An administrative-law judge at the National Labor Relations Board has just begun hearing a case that has important implications for graduate education at many, if not most, of the nation’s universities. The case, which involves teaching assistants at Yale University, raises the question of whether, for the first time, graduate students at a private university who teach as part of their doctoral studies should be treated as employees under the federal labor laws, with the right to organize and bargain collectively. Yale believes that they should not.
Our view is supported by the N.L.R.B.'s own position over the past two decades: that"service” performed as part of a student’s educational program differs fundamentally from employment in the work place, and that applying the law regulating labor-management relations to the educational setting would necessarily affect programs in profoundly inappropriate ways.
We agree, but the N.L.R.B. general counsel has now claimed that Yale graduate students with teaching responsibilities are employees and has charged Yale with violating their rights under federal labor law in its response to a so-called"grade strike” in the winter of 1995-96, led by graduate students who were seeking to force Yale to bargain collectively with their group. Graduate teaching assistants are students primarily, and treating them as employees would have pernicious effects not only for graduate education, but also for the education of undergraduates at universities across the country.
The defining relationship between faculty members and graduate students is the educational one that brought them together, not the relationship of employer and employee. Learning to teach is an integral part of graduate education, and Yale’s graduate school provides teaching opportunities to its graduate students for that reason. By learning to synthesize knowledge through teaching, students come to understand their own discipline more deeply. By assisting a professor in teaching a class or discussion group, they learn how to communicate their knowledge and to evaluate students’ work. More-experienced students may learn how to teach a class on their own, with appropriate supervision. Yet in doing these things, they remain primarily students.
The process that prepares graduate students to be scholars and educators is, by its nature, collegial. It depends upon intellectual rapport and scholarly interaction between students and faculty members. A relationship that begins as one between mentor and promising novice is transformed over the course of years into one of collaborative scholarship, often lasting a lifetime. Clearly, this description does not apply to the adversarial economic relationship between employer and employees upon which collective bargaining and the rules governing it are premised. Rather, it describes an evolving relationship that would be compromised and distorted by the dynamic of bargaining.
Labor negotiations about student teaching would create pressures antithetical to the philosophy that learning to teach is an important part of graduate education. We believe, for instance, that graduate students should teach as part of their education, and that students with more experience should have lower priority for teaching opportunities. The experience of the few public institutions with graduate-student unions suggests that unions would press for just the opposite -- seeking more teaching opportunities for veteran student teachers than for novice teachers. The union contract at one campus specifies that in the case of a retrenchment, more-senior graduate students are to be given priority in the distribution of teaching assignments.
Pressure could be expected, as well, for universities to provide more teaching assignments to graduate students than is desirable for the graduate students’ own studies or for the needs of undergraduate education. Defining the teaching preparation of graduate students is an inherently educational matter, which should be the responsibility of the faculty.
The experience in a few states that now have laws permitting graduate teaching assistants to bargain collectively with public universities does not reassure us. Many of those laws limit bargaining about educational issues, and most of them ban strikes by public employees. But those limitations would not apply under any federal ruling allowing graduate students at private universities to unionize. Strikes, withholding grades, disrupting class or examination schedules, and other “job actions” would undermine the education of undergraduates. They also could corrode the relationship between graduate students and the faculty members responsible for the courses taught.
One might ask whether collective bargaining about graduate students’ teaching could somehow be limited to economic concerns such as compensation and benefits. The answer is an emphatic No: The terms and conditions of teaching are integrally linked to educational matters. For example, even with state-mandated restrictions on bargaining in effect, student unions at public universities have sought to bargain over the size of classes and laboratory groups, the time spent teaching classes and seminars, the nature and number of class assignments to be graded, and the assignment of students to available teaching positions. In at least one state, negotiations have been stalled for many months over issues such as these.
Because state-mandated restrictions do not apply to private universities, it is possible that bargaining could extend to such matters as the nature of -- and standards governing -- departmental and school-wide requirements for Ph.D. programs.
Moreover, if disputes arose about the provisions of a contract, a graduate-student union would be likely to insist on arbitration. This would allow an outside party, the arbitrator, to make rulings that would affect educational and academic matters.
Private institutions must retain the freedom to carry out their academic missions based on the educational judgments of their faculties, not the decisions of a labor arbitrator or the National Labor Relations Board.
Yale’s Graduate School enrolls 2,400 students. Each year, 6,000 students apply for 450 places, mainly in doctoral programs. Yale invests heavily in its graduate students, realizing that they are the next generation of scholars and scientists. A doctoral candidate at Yale receives approximately $130,000 in tuition waivers and stipends during his or her graduate education. In fact, over 90 per cent of our graduate students pay no tuition at all. Therefore, we cannot agree, as some critics have argued, that graduate students are"exploited” as they prepare for their professional careers.
Nor can we agree that the tight job market for Ph.D.'s in some fields justifies imposing federal law upon graduate education in this country. The concerns of graduate students who fear they will be unable to find a job are understandable. We share their concerns, and we are responding to this problem by providing new programs and other support. We do not believe, however, that the solution is to turn graduate teaching responsibilities, which are an integral part of the process of preparing for a career, into a career.
We strongly believe that our academic mission would be undermined if we were forced by the federal government to negotiate the terms of our graduate students’ education with them. Such a ruling would diminish our educational system and erode our ability to maintain the highest standards of excellence in teaching and research. We value our students and our faculty members too highly to see their academic achievements and aspirations compromised in this way.
Thomas Appelquist is the dean of the Yale University Graduate School and a professor of physics.