over the funding mechanism for graduate education as a whole...

...Administrators have rushed headlong into this emerging market...

...The Internal Revenue Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and federal financial aid offices all have regulations based on the assumption that graduate teachers are employees...

...Since teaching will then be an educational degree requirement, and graduate students will receive the same "stipend" during semesters when they teach as when they do not, the university argued that this plan would legally convert graduate teachers back into "students" and their work back into "training...

...VI OREOVER, graduate students appear likely to play an even more central role _ in what are emerging as the critical growth markets for American universities: corporate research in the natural sciences and distance learning in the humanities and social sciences...

...These arguments, carefully honed by anti-union lawyers, were all decisively rejected by the Labor Board...

...In the past two years, officials in California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania have issued rulings similar to that in the NYU case, invalidating the claims made by administrators for the past two decades...

...Administrators across the country are racing each other to establish online courses that will be sold to a variety of market niches: working adults who can afford tuition but are unable to attend on-campus classes, individuals in rural communities who are willing to pay for a more marketable degree than that provided by the local community college, and wealthy foreigners who may be eager to pay a premium for an American degree...

...For the university, these joint ventures are valuable sources of revenue to complement or replace federal science funding, along with the lure of future profits on a scale never before contemplated...

...While other professional salaries have soared over the past three decades, downsizing has enabled university administrators to cut faculty pay, despite significant growth in the higher education market...

...The traditional ideal of college education pictures a setting that is specifically outside the rat race—an opportunity to explore ideas, make friendships, and develop a sense of one's self in ways that are not possible amid the dog-eat-dog pressures of commercial life...

...Ultimately, the government dropped most of its charges based on a technicality regarding the particular form of this strike—withholding undergraduate grades at the conclusion of the fall semester—even though such threats would clearly be illegal in the context of a normal teaching strike...

...70 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...

...In the eyes of the administration, however, department chairs are delinquent in their duties if they refuse to be part of the anti-union machinery...

...Here too, it is likely that graduate students will play a critical role in the creation of the for-profit market for online laboratory training...

...and when this happens, the administrators who have remade the university in the decades since faculty were cut out of collective bargaining will be hardpressed to keep a straight face while suggesting that faculty still run the place...

...Similarly, Yale provost Alison Richard charges that applying the Labor Board's standard of behavior to faculty—that is, banning the use of "threats" or "promises" to turn graduate students against the union—would undermine the fundamental nature of higher education...

...However, Democratic control of the Senate makes it significantly harder to win approval of an aggressively pro-management board...

...The Economic Function of Graduate Students in the Corporate University Although the legal decisions have been important, the recent boom in organizing activity is primarily a reaction to dynamics within the university itself...

...However, for the past thirty years, universities have moved progressively away from this community-of-scholars model, fashioning themselves instead in the image of private corporations...

...Removing the possibility of faculty organizing, he predicted, "threatens to eliminate much of the administration's incentive to resolve its disputes...

...As a result, the number of faculty positions has decreased while the time one is expected to apprentice in the purgatory between graduate school and a junior faculty slot has lengthened, with Ph.D.'s in the biological sciences now spending an average of four years in low-wage postdoctoral "fellowships...

...As the market gets more competitive, wealthy consumers in Beijing or Bangalore will look for online chat-classrooms, email "office hours," and detailed feedback on term papers...

...are modeled not on medieval guilds, governed by their members, but on modern corporations...

...this is the unbeatable deal that universities offer their corporate partners...

...Administrators often talk as if the prospect of academic bargaining is a new problem, fraught with unknown procedures and unpredictable pitfalls...

...In fact, faculty may find that the biggest threat to academic freedom comes from above...

...Nevertheless, clumsy or not, this is the new project of private sector administrators in the wake of the NYU decision: an effort to defeat unionization through creative redefinition, giving everything new names without changing anything...

...or never known anyone who teaches at Rutgers, the University of Massachusetts, or other campuses where faculty are organized...

...candidates to teach introductory language classes for a minimum of four semesters...

...but similar efforts lie at the heart of current anti-union strategies at Yale, Columbia, and elsewhere...

...their time is too expensive...

...It is hard to imagine exactly how the university will justify this system unDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 69 GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS der cross-examination before the Labor Board...

...In fact, though, the NYU decision was only one of several recent decisions that have marked a sea change in academic labor relations...

...in all this time, there has never been a suggestion that academic freedom was compromised...

...This debate over contrasting visions of academic freedom points, at the deepest levels, to what is at stake in campus organizing campaigns...

...At the end of the century, average salaries for tenured faculty were approximately 5 percent lower than they were in 1970...

