Graduate-Student Union Efforts Gain Momentum, Despite New Uncertainties

In his windowless fifth-floor office, amid piles of papers and lab equipment, Justin Steinfeld explains why he’s wearing a “I Voted Union Yes! Today” sticker.

There are two Columbias, says the third-year Ph.D. student in cellular, molecular, and biomedical studies. There’s the face to the outside world, with swanky donor parties and gleaming new buildings. And then there’s his reality, the one where he and colleagues put four air filters in their lab because they’re worried about air quality and where they shared their cramped space with a giant trash bin for weeks to catch a leak from the roof.

“It’s just so shameful how much they make certain parts of Columbia pristine,” says Mr. Steinfeld, “and other parts they don’t care about because they know people don’t see it.”

After he says administrators ignored his and his colleagues’ concerns about conditions in the William Black Medical Research Building, he decided to put his hope in a graduate union. He was one of an overwhelming majority of Columbia students who voted last week in support of forming a union, only the second ever at a private university and the first at an Ivy League institution.

The students had a number of concerns, including lack of dental insurance and delays in payments, but their issues essentially were all a variation of Mr. Steinfeld’s: Graduate students aren’t a university priority. A union, they hope, will force them to be. “I want graduate students to be on a level playing field with the administration,” says Evan Jewell, a classical studies Ph.D. student and union organizer. “Not in the ‘Please, sir, I want some more’ situation we currently find ourselves in.”

The Columbia vote was among the first of a series of graduate-union elections expected at private colleges across the United States this academic year. A sweeping National Labor Relations Board ruling in August, in a case involving Columbia, effectively gave teaching and research assistants at private colleges the right to form unions. Graduate students at Harvard University held a union election in November, but the final vote count has been delayed until officials sort out hundreds of ballot challenges. (A few hundred ballots were also challenged at Columbia, but they won’t be counted because there weren’t enough to change the outcome.)

Hopes and Clouds

With the blowout victory at Columbia — 1,602 to 623 — momentum appears to be on the side of union organizers. Moreover, activists have said that more grad students favor unionization since the last time they had a legal right to form unions, from 2000 to 2004. One reason, advocates argue, is that students now feel bleaker about the prospect of secure academic employment.

“It seemed tenable if you imagined, Well, I’m putting in five, six or seven years being underpaid and overworked, but after that I’m getting into a cushy tenure-track job,” says Bennett Carpenter, a third-year Ph.D. student in literature at Duke University who is helping to organize a union there. “The calculus changes somewhat when you look beyond the Ph.D. and don’t see that, or you see people cobbling together a living by teaching at several colleges.”

Despite the new momentum, the election of Donald J. Trump as president has cast a cloud over the legal landscape for graduate unionization. A labor board under a President Trump, several labor-relations experts say, would probably overturn the Columbia ruling. Because of this uncertainty, graduate activists say that they are racing to win elections and contracts that secure improvement in working conditions and protections. That was the case at Columbia.

“This may be our only chance to get a union,” Olga Brudastova, an Ph.D. student in engineering at Columbia and a union organizer, said on Thursday, the second of two days of voting.

Last week, Ms. Brudastova and other organizers fanned out across campus to answer questions about a possible union and nudge stragglers to the polls. Part of their goal was to counter points Columbia had made in opposition to a union.

The university’s provost, John H. Coatsworth, earlier this month sent a message to the campus raising questions about what unionization would cost graduate students and how it would affect their relationship with the university.

For example, he wrote that, assuming 2 percent in dues, a union would mean an annual transfer of about $2 million from members of the bargaining unit to the United Auto Workers.

“If teaching and research assistants are represented by the UAW, a new group of union representatives will be inserted into the existing conversation between student assistants and the university’s faculty and administration,” Mr. Coatsworth wrote, “and we will all be governed by a regulatory framework.”

And while most graduate students were in favor of a union, some were vocal in their opposition. Emily Moore, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, wrote in an op-ed in The Columbia Spectator this fall that graduate students already have channels to voice concerns to administrators and that a single graduate union comprised of different disciplines, professional schools, and even some undergraduates couldn’t effectively advocate for everyone. The union “claims that it’s possible to include demographic-specific circumstances in the contract,” she wrote, “but how realistic is it to account for every academic community in a single document?”

Concerns Beyond Pay

Unlike on other campuses, stipends were not a rallying point for students at Columbia. Its stipends — the portion of a graduate student’s financial package meant for living expenses — are $30,000 a year in the humanities and higher in other disciplines. That doesn’t make for easy living in New York City, but it’s relatively generous, compared to what graduate students get elsewhere.

Mr. Steinfeld, for example, feels fairly compensated. But he and other graduate students say their frustration around a general culture that devalues graduate students has built up over time. He’s not sure what change a union can bring, but “the status quo is unacceptable.”

The movement to spotlight campus sexual assault and colleges’ response to it, Mr. Steinfeld says, has made clear that “universities react to two things: the law, through the use of Title IX lawsuits with sexual assault, and through shaming. A union provides those two things. Law and shame, through a potential strike and other avenues.”

With the union vote over, it’s unclear whether Columbia will bargain with the graduate students or continue to challenge the legal right to unionize. Mr. Coatsworth, the provost, was not made available for an interview, and a university spokeswoman did not respond to questions about next steps. Private-college administrators may be waiting to decide their strategies based on what the incoming Trump administration does.

The new president could quickly fill two vacancies on the labor board, making it majority Republican and poised to overturn the Columbia ruling if a college were to bring a challenge before it. Graduate students have won and lost the right to unionize under other boards. A Clinton-era board gave them the go-ahead in 2000, but a Bush-era board took it away in 2004, in a case involving Brown University.

A college would certainly bring graduate unionization before the panel again if a Republican majority took hold, says Joseph W. Ambash, a lawyer who represented Brown in the 2004 case. This could happen in different ways. If graduate students voted in favor of a union, a college could refuse to bargain. A college could also challenge a petition to hold an election.

“It’s a fair assumption that the Republican board is going to reverse many, many decisions of the Democratic board,” Mr. Ambash says. “And it seems logical to assume that the Columbia decision is going to be one of the decisions that’s going to be reversed.”

Activists at Columbia, Duke, and elsewhere now worry that colleges will try to run out the clock until the labor board’s composition is more favorable to universities. Union supporters say they hope the lopsided nature of the vote leaves no doubt about where Columbia graduate students stand and forces administrators to negotiate.

“I hope that it will make the Columbia administration think twice about continuing to pour resources into a fight they cannot win and that only makes them look bad,” says Julie Kushner, a UAW regional director. “They’ll only look like they’re trying to crush the will of the majority. This vote makes it clear they need to come to the bargaining table without delay.”

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