The reporter sounded more tentative than she had earlier: “Dean Stimpson, you might not like what I’m about to say, but you’ve got a reputation as a woman of the left, and now you’re against a graduate-student union at N.Y.U. Students say you’re a big disappointment to them. How does that make you feel?”
She was covering the efforts of the United Auto Workers and a student group, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, to establish a U.A.W. local for graduate assistants at New York University.
“They have a right to say what they please,” I answered. I meant what I said, but I did not say everything that has meaning to me about my inability to support this particular unionization campaign.
I often feel as if I am a part of a significant but unfinished drama, which by now consists of three acts. More are to come. Although Yale has dealt with the issue for several years, the N.Y.U. case could be the first to determine whether graduate assistants at private universities are students who receive financial aid or employees who earn wages. Last month, a regional official of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate assistants are both students and employees -- and so are free to unionize. We at N.Y.U. have appealed.
I recently heard a faculty member nostalgically say what “fun” campus politics had been in the 1960’s, and how lucky the students who support unionization are to have the same “fun” today. The remark startled me. For the 1960’s were different from these turn-of-the millennium years. No young American man now at N.Y.U. has to choose between going to graduate school or going to war; diversity, then a vision, has become a practice. And although the drama of unionization at N.Y.U. has had its comic moments, it is anything but funny.
For me, the prelude began in January 1998, when I took office as graduate dean of arts and science. There was work to be done. Unlike many research universities, N.Y.U. was still creating itself. That appealed to me. We needed, for example, to improve financial-aid benefits for graduate students, and to provide universitywide childcare subsidies. I immediately began working with others to take steps to do so.
I am unsure exactly when Act I began. As far as I can tell, much of the union’s organizational work was done quietly, department by department, graduate program by program, individual by individual. As in any good play, the first act involved the articulation of issues. I heard six that seemed to matter most. Like other people on campus, I found myself agreeing with the graduate students on some of those points, but not all of them.
Since becoming dean, I had seen my primary responsibility as helping to resolve four of the issues. The first dealt with material needs: increased stipends, better health insurance, and affordable housing. The second involved social concerns: greater diversity in a multicultural, cosmopolitan university. The third was governance: clear grievance procedures, transparent processes, a stronger student voice in decisions. The fourth was about moral and psychological demands: respect for each individual. Privately, I even wondered if the term “graduate student” was not itself a problem, indicating a failure to recognize the age and accomplishments of people seeking advanced research degrees.
On two entwined issues, however, I had to disagree. Both my understanding of the nature of the graduate university and my feminism, with its emphasis on collaborative methods of working, made me doubt that the adversarial process of collective bargaining, in which the United Auto Workers would be involved, was the best way to resolve differences among faculty members, students, and administrators. The collegial method of governance seemed far more appropriate.
Behind that lay another issue: whether graduate students are employees who can demand that the university join them at the table. No, I answered with others, graduate assistants do valuable work, but they are not employees. The criteria for admitting and supporting a student are academic, not job-related: academic merit, promise, and fit between the potential student and a university devoted to learning.
I do not mean to denigrate the efforts of the organizing group when I say that it has been the beneficiary of today’s historical context. One element is a revitalized labor movement that is seeking new, white-collar members. Another is the appeal of identity politics, which encourages people, especially if they feel powerless, to assert themselves by claiming a name -- by saying, for example, “I am a worker, and you must recognize my self-identification.”
A third element is higher education itself. Its labor practices, especially in the humanities, have helped to fray the social contract between the university and graduate students, a contract that once promised that if a student buckled down in the strenuous and penurious boot camp of graduate school, there would be a reward at the end -- an honorable degree, a respectable job. Anxiety about the value of a doctoral degree, again especially in the humanities, is being channeled into efforts to control what seems more controllable than the job market: the graduate school that is, in part, preparation for the market.
Moreover, our macho, tough-minded references to higher education as an “industry” are horrendously self-defeating. Not only do they strip higher education of any idealism that might bind its constituents together. They also legitimize the position of graduate students who, for whatever reason, buy into the industrial model and see themselves as industrial workers.
During this first part of the drama, I sensed, no matter how implicitly, the presence and pressure of competing myths. The U.A.W.-G.S.O.C. seemed to offer the seductive myth of rebirth, of a brighter and happier future. Once, reading organizers’ promises of what a union would do, I had a fantasy of the U.A.W. as a graduate student’s generous, attentive, sympathetic new partner, while the graduate school was the fallible old partner, warts too obvious, snores too audible, and attempts to do better too slow, fumbling, and suspect. The union efforts also summoned up the modern myth of liberation, of freedom and power for individuals won through the collective struggle against an intimidating but defeatable bully.