...The profit strategy of these new ventures, then, relies explicitly on an army of graduate students and adjuncts to monitor online discussions, critique papers, answer questions, and get to know individual students' GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS work well enough to write the obligatory letters of recommendation...

...But this has nothing to do with academic freedom and, on the contrary, amounts to a direct refutation of the very purpose of federal labor law—to provide workers the ability to negotiate on a more even footing with their employers...

...B B UT THE SAME dynamics that make graduate students such a good buy while they are in school make them increasingly unemployable after they complete their degrees, leading a coalition of national faculty associations to bemoan the vanishing traditional faculty member...

...And in both natural science and humanities departments, graduate students are responsible for 90 percent of the grading...

...p p comes from NYU itself, where a prominent professor was fired after being the only non-tenured faculty member to testify before the NLRB in support of graduate student unionization...

...Nevertheless, there is a meaningful—and disturbing—conception of "academic freedom" that animates administrators' opposition to unionization...

...Just as administrators may have feared, the success of graduate student unions has spurred increased organizing among other academic employees, including both adjunct and tenuretrack faculty...

...Westheimer's firing— ostensibly on the grounds of insufficient scholarship, despite the fact that he was awarded NYU's internal award for excellence in scholarship— set off a firestorm of protest both at NYU and in the national education community, in which a petition calling on NYU to reexamine this decision has been signed by four past presidents of the American Educational Research Association...

...In a comprehensive survey of faculty at universities with established graduate student unions, 95 percent of faculty stated that graduate student collective bargaining did not inhibit the free exchange of ideas between faculty and graduate students...

...and it is unlikely that administrators' re-labeling projects will convince them not to deduct payroll taxes...

...Administrators, though, have adopted a conscious strategy of placing faculty at the fulcrum of union conflicts...

...Faculty have, in fact, found unions easy to work with...

...In the case in question, Yale faculty and adminis GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONS trators threatened strike participants with being banned from future teaching assignments...

...When University of California administrators refused to bargain with their graduate student union, the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate warned them that, all legalities aside, their strategy had plainly backfired: after a fifteenyear campaign to defeat unionization, "huge sums of state money have been spent...

...Similar applications are now being developed for science departments as well...

...Collective bargaining, with its demand that one voice speak for all, is [not] compatible with the individualism of university life—the life the students have chosen precisely because it leaves them free to follow their own path and to speak for themselves...

...The Labor Board agreed to a settlement on the remaining charges that required Yale to post prominent notices outside the graduate school administration offices promising that in the future no employee would be subject to threats for participation in union activities...

...Rather than pursuing the romantic vision of the classroom as an encounter between seasoned scholars and eager young minds, administrators across the country have radically shifted teaching duties away from regular faculty and onto the shoulders of graduate students and adjunct instructors...

...Where Do We Go From Here...

...Beyond the immediate economic issues of wages and benefits, this is a fight over the extent to which universities will be democratized...

...Just such an effort is underway at Yale, where the graduate school instituted a plan in which each department is to determine, supposedly according to strictly pedagogical criteria, the number of semesters that their graduate students needed to teach in order to gain the proper professional training...

...We have moved very far from the model of the university as a community of scholars...

...Moreover, the amount of work done by graduate students is simply too great and too varied to be disguised out of existence...

...As the president of NYU's AAUP chapter notes, "today it's undeniable that universities...

...If the services were not provided by the graduate assistants, they would be provided by instructors who may be statutory employees...

...The second front of the graduate unionization struggle is the administrators' war for the hearts and minds of campus faculty...

...IT IS UNCLEAR what the chances of such a project are...

...The wholesale substitution of casual teachers for tenure-track positions has marked the decimation of the academic job market...

...These reprisals led the federal government to file charges against Yale administrators and faculty and to resolutions of censure against the school from the Modern Language Association, the American History Association, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP...

...In June, the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors held a press conference to denounce NYU's action, suggesting that the administration may have committed a "gross violation of the principles of academic freedom and free speech," and calling for a special community board hearing to examine threats to both graduate students and faculty engaged in campus labor issues...

...In a series of hearings before the National Labor Relations Board, arguments opposing the union were voiced not only by NYU's own administration but by those of Yale, Princeton, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Boston University, the American Association of Universities, the American Council on Education, and the Council on Graduate Schools...

...Ultimately, however, the logic of distance learning means that universities will look to standardize their educational products by patenting the lectures and course materials of name faculty who will serve as "content providers...

...This, then, is the contradiction that lies at the heart of the corporatization process: the very dynamics that make graduate students so useful to the business mission of the university are also destroying the academic careers that are supposed to justify the long haul of earning a Ph.D...

...This article is taken from a longer work available as a pamphlet from the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...Asked whether he would oppose a faculty union on these same grounds, Kronman stutters: "Oh boy, that's a difficult question to answer...

