AAUP Director Testifies at Workers' Rights Hearing
The AAUP's director of organizing and services, Michael Mauer, testified in September at an academic labor board hearing held at Yale University. A panel of professors and legal experts presided over the public forum and heard testimony about graduate student organizing at Yale. The panel was invited by the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale, a group seeking to unionize. The Yale administration opposes unionization for graduate student employees.
In his testimony, Mauer described the AAUP's support for graduate student organizing over the years. The AAUP has endorsed explicitly the right of graduate students to bargain collectively, and the Association's Statement on Graduate Students, issued in 2000, addresses the obligation of administrations to honor a majority request for union representation where state legislation permits.
Mauer spoke about academic unions that have successfully negotiated explicit, legally enforceable guarantees of academic freedom in their negotiated agreements. He addressed a common fear that unionization of graduate students may harm faculty-student mentoring relationships, and noted that neither legal precedent nor empirical evidence supports this notion.
Graduate students on both sides of the unionization issue presented statements at the hearing, along with faculty from Yale and other institutions and academic experts on unionization. Mauer submitted into the record a statement from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which also supports the right of graduate student employees to organize if they so choose.
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