In contrast, the myth of graduate education is more austere. It is the story of the quest for truth, of the beauty and power of advanced learning and teaching, of the nobility of Aristotle’s opening of the Metaphysics: “All men [and women] by nature desire to know.”
During these months, my role seemed clear to me. It still does. Above all, I had to keep the graduate school going, without being divisive. I was not, however, going to adopt a position of spurious neutrality and mask my doubts about the effects of unionization on academic values.
The second act opened far more abruptly than the first. Late in April 1999, a group of union supporters, including some local Democratic officials, unexpectedly entered Bobst Library, the N.Y.U. library-and-administration building. Stating that they had enough graduate-student signatures, representatives of G.S.O.C. demanded formal recognition. If the university had done so then and there, it would, in essence, have accepted the proposition that graduate assistants are employees.
On May 1, the university wrote saying that it recognizes unions only if they win a secret-ballot N.L.R.B. election. On May 4, the U.A.W. filed a petition with Region 2 of the board, seeking recognition of U.A.W.-G.S.O.C. as a bargaining unit. On May 19, moving with surprising celerity, the regional office initiated fact-finding hearings on the petition.
Under a subpoena from the U.A.W., the university began to assemble documents pertaining to graduate assistants. A subpoena is a machine that sucks up everything, be it central or peripheral, to be scrutinized for the worst possible connotations. I prepared to be a witness -- to raise my hand, swear to tell the truth, and undergo examination, cross-examination, and then redirect examination by lawyers.
Legal processes, especially when they are inseparable from politics, are draining and demanding. They require distinguishing one’s symbolic role from one’s day-to-day life and core identity. I told myself not to conflate the “Dean Stimpson” of graffiti chalked on the sidewalks around Washington Square with the “me” who had a job to do.
But although the N.L.R.B. hearings took place in a federal office building in downtown Manhattan, away from academic buildings and dormitories, they did not occur in isolation. External developments influenced them. In November 1999, the National Labor Relations Board, in a case involving the Boston Medical Center, cast aside precedent and ruled (three votes to two) that medical residents and interns are primarily employees, not students.
On campus, the campaign continued. I met frequently with students. With some, I felt that we were exchanging position papers; with others, that “the union” was an abstract but attractive possibility that somehow promised “to make things better.” With all, I repeated the legal constraints, some of them reasonable, under which “supervisors” in a unionizing situation must speak.
The third act began on April 3, 2000, and is not yet concluded. The regional administrator of the N.L.R.B., Daniel Silverman, issued a 40-page ruling. Supporting the U.A.W. position, indeed going beyond it, for the first time the N.L.R.B. set a precedent and declared that graduate assistants at private universities are employees. The administrator ordered an election, which was held last week.
“Here’s what will influence my vote,” a student told me via e-mail. “Will you promise me that the following things will happen if we don’t have a union?” A list followed. Of course, I could promise nothing about the future.
In the meantime, the university, after consultation with the faculty, has appealed the regional decision to the full N.L.R.B. However, we expect the election ballots to be impounded while the board decides how to respond to the university.
Reading the decision -- along with the N.L.R.B.'s stark, legalistic announcements about the election that were soon posted around the university -- I felt as if graduate education had been reduced to a relationship between employer and employee, and my own identity to that of the employer.
My doubts were fed by the memory of the time I had spent as a faculty member and administrator at Rutgers University, a unionized public research university. I saw there that unions could serve an important role as an advocate for faculty and graduate-student interests in a huge state bureaucracy, one that could swing from support to indifference to hostility toward those interests. Unions, however, could also cause harm, by imposing industrial models on academic institutions; by almost automatically filing grievances against academic judgments, no matter how reasonable; by sometimes promoting the belief that the union mattered more, and deserved greater allegiance, than the university.
More crucially, I knew that a private university with a graduate-assistant union would be more vulnerable than a public university. Graduate-assistant unions at public universities fall under state labor laws that impose some limits on union activities at educational institutions. In contrast, a graduate-assistant union at a private university falls under the National Labor Relations Act, which forbids neither strikes nor bargaining about academic matters.
Outside of the university, I have encountered divided responses when I speak about being unionized. In New York, a labor town, some people seem to have a diffuse sympathy for unions, generally perceived as good, and students, generally perceived as innocent underdogs. “You’re not going to like this, Kate,” a friend started with an unconscious echo of the reporter who interviewed me, “but my hunch is that the graduate-student case isn’t legally crazy.”
