Both Michael Gasper and Robb Willer felt powerless.
At New York University, Mr. Gasper’s stipend in his history Ph.D. program, as he recalls it, was about $8,000 a year, a meager amount to live on in New York City, even in the late 1990s. At Cornell University, Mr. Willer’s concern was a financial-support dispute during his first year as a doctoral student in sociology that clarified for him the insecurity of graduate-student life.
Both students would help lead graduate-unionization drives at their respective universities. Mr. Gasper’s, in 2000, won a narrow majority, eventually making NYU the first and only private college to recognize a graduate student collective-bargaining unit. Mr. Willer’s effort, in 2002, flopped, with Cornell students voting more than 2-to-1 against forming a union.
Both bids involved elite colleges in New York State and were affiliated with the United Auto Workers. That’s about where the similarities end. The wildly different outcomes hold lessons both for administrators and graduate-student activists as they gear up for a new round of collective-bargaining fights. The National Labor Relations Board in August deemed graduate assistants at private colleges employees with the right to unionize.
Cornell and NYU are the only two examples of graduate-union election results at private colleges recognized by the labor board. Graduate students previously had the right to collectively bargain only from 2000, when a Clinton-era labor board gave them the right, to 2004, when a Bush-era board took it away. A few other colleges held elections during that time, but those votes were impounded and ultimately never counted because of the 2004 ruling, involving Brown University.
Fourteen years later, Mr. Willer speaks wistfully about the resounding defeat he and fellow Cornell students suffered. The drive was formative in his development as a scholar. Now a professor at Stanford University, he researches political psychology and value-based motivation, areas that his young activist self would have found useful. “I wish I could live my life in reverse,” he says, “Benjamin Button style.”
He and fellow graduate students focused too much on bread-and-butter graduate-student issues, he says, like stipend levels. Knowing what he does now about what motivates people — having papers such as “The Trouble With Invisible Men: How Reputational Concerns Motivate Generosity” under his belt — he would have emphasized the ideals of collective bargaining, like the right to have a say in one’s workplace.
Compensation issues, he says, played better in New York City, where stipends were low and the cost of living was high, than in Ithaca. There, a Cornell computer-science student who led the anti-union effort made the ultimately effective argument that her $14,800 nine-month stipend was reasonable when her apartment, a walking distance from campus, cost $380 a month. “Our graduate students didn’t feel the same financial pinch that NYU graduate students felt,” Mr. Willer says. “That was a big thing. That’s a basic motivation to be in a union.”
Who’s in the Union?
Just as important, organizers from NYU say, was organization. Mr. Gasper, now an associate professor of history at Occidental College, urges activists not to rush the process of winning student support, a grueling task that requires getting to know the nuances of each academic department and building relationships. “Many of us spent longer in graduate school than we should have because of this,” says Mr. Gasper, who estimates he added about two years to his time to degree because of organizing.
Mr. Willer concedes the organizing was lackluster at Cornell, particularly in the sciences and engineering. “It hurt our drive a great deal that we went to an election before building up a really strong base of support,” he says. “Our election happened a little more than a year after we began the union drive. In retrospect that just wasn’t enough time.”
At both universities, the losing side partly blamed the composition of the bargaining unit. Cornell’s included research assistants. NYU’s did not. Research assistants, who work in labs typically in science and engineering fields, tend to be less supportive of unions than their fellow graduate teaching assistants in the humanities. That’s a result of practical factors, Mr. Willer says, like science students’ typically earning higher stipends because of better access to federal grants, and cultural reasons, like humanities students’ tending to be more liberal and immersed in the study of how society works.
Whether to include research assistants in bargaining units is a key question on activists’ minds these days as the full labor board in August, for the first time, cleared the path for research assistants to be part of graduate unions. The decision was hailed by union activists, but it could turn out to be a curse in disguise if organizers don’t ensure they have support in the sciences.
A number of public colleges — where unions are governed by state law — have successfully unionized research assistants, including the Universities of Connecticut, Oregon, and Washington. But opposition does tend to come from the labs. That was the case at Cornell, where a trio of engineering students started a website, At What Cost?, to oppose the graduate-union drive. They argued that more than 1 percent of a graduate student’s stipend would go toward union dues and that collective bargaining would hurt the relationship between graduate students and their faculty advisers. No such organized student opposition existed at NYU, allowing activists there to present a less muddied message about a struggle between graduate students and the administration.
Past Is Prologue
In fact, at the time, Cornell administrators cited a generally collaborative relationship with students, which was not the case at NYU. While several colleges challenged the legal right of graduate students to organize, Cornell focused on winning the election instead. Hunter R. Rawlings III, Cornell’s president at the time — who is now back as interim president — determined that a legal strategy would hurt the university, wrote Henrik N. Dullea, Cornell’s vice president for university relations at the time, in a Chronicle column titled, “How Cornell Beat a Union by Letting T.A.s vote.”
“Joining the litigation would have unnecessarily polarized faculty members from the start, creating unprecedented conflict with the administration,” Mr. Dullea wrote. “Rawlings decided it would be preferable to have Cornell’s actions determined within its own environment rather than linked to situations elsewhere.”
Mr. Rawlings declined to comment for this article. A message left for an NYU spokesman was not returned.
Now, Cornell is gearing up for another graduate-union election, this time affiliated with a different union, the American Federation of Teachers. Organizers are adamant that things are different this time. They are paying more attention to organizing and are emphasizing more than just compensation, such as the workplace security that a union provides to graduate assistants. Activists recently advocated, for example, on behalf of a doctoral student they say had her financial support unfairly cut off. They hope to highlight the university’s grievance process, and how a union can advocate for graduate students.
In May, the administration reached an agreement with the union that, among other issues, ensured the university would respect the outcome of a union election in the event that the labor board granted graduate students the right to form unions. The cynic may see hints of what worked in 2002 for administrators in Cornell’s current strategy, but student activists hailed the deal as “fostering a mutually respectful relationship” between the union and administration.
Mr. Willer is hopeful for the chances of the new unionization drive because activists are learning from some of the mistakes his generation made, but also, he says, because 2002 was a different time. A consciousness was just starting to develop then that tenure-track jobs were becoming scarcer and that universities were using low-paid labor like adjuncts and graduate students to increasingly cover their courses.
“People have really come to realize that you can’t just wait for fair compensation and a voice in your workplace,” Mr. Willer says. “The time to organize and give voice to your concerns about the structure of academic employment and your situation at the university is now. It’s always now.”
Whether this time really is different, and whether graduate students who have relatively robust stipends, as those at Ivy League institutions do, will support a union should be answered soon. Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities are among private institutions expected to hold elections this academic year. As for Cornell, a student organizer there, perhaps with an eye to the lessons of the past, was noncommittal about an election timeline. She said only, “We’ll file when ready.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
