Grad Students at Private Colleges Were Cleared to Unionize 3 Years Ago. Here’s What’s Changed.

Jaime Danies

For years, private colleges aggressively resisted bargaining collectively with their graduate students. But almost three years ago, the National Labor Relations Board gave graduate students the right to collectively bargain in the private sector. Since then, the anti-union firewall has eroded.

Four private colleges have already ironed out union contracts with their graduate teaching and research assistants since the NLRB’s 2016 ruling, including the New School and American, Brandeis, and Tufts Universities.

Perhaps more influential, elite institutions that led the opposition to graduate-student unions for years, including Brown, Columbia, and Harvard Universities, are collectively bargaining with their graduate-student unions.

More and more institutions are realizing that unions provide representative democracy for graduate assistants and that “collective bargaining is not the end of the world,” said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.

Not all private colleges have accepted the right of their graduate students to bargain collectively. This month seven Loyola University Chicago graduate students were arrested during a protest of the administration’s refusal to bargain, and graduate students plan a walkout there on Wednesday.

Some private colleges have been slow to embrace the labor board’s ruling after seeing its composition shift from majority Democrat to majority Republican since the election of President Trump.

Unions could take their case to the labor board if a university refuses to bargain, but that step would allow the Republican-led labor board to revisit the issue of graduate-student unionization and overturn the 2016 ruling. So the unions have adopted the strategy of avoiding the labor board until its political composition is pro-union again.

With dire predictions unrealized and contentious issues unresolved, here are a few takeaways about where things stand now in the collective bargaining of graduate students at private institutions.

The Sky Did Not Fall

In arguments before the labor board ahead of the 2016 ruling, several elite private universities, including all the Ivies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made alarmist appeals that evoked concerns over academic freedom and what they described as the degradation of the sacred relationship between graduate students and their academic advisers.

The unions always felt those arguments were unfair. They cited as evidence the public sector: The University of California, for example, has unionized graduate assistants, and no one would accuse it of being a diminished institution as a result.

But the private sector was different, said the elite institutions, who argued that graduate-student unions “would significantly damage private-sector graduate education in this country” and would represent “an inappropriate intrusion into long-protected areas of academic freedom and autonomy.”

At a panel discussion this month, administrators from Tufts and Brandeis and a union representative negotiating with those institutions described a healthy relationship based on mutual respect. No one reported a weakening of academic freedom or the erosion of the adviser-advisee relationship. In fact, the contracts themselves draw lines protecting academic freedom.

Pay Remains a Big Issue

Sixteen graduate-student unionization elections have been held at private colleges since the 2016 labor-board ruling (counting Yale as one, even though the union there took a “microunits” approach that led to individual votes by departments), Herbert said.

Only three of those failed: at Cornell University, Duke University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Each of those campuses is in a relatively low-cost area where a student’s pay — in the form of a stipend for teaching undergraduates and conducting research — could be stretched farther than in places like New York City or Washington, D.C., where union drives tend to succeed.

Such dynamics underscore how concerns over inadequate pay remain a primary driver behind a graduate students’ willingness to support a union.

But Pay Is Far From the Only Issue

Union activists have long advocated for parental-leave benefits, mental-health services, and gender equality, but those issues are more crucial in graduate-student contract bargaining than even just a decade ago because they are more powerful forces in a national conversation about equity.

The Brandeis contract, for example, includes a clause on mental health. Some graduate students worry about being seen by an undergraduate they teach as they seek mental-health treatment at a campus clinic or office. The contract states that the university will provide “confidential and discreet access” to mental-health counselors in locations around the campus.

The Brandeis contract also addresses perhaps the central factor in determining the success of a Ph.D. student: the quality of the relationship between the student and her or his doctoral adviser. The contract calls for flexibility in the feedback that an adviser must provide to an advisee, but requires a professor with concerns about a graduate assistant’s work to meet with the student “as soon as practicable” to discuss them.

Sexual Harassment Is a Point of Contention

Sitting at the bargaining table and agreeing on a contract are two different things. At Harvard, graduate assistants were animated by some of the same issues, like stipends and improved health-care plans, that have been roiling other campuses. But a key sticking point during negotiations has been a grievance procedure for sexual harassment, said Madeleine F. Jennewein, a member of the bargaining committee and a fifth-year Ph.D. student in virology.

The graduate students want members of the bargaining unit to have the option of submitting their grievances to a neutral third party instead of going through Harvard’s internal processes, which include guidance from the university’s Title IX office and filing a complaint to the Office for Dispute Resolution.

Graduate assistants have argued that, because the dispute-resolution office’s investigators are paid by Harvard, they have a conflict of interest in handling harassment complaints. A university spokesman, Jonathan L. Swain, disputed that in a statement to The Harvard Crimson.

“We find it difficult to accept the view,” he said, “that it is impossible to find unbiased members of the university community who could review an investigation on appeal.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.