Professors and graduate students must navigate all kinds of tricky topics in their relationships. Dissertation deadlines, Ph.D. career paths, and the occasional lapse in research ethics are just a few examples.
Now add to that list graduate-student unionization.
Or at least that’s what Harvard administrators think.
This month the university published a two-page “guide for discussion” to help faculty members talk with graduate students about unionizing. Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences created the discussion guide after fielding inquiries from faculty members about a push by Harvard graduate students to establish ties with the United Auto Workers union.
The document lists 15 dos and don’ts, many of which seem like common sense: Don’t spy on union meetings. Don’t threaten students for supporting a union. Don’t interrogate students about union activity.
Yet the fact that Harvard felt the need to write such a guide is a sign of how much the unionization of graduate students is a growing issue, even though it exists at only one private university. And the guidelines do point to the tough spot faculty members can be in when stuck between administrators and students in this debate.
‘We need to be particularly careful to make sure that the expression of all different kinds of ideas are welcome around a topic that has been polarizing at other institutions.’
Some professors have viewed certain suggestions with skepticism: Do explain the downside of unionization, for example, and do correct misleading union statements. They note that there’s no “do” that says, Do explain the upside of unionization, and that the guide assumes that all faculty members are opposed to graduate-student unions.
“We have a university dedicated to the free exchange of ideas,” says Alison Frank Johnson, director of graduate studies in Harvard’s history department. “We need to be particularly careful to make sure that the expression of all different kinds of ideas are welcome around a topic that has been polarizing at other institutions.”
Others say faculty members shouldn’t play a role in the collective-bargaining debate at all. “Faculty speech is disproportionately powerful — in our advising, in our teaching, in our supervision of graduate students,” says Kirsten A. Weld, an assistant professor of history at Harvard. “That’s why we as faculty members need to observe a policy of neutrality.”
Faculty as Management?
To one outside observer, the guide is about enlisting the faculty in the university’s effort to defeat unionization. Harvard, writes Corey Robin, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is “treating the faculty as if they are management, as if they are the enforcers of the administration’s policies. In the same way that the moguls of General Motors or Hyatt or Amazon instruct their front-line managers in how to talk to workers — often using the same kind of boilerplate that Harvard is using here — so is Harvard training its managers in how to talk to the workers there.”
Harvard administrators, however, say the guide is meant to help facilitate a better conversation about the issues. A letter accompanying the guide, obtained by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, from Xiao-Li Meng, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, says “there must be a full and open conversation on unionization” that explains “the facts on the generous financial aid, tuition, stipend, housing, health-care benefits, and other support and services that are already provided to graduate students.”
‘We are asking for a voice, and it sounds like we are being heard.’
Some graduate students have praised the guidelines as a step forward by administrators. “We are glad they are talking about open discussions between students and faculty because that is what we are asking for,” John M. Nicoludis, a graduate student in the chemistry department, told the Crimson. “We are asking for a voice, and it sounds like we are being heard.”
The guide was sent out as graduate students are trying to form unions to improve pay and working conditions at several elite private universities, including Columbia, Cornell, and Yale Universities and the University of Chicago.
A 2004 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board concerning a case at Brown University states that graduate assistants, who receive a stipend and other benefits for teaching and conducting research, do not have a right to unionize at private universities and are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act because their relationship with the university is primarily academic.
But a pair of cases pending before the labor board, involving Columbia University and the New School, have infused pro-union activists on campuses with hope that the Brown ruling will be reconsidered.
Moreover, the 2004 ruling doesn’t prohibit private universities from voluntarily recognizing a graduate-student union, and students are looking to the example of New York University, where graduate students voted overwhelmingly in 2013 to form a bargaining unit after the university, worn down by years of organizing efforts, agreed to remain neutral in a vote. NYU is the only private university to recognize a graduate-student union.
Despite the new guidelines, don’t expect Harvard to be the second. While the administration says it hopes to start a broader conversation, it remains steadfast in opposing a graduate-student union.
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