...thus, even if every single assistant professor quit or got promoted, 40 percent of current graduate students would remain jobless...

...In order to disguise the work of graduate teachers as part of their own educational training, administrators must concoct elaborate rationales for "training" assignments that happen to match up perfectly with undergraduate teaching needs...

...After nearly 30 years of experience with bargaining units of faculty members," the Labor Board concluded, "we are confident" that issues of academic versus employment considerations can be easily resolved...

...When pressed on this issue, Kronman backpedals, conceding that he would not advise college students against attending graduate school at a unionized campus or discourage faculty from taking a job there on the basis that it might restrict their intellectual development...

...The Labor Board roundly rebuffed this argument...

...Administrators face an uphill battle, because the reality of graduate student teaching loads makes it hard to conceal their work through the magic of newly invented degree requirements...

...The administration's argument, the Labor Board concluded, "runs directly contrary to the express purposes of the [National Labor Relations] Act...

...Although distance learning may suggest a fully automated education, it is unlikely that tuition-paying students will settle for it...

...GORDON LAFER is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and is the author of The Job Training Charade (Cornell University Press, 2002...

...Beyond the immediate value of funding, universities have been accelerating efforts to capture the intellectual property rights that emerge from this research, with many schools pioneering in-house venture-capital offices to support for-profit startups based on the results of laboratory research...

...These rulings have helped to spur an unprecedented boom in graduate student organizing...

...The romantic vision of the medieval university run by its scholars is long gone...

...and adopted a policy allowing faculty advisers to write negative letters of recommendation on the basis of strike participation...

...Earlier this year, for instance, the dean at the State University of New York at Buffalo removed Professor Barbara Bono from her position as chair of the English department after she refused to sign a letter threatening striking graduate student teachers with being banned from future employment...

...while classics, a small department with few undergraduate majors, determined that its discipline does not require any minimum teaching quota whatsoever...

...The revised principle seems to boil down to the right of administrators to threaten those lower down the academic food chain...

...Graduate student unions have repeatedly insisted that their conflict is solely with the central administration...

...And with all the creative strategies at their disposal, the one thing universities cannot do is decrease their reliance on graduate labor...

...but] the movement has grown stronger and deeper...

...Faculty are encouraged to play this role, in part, by administration suggestions that unions threaten the freedoms of faculty themselves...

...The fact that the entire organizational leadership of elite higher education mobilized against the NYU union indicates what was at stake in this fight...

...These restrictions on what could be legally discussed with an employee,'" Richard insists, "would strike at the freedom of expression central to the whole conception of the university as an intellectual community...

...Given a free hand to unilaterally mold the university to their own liking, administrators have produced a system that—while financially successful—has undercut much of what used to stand at the heart of academic life...

...Thus, one school's recommendation to fellow administrators was to stock the university's negotiating committee with a majority of faculty members—even though they would have no final say over university positions...

...Thus, Dean Charles Stiger explained that he removed Professor Bono because "she expressed considerable sympathy for the students' situation and didn't see that forceful action was required...

...Is it really so much more difficult to learn how to teach Spanish than to learn how to teach Greek...

...References used for this article may be found at the Dissent Web site (www.dissentmagazine.org...

...Some administrators may hope that a Bush-appointed Labor Board will overturn the NYU decision...

...At Yale, it was estimated that the use of graduate teachers produced a savings of over $5 million per year and allowed administrators to eliminate nearly two hundred junior faculty positions at that school alone...

...Given that there is no question the threats voiced during the grade strike would be prima facie illegal in a normal strike action, it is curious that administrators have chosen to uphold these reprisals as the hallmark of academic freedom...

...The potential earnings from pharmaceutical, technology, and biotech patents represent a major new profit center for university managers and have led many schools to market their science departments aggressively to potential private sector partners...

...While an outright reversal of the NYU precedent is unlikely, some administrators have pinned their hopes on an ambitious effort to redisguise graduate employment as training...

...thus, students in Hong Kong may sign up for the "Henry Kissinger Lectures in PostWar Diplomacy" or similar name-brand courses...

...The Labor Board rejected this lastminute maneuver...

...These activities come on the heels of what is already a fastgrowing movement...

...It is telling that both NYU and Columbia administrators have pointed to charges that the Labor Board filed against Yale faculty in the wake of that school's 1996 graduate teachers' strike as evidence of the propensity of unions to chill academic freedom...

...At NYU and Columbia, national union representatives warn that "once teachers have gotten organized, we will never go away...

...Nationally, there are now 200,000 graduate teachers in the nation's universities, but only 114,000 junior faculty members...

