AAUP cosponsors forum on graduate student unions

Academe, May/Jun 2002

In December the AAUP cosponsored a forum on graduate student unionization at Yale University with Yale professors, including Peter Brooks, Michael Holquist, and Robert Gordon. The event provided interested faculty at Yale with information on different aspects of graduate student unionization.

AAUP general secretary Mary Burgan reviewed the changes in higher education that account for the surge in interest among graduate students in collective bargaining. "Ours is a profession under siege," Burgan said, citing a depressed job market for Ph.D.'s, attacks on tenure, the mounting use of contingent labor in the academy, and moves to "unbundle" or outsource the work of the professoriate. The traditional academic career trajectory is becoming a thing of the past, Burgan said.

AAUP general counsel David Rabban, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, discussed labor law relevant to graduate student organizing and examined arguments for and against it. He noted the similarity between New York University's recent claim that graduate student unionization threatened institutional academic freedom and the 1935 claim by the Associated Press that collective bargaining rights for journalists would compromise the freedom of the press. (In the NYU case, the AAUP filed an amicus brief asserting that, in the experience of its local chapters, unionization in higher education has not threatened academic freedom. The NYU graduate students were granted collective bargaining rights in 2001.)

Following the AAUP speakers, two faculty members shared their experiences with graduate student unionization. Dee Morris, an English professor at the University of Iowa, was chair of her department when graduate students at the university organized. She said she does not view graduate student unionization as inimical either to higher education or to faculty-student relationships. Jackson Lears, a professor of history at Rutgers University, testified to the collegiality of relationships between faculty and graduate students at Rutgers, where both groups are in the same bargaining unit. Morris and Learn acknowledged that graduate student organizing has complex ramifications for academic departments, but both also noted that union rules and procedures can clarify and improve relationships between faculty and teaching assistants.