ACADEMIC SWEATSHOPS : The higher unionizing - pay scale for graduate-student teaching assistants

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Clayton Sinyai

On March 1, hours before a threatened strike at New York University by graduate teaching and research assistants, the school's administration agreed to bargain with the graduate assistants' union. The historic pact places NYU graduate assistants in the forefront of a national organizing movement among contingent faculty that aims to secure decent working conditions while defending academic values. The agreement followed a three-year fight by graduate assistants to secure recognition. Last year the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had ruled that, as university employees, graduate assistants were entitled to union representation if they wished. In November, it was announced that the graduate assistants had chosen to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110. (The UAW represents graduate assistants on a number of other campuses, most prominently in the University of California system.) But NYU's administration continued to balk, despite an NLRB complaint against it for refusal to bargain. Only after a public campaign by the union, a strike threat, and back-channel negotiations did the university agree to negotiate.

The organizing effort at NYU is not an isolated case but part of a rising tide of union activity on university campuses. Organized labor, in a bid to renew its mission as a social movement rather than an interest group, has reached out to academics, religious groups, and social activists. University campuses have reflected this outreach with a proliferation of student groups such as United Students against Sweatshops, as well as with increased campus labor organizing activity. The NYU graduate students' campaign for recognition included a visit by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to NYU President L. Jay Oliva.

The main reason for the leap in organizing activity, however, is to be found in the changing face of higher education. Universities, under pressure to reduce costs, are transferring more and more of their undergraduate teaching to lower-cost graduate assistants and adjunct faculty. The case of "part-time" adjunct faculty is especially striking. Traditionally, adjunct faculty were successful professionals in their fields who would teach an occasional course for a small stipend and, in the process, enrich the university with "real-world" experience. Today, many universities see adjuncts as inexpensive substitutes for full-time tenured faculty. Adjunct positions are often filled by Ph.D.s who, though nominally part-time, actually cobble together a full-time course load at half the salary (or less) of a full-time tenured professor--and with no benefits. Whereas adjuncts were less than a quarter of all faculty in 1970, today they are about half.

The effects of this "casualization" of university education, as it has come to be known, are deleterious to the university's educational mission. When less than half the instructional faculty are protected by tenure, academic freedom--at least in principle--is endangered. Furthermore, contingent faculty cannot provide undergraduates with the sort of contact possible with full-time, tenured professors. Are adjuncts, who may teach courses on two or three university campuses, and graduate students, who are students themselves, likely to offer undergraduates the same quality of academic counseling? Will they have the time or the energy for the same excellence in the classroom? Research by the American Association of University Professors (a professional association of university faculty that engages in collective bargaining) suggests the answer is often no. Thirty percent of part-time liberal-arts faculty reported no scheduled office hours, and adjuncts were 50 percent less likely to require essay exams than full-time faculty. Adjuncts and graduate students who deliver quality instruction, the AAUP's Rich Moser argues, do so in spite of the conditions of their employment.

Kimberly Johnson, an NYU teaching assistant, agrees, and hopes that unionization can help. Stipends averaging $13,000 per year are not enough to live on in New York City, and graduate students are obliged to seek outside jobs to supplement their incomes. "When you have graduate students who aren't working three or four jobs they can focus on their teaching work," she says.

The standard objection to campus unionization is that higher education is not a business. Collective bargaining is appropriate to workers in private enterprise, but it does not belong in universities where the purpose is not to accumulate profits but to foster learning. But the increasing use of contingent instructional faculty suggests that the university has already gone a long way toward adopting business modes of behavior, and the intrusion of for-profit educational institutions like the University of Phoenix will only increase the competitive pressures toward this transformation.

Many activists in faculty unions think that the best response to these developments is to acknowledge them. Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress--a union representing City University of New York faculty, full-time, part-time, and graduate assistants--says that "academics are workers and we must learn to defend ourselves as workers."