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AAUP Council Addresses Graduate Student Issues
By Julie M. Schmid
The national Council of the AAUP addressed three topics that concern graduate student members of the Association at its November 2004 meeting. First, the Council approved amendments to the AAUP constitution. The amendments, which appear on page 117, will be before the 2005 annual meeting for ratification. Second, the Council adopted a resolution reaffirming the right of graduate students to organize for collective bargaining. Pointing out that some graduate students work as graduate, teaching, and research assistants, thereby assuming the role of employees at their institutions, the Association supported their right to choose to form unions and to select collective bargaining agents. The Collective Bargaining Congress (CBC) approved a similar resolution at its December 2004 meeting.
The Council and the CBC adopted the new resolutions in response to the July 2004 decision of the National Labor Relations Board in Brown University. In that case, the board declared that graduate assistants are not employees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), thereby overruling a 2000 decision in New York University, in which the board ruled that graduate assistants were employees under the NLRA.
The Association first went on record in 1998 affirming graduate student rights. In 2000, the Association submitted an amicus brief before the National Labor Relations Board in New York University, arguing that unionization is consistent with academic freedom, and that graduate assistant unionization does not violate academic freedom or harm faculty-student mentoring relationships.
In a third action, the Council approved the creation of the Graduate and Professional Student Committee. This new standing committee, composed of faculty and graduate students from collective bargaining and traditional advocacy chapters, will monitor and report on the status of graduate students within the context of AAUP policies and principles, and recommend appropriate actions to the Council. In proposing the establishment of the committee, Rama Murthy of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities noted the increased number of graduate employees among the academic workforce and the concerns that graduate students share with tenure-track and contingent faculty—intellectual and academic freedom and terms and conditions of employment. Murthy emphasized that graduate and professional students involved in teaching and research are the future of the professoriate.
Michael Livingston, president of the Minnesota AAUP conference, will chair the new committee. Of the Council's three recent actions on behalf of graduate students, he says, "These are small but important steps forward for the AAUP. Graduate students are important members of the community of scholars. By defending their right to unionize and their rights to academic freedom, we defend the entire academy."
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