On the other hand, some others seem to feel that the financial aid that graduate students receive is something to be prized, even envied. An alumnus did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that divided the amount of a minimum financial-aid package next year (stipend of $13,000, full-tuition scholarship of about $18,600, fee remission of about $1,100, N.Y.U. health-insurance subsidy of $400) by the number of hours of work required of a teaching assistant during two semesters (600). “If they’re employees, they’re darn well paid,” he concluded.
Both responses seem to hold the unasked question, “Why does this issue matter to you?” Perhaps, I have worried, I am guilty of maternalism (“There, there, the nice dean will make everything better”) or of the “Not in My Back Yard” syndrome (“I’m all in favor of unions, but not the U.A.W. at N.Y.U.”). To be an educator demands being forever educable, and thus aware of the probability of imperfections and errors.
However, at heart, what matters in the university are academic values, and I am wary of any force that might corrode them.
The first value is academic freedom. A canonical definition of academic freedom, indeed cited in the regional administrator’s decision, is the right of a university to determine “who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”
Although union supporters, and the regional-N.L.R.B. decision, pooh-pooh concerns about a union’s intrusion into academic freedom, union activities do touch, not always delicately, on such areas. During the campaign at N.Y.U., U.A.W.-G.S.O.C. supporters called for “neutrality” from the university, an organizing practice that permits only potential members of a bargaining unit to voice their thoughts about unionization. Applied to a university setting, such a practice can easily stifle wide-ranging debate. And when a university gives up debate, it gives up its identity.
Moreover, what are we to make of U.A.W.-G.S.O.C. fliers that promised to seek “more institutional support for ethnic and gender studies; programs for under-represented students (i.e., first generation students, single parents)”? Statements like those fudge the line between setting conditions of work and deciding academic matters. I have spent a career supporting ethnic and gender studies, but I do not want them, or any academic program, subject to collective bargaining.
The second value I fear for is shared and collegial academic governance, which should be a bulwark of academic freedom. To be sure, adding graduate students to the mix of faculty members and administrators who share governance is a new challenge for many institutions, including N.Y.U. And, yes, third parties -- from legislators to private donors -- intrude into academic governance all the time. But no matter how much G.S.O.C. claims that graduate students will control their own union, I must ask whether the presence of the U.A.W., with its history of industrial organization, will impose a constrictive, alien model on the academic life of teaching, learning, and research.
One must also consider the claim that a union election rests on the democratic right to vote. This ignores the fact that a union election allows only a tiny proportion of the people affected by the outcome to vote. A graduate-student union would have an impact on graduate students who are not assistants, on undergraduates, faculty members, and others. But in our recent election, only currently enrolled graduate assistants (about 3 percent of the 50,000 people at N.Y.U.) were able to vote. Those few can make a decision for the many, and then depart. They are, by definition and design, transitory. Even the most ardent supporters of graduate-assistant unions admit that such impermanence results in collective-bargaining processes that must constantly reinvent the wheel.
Activist students also depart, leaving behind a structure to which future students are bound, required to pay dues or a fee -- no matter what their individual feelings about a union might be.
Like the arts, academic life further reminds us of the necessity of complexities. American graduate education, arguably the best in the world, is made up of diverse units. With a belief in the intellectual energy and creativity of individual scholars, departments, and programs, it is a collection of free localities bound together by a common devotion to research and teaching and, at their best, a common ethic of fairness. The union contracts that I have seen may bring their members valuable benefits. However, they impose excessive standardization, often laid out in mind-numbing detail. Surely the benefits can be won through a less adversarial system, without the costs.
My doubts about the enduring viability of the relationship between the U.A.W. graduate union at N.Y.U. and academic values crystallized when I reached the bottom of the 38th page of the regional N.L.R.B. administrator’s decision -- his finding of which specific “employees constitute an appropriate unit for collective bargaining.” Expanding upon the request of U.A.W. lawyers, Mr. Silverman “excluded” all graduate assistants in the biomedical sciences and all research assistants supported by external grants in physics, biology, chemistry, and the Center for Neural Science, on the grounds that those students were “working” only as part of their dissertations. Yet he left in research assistants on external grants in psychology, computer science, and mathematics.
Not only did Mr. Silverman’s ruling rip out the voices of more than 200 students in an election. It misunderstood how science works. For research assistants on external grants do much more than just work on their dissertations: They perform experiments, record and analyze results, and assist with interpretation. In brief, a government administrator’s ruling trumped the realities of a university’s lab.
I did not answer the reporter who asked me how I felt about being unionized. My feelings are not at stake here, not the point of it all. What is at stake is the fate of academic values.
Catharine R. Stimpson is dean of the graduate school of arts and science at New York University.
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B7