...The Commission on Life Sciences warns that "many graduate students entered life science training with the expecta tion that they would become like their mentors: they would be able to establish laboratories in which they would pursue research based on their own scientific ideas...

...For pharmaceutical giants, they are a much cheaper alternative to in-house research...

...Indeed, for the first time in two decades, the NLRB last year ruled that faculty at a private college have the right to organize, determining this time that faculty's authority was not truly managerial, but merely "advisory" to the administration...

...For most of the academic community, academic freedom consists precisely in the protection against such threats...

...NYU asserted that all the working conditions of teachers—including salary and workload—were "educational policy" issues that could not be subject to collective bargaining without undermining fundamental freedoms...

...Under the new scheme, most graduate students will receive a fixed stipend for five years and will be required to teach several times in order to obtain their degree...

...Perhaps Kronman has never heard of Albert Einstein—a member of Princeton's 66 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 American Federation of Teachers faculty union...

...This win-win solution, however, relies critically on the availability of thousands of graduate students who are simulta 64 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 neously among the nation's most highly trained and most poorly paid technology workers...

...In the humanities and social science departments, the key emerging market is distance learning...

...While the Yeshiva ruling remains in effect until challenged at the Supreme Court level, the recent reasoning of the Labor Board suggests that—with the dramatic changes in university governance over the past twenty years—faculty on more and more campuses may be defined as not fitting the factpattern outlined in Yeshiva...

...But the difference between a democratized and corporatized university remains more critical than ever as universities face the future...

...Even at the nation's top schools, the share of life sciences Ph.D.s who go on to permanent research jobs in either academia or industry has fallen from 87 percent in 1973 to 56 percent in 1995...

...Graduate students "are working to become individuals with distinctive views and voices," Kronman explains...

...Unsurprisingly, the Spanish department, which relies heavily on graduate teachers to staff introductory language courses, determined that the particular pedagogy of its profession requires Ph.D...

...In the beginning stages, thousands of professors may be asked to convert their current courses into online offerings...

...Clearly, the big names will have little or no contact with students...

...The fact that administrators have responded to the NYU ruling not by finally honoring the democratic rights of their own graduate employees, but by devoting their primary energy to a transparently Orwellian scheme whose sole purpose is to disempower the very people the university is charged with mentoring, is a testament to administrators' desperation to maintain corporate control...

...As administrators have been increasingly driven by bottom-line considerations, graduate students have become an indispensable ingredient in the financial calculations of every major university...

...Finally, even those ultimately lucky enough to land tenure-track positions find that they are still not inhabiting the lives of their mentors...

...In fact, the correct response to this worry is: been there, done that...

...Across the country, administrators are competing to cement corporate partnerships supporting jointly funded science research...

...If this description of facultyrun universities was dated in 1980, it has become utterly untenable twenty years later...

...thus MIT recently announced an ambitious effort, developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research, to create online science labs that would allow physics and engineering students to participate in laboratory instruction from remote portals...

...Faculty: Caught in the Crossfire...

...In the natural sciences, the turn to commercially sponsored research has likewise encouraged a more corporate structure in which a limited number of principal investigators oversee a large staff of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows...

...For instance, the Labor Board's ruling was partly predicated on the fact that "the number of TA positions available is tied to undergraduate enrollment, not graduate enrollment...

...Within three months of the NYU union's winning recognition, unions were voted in by lopsided margins at both Temple University and Michigan State University, a majority of graduate students at Columbia and Brown petitioned the NLRB for an election, and new organizing drives were announced at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania...

...Twenty years later, it appears that graduate education has fallen victim, in part, to just this unchecked administrative power feared by Brennan...

...To accomplish this feat, students had to overcome the political and legal opposition of virtually every elite school in the country...

...The Yeshiva decision drastically restricted faculty organizing on the basis that, in the model of medieval scholarly communities, faculty hold primary decision-making authority and therefore are themselves managerial employees with no right to organize...

...Professor Joel Westheimer had won "exceptional merit" performance reviews in every year until his Labor Board testimony and was unanimously recommended for tenure by the members of his department and all eight outside reviewers, but was terminated by School of Education dean Ann Marcus— who herself testified against the union in the Labor Board hearings...

...Finally, there is an on-the-ground reality to the new unions that will not be changed even if the law is reinterpreted...

...or never been impressed by the work of any graduates of the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, or other unionized schools...

...to circumvent recognition...

...suggested that participants could be kicked out of graduate school...

...The economic logic of this strategy is simple to grasp: in 1999, an average full professor earned $71,000 per year, while graduate student teachers earned between $5,000 and $20,000...

...It now appears likely that, this fall, NYU officials will be dragged back into labor court to face new charges of violating federal law in the Westheimer firing...