University administrators don’t view Tania Aparicio as an employee, but she feels like one.
The sociology Ph.D. student at the New School teaches two undergraduate courses, holds office hours, answers students’ emails, and performs research unrelated to her dissertation for professors.
“When I had an issue with my pay stub,” Ms. Aparicio says, “I was referred to human resources and payroll. I wasn’t referred to my adviser or my dean, because I’m an employee, and those are my wages.”
To Ms. Aparicio’s frustration, however, she and other graduate assistants at the New School are not seen as employees and do not have a legal right to collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions.
That may change soon. Last month the National Labor Relations Board said it would review a bid by New School graduate students to unionize, a move that could reshape how graduate students are viewed at private colleges nationwide.
A 2004 ruling by the board involving Brown University found that graduate students at private colleges can’t unionize because their relationship with universities is primarily academic, not economic. (Unionization at public colleges, meanwhile, is governed by state law.) In taking the case, the labor board is signaling a willingness — and many labor experts say a likelihood — to overturn the Brown ruling.
The review of the New School case comes as graduate students at several other private universities like Yale, Harvard, and Columbia are seeking to unionize, fueled by hope that the Brown ruling will fall, and by the example of New York University, which in 2013 became the only private college to voluntarily recognize a graduate-student union.
Like students on other campuses, those at the New School say their frustrations grew over time, slowly boiling to the point where they decided to form a union and then take their case to the labor board. Yet Ms. Aparicio and others also say their situation stands out as something of a perfect storm of graduate-student woes in part because the New School offers relatively low financial support despite being located in an expensive city like New York.
In taking the case, the labor board is signaling a willingness -- many say a likelihood -- to overturn the Brown ruling.
Top administrators at the college acknowledge the hardships for the graduate students, but university lawyers argue that the money graduate assistants receive is actually financial aid, not pay. Moreover, according to legal briefs filed by the university, the purpose of these positions “is to assist students, and not create employment opportunities.”
‘We Felt Powerless’
Ms. Aparicio says she lives frugally. She lives close to campus to save on commuting costs, in a rent-stabilized Chinatown walk-up that she shares with three roommates. Some weeks during her graduate program, she says, her food budget was tiny and she ate just one meal a day.
These days, she counts herself among the lucky students who have on-campus academic jobs. When she started at the New School as a master’s student in 2012, however, she worked at one time or another as a babysitter, a graphic designer, a researcher for a human-rights group, and a production assistant for commercials.
Even so, Ms. Aparicio has accrued more than $80,000 in debt to finance her graduate studies, and she’s not alone. About a third of the people who completed a Ph.D. at the New School from 2004 to 2013, the most recent period for which data are available, reported accruing more than $50,000 in debt during graduate school, an unusually high rate, according to federal data.
Moreover, many report difficult working conditions. Ms. Aparicio, for example, didn’t know she would have classes to teach until a week before they began this semester, making financial planning uncertain. “There’s no way for us to know how we’re going to make a living,” she says, “or whether we should take a year off or a leave of absence because it’s not going to be possible to do both school and work outside the university.”
Students say they have been raising these concerns to administrators for years. Oliver Picek, a fifth-year economics Ph.D. student, recalls being particularly frustrated in a town-hall meeting with President David E. Van Zandt in 2012. Mr. Picek, who earned about $16,000 that year teaching four courses, and other Ph.D. students wanted to know why financial support was so paltry. The response, he says, was vague and unsatisfying. “No one would take any responsibility for our situation,” Mr. Picek says. “We felt powerless.”
Afterward, over drinks with a fellow dejected student, he floated the idea of a union. In the days that followed, he learned others were thinking the same. Last fall Mr. Picek, now a union organizer, and others collected signatures supporting a United Auto Workers collective-bargaining unit from more than 70 percent of the 350 or so graduate teaching and research assistants who would be part of the unit. The New School has about 3,500 graduate students.
Armed with the support of a majority of graduate assistants, the graduate students asked the university to recognize the union in December. When they did not receive recognition, they filed their petition with the labor board.
In an interview, Mr. Van Zandt, who became president in 2011, said he was sympathetic to the students’ concerns and that he was “sort of astounded” at the financial challenges faced by the students when he first heard them.
He said, however, that the New School doesn’t have the resources of a traditional research university. With a relatively small endowment of about $300 million, the university depends on tuition and fees for about 90 percent of its budget. While most colleges “fully fund” their doctoral students, meaning they cover tuition and offer a stipend for living expenses, most New School Ph.D. students pay at least some tuition, and stipends often don’t cover the cost of living in New York. In exchange for a stipend, graduate students at the New School often hold teaching and research assistantships. A teaching assistantship, which is the most common, is supposed to require 10 hours of work a week and provides $4,228 per course.
Recently, the university began fully funding a small number of Ph.D. students, 36, and Mr. Van Zandt says his goal is to increase that support, though he said it was too soon to offer specifics.
When asked to make the case that graduate assistants aren’t employees, Mr. Van Zandt said, “It’s not really relevant to me what we call them. I’m focused on the best way to support them going forward as opposed to what the lawyers might say at the NLRB.”
‘Ping-Pong Jurisprudence’
The New School graduate students aren’t the only ones taking aim at the 2004 Brown ruling. A petition filed by Columbia graduate students may also be taken up by the labor board.
While the New School students’ petition takes direct aim at the Brown ruling, it also makes the case that New School graduate assistants are different than those at most other universities. For example, students at the New School can earn their doctorates without ever being a teaching or research assistant, showing that those duties are disconnected from their educational experience.
If the board does rule in favor of the New School, it doesn’t mean the debate is over.
Daniel V. Johns, a higher-education labor lawyer with Ballard Spahr, calls the labor board’s views on how graduate assistants fit into universities “ping-pong jurisprudence,” the result of its members’ being politically appointed by the president.
Graduate students at private colleges “didn’t have the right to organize under the pre-Clinton board,” he says. “They did under a Clinton board. That goes back the other way under a Bush board. Now it may go back the other way under an Obama board. There’s no reason to believe that might be any different should the White House go Republican.”
Even so, a labor-board win for the New School students would probably provide immediate collective-bargaining power to the students. And even if the political wind changes, says Mr. Picek, the New School union organizer, contracts often last several years.
What’s more, while the ability to form a union is important, to New School students like Zoe Carey it’s really about changing the campus culture to prioritize graduate-student needs. The challenges they face, says Ms. Carey, a Ph.D. student in sociology, show a larger problem with higher education. “There’s really no alternative to either accruing exorbitant student loans or working while you’re also studying,” she says. “We’re no longer exclusively students. We’re students and workers.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
