Judging by their unequal financial support, it’s hard to believe that Sudhir Mahadevan and Jacob Denz were both Ph.D. students in the humanities at the same university.
Mr. Mahadevan received a stipend of about $12,000 at the start of his cinema-studies program in 1999. To get by, he rented a room in a run-down Jersey City home for $300 a month, a bargain even after factoring in the refrigerator that often didn’t work. The university did not pay for Mr. Mahadevan’s health insurance, and he had to turn down research opportunities because he had no money to travel.
Here is a collection of articles from The Chronicle about recent unionization efforts by graduate students, rulings that have aided them, and how the picture may change under a new administration.
Mr. Denz, on the other hand, is among the best-paid humanities Ph.D. students anywhere. In the sixth year of his German program, he received about $37,000 last year from NYU — a stipend of about $25,000 and the rest for teaching a pair of classes to undergraduates in an unusual system where teaching duties are disconnected from fellowship packages and graduate students receive extra money at the adjunct rate for teaching. Mr. Denz’s compensation allows him to focus squarely on his studies and research, without the stress of worrying about money. The university pays for his health insurance.
The drastic improvement in graduate-student working conditions and pay, labor activists say, is “the union difference.” The years between Mr. Mahadevan’s time in the program and now have seen the rise and fall and rise again of NYU’s United Auto Workers-affiliated graduate union, the only example of a graduate collective-bargaining unit recognized by a private college.
The NYU union, which university administrators voluntarily recognized in 2013, was cited as both a success story and cautionary tale in arguments over whether graduate students at private colleges should have the right to form unions. On Tuesday the National Labor Relations Board decided that graduate students are employees, overturning a 2004 ruling involving Brown University and paving the way for graduate students at private colleges across the United States to form their own collective-bargaining units. The board majority cited NYU as an example of a successful bargaining relationship.
Columbia University, the New School, and Harvard University might hold union elections soon, a United Auto Workers official says, and several other institutions are expected to follow. As private colleges brace for unionization fights, graduate-student activists and union opponents paint wildly different portraits about what NYU’s experience means for graduate collective bargaining at private colleges.
Supporters tout the remarkable increases in financial support graduate students now enjoy, won through nearly two decades of bitter political fights, a pair of union contracts, and, when the union wasn’t officially recognized, intense organizing efforts. While union opponents say the increases might have resulted from NYU trying to compete with its peers, no one denies the role of collective bargaining in the higher pay.
Many of the nation’s top private colleges and groups like the American Council on Education, meanwhile, portray NYU’s experience as a warning about why graduate unions at private colleges are a bad idea: They taint the relationship between faculty members and their doctoral students by introducing a third party into the mix. The NYU union, its opponents also say, has tied up the university in arbitration over issues that impede academic freedom, such as who would teach a course, a member of the union or someone outside the bargaining unit.
Public-Private Divide
NYU has a storied place in the graduate-student organizing movement. In a landmark 2000 case, a Clinton-era labor board ruled NYU graduate assistants were, in fact, employees under the National Labor Relations Act, rejecting — as the labor board did again on Tuesday — the contention that “because the graduate assistants may be ‘predominantly students,’ they cannot be statutory employees.” The next year, the graduate union became the first, and only to this date, graduate collective-bargaining unit at a private college. Graduate assistants at public colleges are subject to their states’ labor laws.
The first contract won major increases for NYU’s grad students, including setting the floor for stipends at $15,000 a year. With $1,000 increases per year over the life of the four-year contract, Mr. Mahadevan finished his doctoral program in 2005 with a stipend of $19,000. “That was an unthinkable amount when I started my program,” says Mr. Mahadevan, who is now an associate professor of film studies at the University of Washington.
That year — a year after a George W. Bush-era labor board effectively struck down graduate assistants’ right to unionize, in the Brown case — NYU withdrew union recognition. Years of intensive organizing ensued.
In 2013, as the labor board appeared poised to restore the rights of graduate students to unionize in a new case involving NYU, administrators agreed to voluntarily recognize the union. As part of the agreement, the union withdrew its case from the labor board, leaving the national question to be decided by the board on another day.
