The activities Scott Barish performs as a doctoral research assistant align with the goals of the federal agencies that sponsor his research and directly benefit his faculty adviser and Duke University. In short, Mr. Barish argues, he is providing a service in exchange for pay and, therefore, he is an employee.
Last month, 42 years after deciding otherwise, the federal panel that oversees labor relations agreed. In a ruling involving Columbia University, the full National Labor Relations Board extended the right to collectively bargain not only to teaching assistants at private colleges but also, for the first time, to research assistants on externally funded grants, like Mr. Barish. Graduate unionization at public colleges is governed by state laws.
Activists cheered the new rights for teaching assistants, which they had been denied since 2004, under a ruling involving Brown University. But as important, union advocates say, is the reversal of an obscure 1974 decision involving a bid by 83 research assistants in Stanford University’s physics department to form a union to “improve wages and working conditions.” In that case, the board held that the research conducted by the graduate assistants was a requirement of their programs and “a part of the learning process.” In other words, it was education, not employment.
Graduate students make a living while in their programs usually by serving as a teaching assistant, in which they work as instructors or assistants in undergraduate courses, or, in the sciences, as research assistants, in which they help their faculty advisers with research and work on their dissertations. The students are typically given a stipend for living expenses. Colleges call it financial aid. Students often call it pay.
About 30 graduate student unions exist at public colleges, according to William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Several have unionized research assistants, including the Universities of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington. Unionized teaching assistants are more common, in part because the employment relationship is more visible: A graduate assistant teaching a class, for example, is filling a business need of a university in a way that is often clearer than the work of a research assistant who is making progress on a dissertation by doing work with an adviser on a federal grant.
The recent Columbia ruling deemed the conclusion of the 1974 board — that research assistants are “primarily students” — irrelevant. Instead, the board applied the same “common-law test of employment” that it did to teaching assistants on the question of research assistants: Does the employer control the work, and is the work performed in exchange for compensation? Yes on both, it concluded.
“Most of the research assistants I talk to feel the nebulousness of what our status is,” says Mr. Barish, a fifth-year student in the biology department. “We acknowledge the reality that we are simultaneously learning and engaged in that process of education while also doing work and labor. This ruling puts legal concrete behind that.”
At an Equilibrium
Opponents of graduate unionization say they worry about how colleges can separate labor from educational requirements such as work on a dissertation. The process would be burdensome, messy, and result in years of litigation, critics say. “By sweeping all research assistants into the embrace of this ruling,” says Joseph W. Ambash, a lawyer with Fisher Phillips who successfully argued the 2004 Brown case, “the intrusion into higher education is unfathomable.”
Some faculty members at public colleges have done more than just fathom it, however. They’ve learned to embrace the unionization of research assistants, despite the occasional headache and transitional growing pains. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has had unionized research assistants for 25 years, for example, faculty members report none of the major concerns often raised by graduate-union critics.
At first, faculty members found it shocking when they learned they would have to provide guaranteed raises to their research assistants, says Elizabeth A. Connor, head of the biology department. The contract the union bargained for created bookkeeping and financial challenges by mandating stipend increases, she says, which complicated the process of divvying up federal grants.
“Now that we’re all aware of the cyclical nature of that,” Ms. Connor says, “it’s not as stressful as it was those first few years. It took a little time getting used to, but we’ve certainly been at equilibrium for a number of years.”
At the University of Washington, which has 4,500 teaching and research assistants, administrators say they don’t get into the weeds of determining what counts as work. They set a limit on the hours a research assistant can work — 220 per quarter, or roughly 20 hours a week — and then leave the professor and student to work out the details. It’s a system that has worked with no major problems, says Peter Denis, Washington’s assistant vice president for labor relations.
The question of what’s personal research and what is research for the university can be complicated, but it’s a question administrators largely sidestep, Mr. Denis says. “What we’ve tried to do as an institution over the years is be mature about this and say: This is our expectation. If there’s a reason you can’t meet that expectation, we want to know about it and we’ll address it on a case-by-case basis.”
A Changing Relationship
The labor board’s recent decision represents a recognition of the shifting nature of the work research assistants do, says Olga Brudastova, a graduate assistant in the civil engineering department of Columbia University. A dissertation in the sciences or engineering is often a series of three or more papers written on topics that help the student’s research adviser earn more grant money. “The work they produce is also covered by intellectual-property law and belongs to Columbia,” Ms. Brudastova says.
Mr. Barish, from Duke, says the work he performs studying nervous-system development in fruit flies — which includes being first author for two papers in which his adviser is also listed as a co-author — directly helps his adviser, an assistant professor, make the case for tenure and win research grants.
A portion of those research grants is taken by Duke for overhead costs, meaning his work, he says, “contributes to sustaining the university.”
The labor board’s ruling on research assistants could be a double-edged sword for union activists. Research assistants in the sciences tend to be less supportive of unions than teaching assistants in the humanities, and administrators sometimes encourage the inclusion of research assistants in proposed bargaining units with the belief that they’ll help defeat union elections.
But activists, including at Duke, where they are hoping to create a bargaining unit consisting of all of the university’s teaching and research assistants, say students in the sciences are just as much in need of support as humanities students. In the sciences, stipends tend to be higher because of access to federal grants, but being overworked and not having enough time off tend to be more prevalent concerns.
David Hoagland, head of the polymer science and engineering department at UMass Amherst, says the graduate union there has helped change the culture around labor relations in his department, which has only research assistants. Graduate students are working less than they used to. Professors no longer call their advisees on nights and weekends. And students report fewer problems with delayed paychecks.
Even so, Mr. Hoagland is rueful about the change in the relationship with his research assistants. It’s more “employer-employee than adviser-mentee” now, as opposed to 30 years ago. Mr. Hoagland, however, does not fault graduate students for wanting to collectively bargain.
“The academy brought this on itself by not being as sensitive to the needs of graduate students as it might have been,” Mr. Hoagland says. “You have to suffer the consequences of your policies.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
