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State of the Profession: The Other Brown
By Marcus Harvey
In July, a divided National Labor Relations Board reversed its 2000 finding that New York University's teaching assistants, research assistants, and proctors were statutory employees, and ruled that graduate employees at Brown University (and, by extension, those at other private universities) were not employees for the purposes of collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act. The decision means that impounded ballots from the union certification election at Brown will not be counted; that graduate assistant cases currently pending in front of the board, including those involving Columbia and Tufts Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, will be sent back to their respective regional offices for reconsideration in light of the Brown decision; and that the bargaining status of the United Auto Workers local representing graduate employees at NYU could be contested when its current contract expires.
The board's 3 to 2 decision in Brown University was based on an either-or understanding of the distinction between "students" and "employees." The majority reasoned that because graduate assistants "are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university," they should, therefore, not be considered employees. Even if one accepts the validity of the initial assumption, it is certainly difficult to understand why the board would not conclude—as so many public employee relations boards have done—that graduate assistants are simultaneously students and employees who, in their latter capacity, have the same rights to choose unionization as do other workers.
The majority further reasoned that graduate assistant collective bargaining would be incompatible with the educational mission of the institution and with academic freedom itself. Disturbingly, the academic freedom with which the board is most concerned seems more akin to managerial rights than anything else. Although invoking both pedagogy and academic freedom, the majority simply ignored the weight of experience and expert opinion.
Among the opinions ignored by the majority were ours. The AAUP filed an amicus brief arguing that graduate assistants should have the right to bargain collectively and explaining that such bargaining is consistent with sound academic practices and not subversive of academic freedom. Similarly ignored in the majority opinion (though cited in the dissent) were scholars whose work shows that established collective bargaining relationships clarify the roles played by faculty members in the lives of their graduate students and can "enhance mentoring relationships."
In fact, the degree of faculty support for graduate employee unionization, as reflected in the activities of AAUP chapters, is heartening. During the course of the graduate employee campaign at NYU, the AAUP chapter there grew markedly in size and activity as faculty members, who themselves are not unionized, sought a platform from which they could support the students' unionization effort. At Rutgers, faculty and graduate employees are part of the same local AAUP bargaining unit, a relationship which—if peculiar—has afforded Rutgers's graduate employees with strong contractual protections and competitive remuneration. Recently, the local AAUP faculty chapter at the University of Rhode Island helped graduate assistants unionize, reasoning that unionization would drive up graduate employee wages, push the legislature to devote more resources to graduate education, and make the institution more competitive in recruiting new graduate students.
Brown makes it all but impossible for graduate employees at America's private universities to unionize painlessly and is, therefore, likely to ex-acerbate rather than diminish labor tensions on many campuses. Graduate employee campaigns have demonstrated remarkable staying power. With tens of thousands of graduate employees already under contract at many of the nation's largest and most prestigious public universities (including the University of California, the State and City Universities of New York, and the flagships in Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin), it is unlikely that activists at places like Brown, Yale, Columbia, and Penn will take no for an answer. Rather, they will do what unions do when left with no other recourse: turn to demonstrations, work actions, and even strikes. The thousands of graduate assistant "nonemployees" at Brown, Yale, and other private universities are doing a significant portion of the teaching and research at those institutions. Testing the validity of the graduate students' ubiquitous assertion that "the university works because we do" could prove a costly experiment indeed.
Marcus Harvey is an associate secretary of the AAUP.
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