That day turned out to be Tuesday. In the months before, a number of elite private colleges and powerful higher-education groups — the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities — pointed to NYU as Exhibit A for why the labor board should let the Brown ruling stand.
A brief filed on behalf of the Ivies, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that NYU’s experience “demonstrates the burdensome and disruptive effect such bargaining has on graduate education.” Universities will be tied up in lengthy arbitration disputes, the brief continues, and both arbitration and collective bargaining “have the potential to transform the collaborative model of graduate education to one of conflict and tension.” A brief filed by ACE and other higher-education groups states that graduate collective bargaining at private colleges would “intrude upon academic freedom and the relationship between university professors and their students, with implications that are both extensive and far reaching.”
A degree, the brief states, is based on academic, not labor, standards, and overturning Brown would “unsettle fundamental relationships in higher education” by changing the way universities handle financial aid, curriculum, and related matters.
But several NYU faculty members, including some who have previously opposed a graduate union, say concerns about a breakdown in faculty-graduate student relations never materialized. Senior NYU administrators did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In its ruling, the labor board stated the Brown board “failed to demonstrate that collective bargaining between a university and its employed graduate students cannot coexist successfully with student-teacher relationships, with the educational process, and with the traditional goals of higher education.”
Alarm Over Grievances
To support their case that unions are burdensome, opponents cited a series of grievances NYU had to confront during the first contract that challenged who would teach a course — a member of the collective-bargaining unit or someone outside it. The disputes worried a faculty body, the Faculty Advisory Committee on Academic Priorities, enough to recommend in 2005 that recognition of the union should be discontinued.
The committee, according to the recommendation, feared that the grievances “threatened to impede the academic decision-making authority of the faculty over such issues as: the staffing of the undergraduate curriculum; the appropriate measures of academic progress of students; the optimal design of support packages for graduate students; and the conditions and terms of fellowships (as opposed to graduate assistantships).”
The labor board’s ruling on Tuesday weighed in on the recourse for colleges that believe bargaining threatens academic freedom, noting that Congress has limited bargaining to wages, hours, and other “terms and conditions” of employment.
Further, the ruling specifically mentions the latest NYU contract, which covers 2014 to 2020, in which a “management and academic rights” clause preserves the university’s right to “exercise sole authority on all decisions involving academic matters,” including how material is taught and who does the teaching.
The debate over graduate unions at private colleges isn’t finished, but it’s hard to argue that collective bargaining hasn’t improved the lives of students. Mr. Denz, the student who received $37,000 last year, has pulled off a rare graduate-school feat: He has started to pay down his undergraduate student loans while still in his program.
“I chose to go to NYU in large part because it was attractive financially,” he says. “Everything about NYU’s experience shows how a union adds to universities.”
Mr. Denz and others point to additional improvements the union won in the latest contract, including a guarantee that if a class that a worker is scheduled to teach is canceled, NYU must appoint the student to a comparable position. This, Mr. Denz says, gives students peace of mind and makes budgeting easier, especially during the summer.
The lessons Mr. Mahadevan, the grad student who started his doctoral program in 1999, learned organizing at NYU have stuck with him. He mentors Ph.D. students of his own now at the University of Washington. His students don’t help him move books or blanch asparagus for parties, roles he says he and his colleagues performed for professors as NYU graduate students.
Mr. Mahadevan sits down with each of his Ph.D. teaching assistants at the start of each quarter and outlines their relationship. A sheet of paper specifies how many hours they’ll be working per week — no more than 20 — and how that time will be divided between teaching, grading papers, and preparing for class. He and the graduate assistant both sign the paper. This helps reduce a common complaint of graduate students everywhere: They work far more in reality than it says on paper.
Mr. Mahadevan is not alone among colleagues in providing that level of clarity to his doctoral students. It’s now an expectation. University of Washington graduate assistants are unionized.
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
Correction (8/25/2016, 4:44 p.m.): This article originally misstated the year that New York University administrators recognized the graduate union there. It was 2013, not 2001.
