The National Labor Relations Board’s decision on Tuesday declaring that graduate-student assistants at Columbia University are employees with the right to unionize could have stark and unwelcome effects on private campuses where such unions are formed. Or so said the lone board member who voted against the majority, Philip A. Miscimarra, in his dissent.
First and foremost among those effects are the “economic weapons” now available to both the assistants and their universities in the course of collective bargaining, Mr. Miscimarra wrote.
For instance, in the event of a strike, the university would be allowed to suspend tuition waivers for striking assistants. To participate in classes while striking, Mr. Miscimarra wrote, the students would probably be required to immediately pay full tuition — a heavy sum on many private campuses.
Even more disturbing than such weapons, the board member continued, are the various behaviors that the new employment structure could allow. “Parents take heed,” Mr. Miscimarra wrote, “if you send your teenage sons or daughters to college, the board majority’s decision today will affect their ‘college experience’” in a variety of ways.
First, say an undergraduate is sexually harassed by a graduate assistant at a private college. The institution would investigate, and because of the National Labor Relations Act that now applies, it would be forbidden to ask other assistants who had witnessed the harassment to keep what they discussed confidential.
Or, more basically, the university cannot make rules requiring student assistants to “maintain ‘harmonious interactions and relationships’ with other students,” Mr. Miscimarra wrote, and it could not prohibit profanity either.
Speaking of profanity, social media could become a forum for vulgar gripes under the decision. Mr. Miscimarra:
If a student assistant objects to actions by a professor-supervisor named “Bob,” the university must permit the student to post a message on Facebook stating: “Bob is such a nasty mother fucker, don’t know how to talk to people. Fuck his mother and his entire fucking family.”
The same would apply to verbal abuse directed toward a professor, according to the dissent:
The university may not take action against a student assistant who screams at a professor-supervisor and calls him a “fucking crook,” a “fucking mother fucking” and an “asshole” when the student assistant is complaining about the treatment of student assistants.
And that’s just a “small sampling” of effects that will “predictably follow” from the decision, Mr. Miscimarra wrote.
But, in its decision, the majority pushed back against those apocalyptic predictions, noting that New York University has accepted student assistants’ ability to bargain collectively (even after a 2004 decision that blocked such efforts) in a relatively harmonious manner.
In that case, the two sides were able to negotiate “stipends, pay periods, discipline and discharge, job posting, a grievance-and-arbitration procedure, and health insurance.” All those aspects that are typically associated with the private sector “appear to have been successfully adapted to a university setting.”
In addition, the majority wrote, sectors such as medicine and national defense — which add other complications to the employee-employer relationship — have negotiated that balance.
“These critical sectors have proven able to effectively integrate collective bargaining, with its occasional disputes and attendant delays, into their modes of doing business,” the decision reads. “We have no reason to doubt that the higher-education sector cannot do the same.”
Read the decision and the dissent.