Getting Organized
There is power in a union, the old labor anthem crows, and last week graduate students who teach and do research at private colleges won the right to tap that power. The National Labor Relations Board handed down a ruling that graduate students at Columbia University are employees of the institution, and therefore can organize just like steelworkers — or full-time faculty members, or adjuncts — do.
Graduate students at Columbia and other private institutions rejoiced, and several student-activist groups said they would throttle up their idling plans to form unions. (A ruling by the board in a similar case involving the New School is expected soon.) Predictably, some private institutions, advocacy groups, and even a member of the labor board itself, aren’t happy about the shift in the balance of power.
The board’s 3-to-1 ruling overturned a 2004 decision in a case involving Brown University, in which the board stated explicitly that graduate students at private universities were students foremost and thus not covered by federal labor law. The Brown ruling itself had overturned a 2000 board ruling that ushered in graduate-student unions at New York University and sparked a modest wave of organizing attempts at other private colleges.
In short, graduate-student unions at private colleges are far from a new idea. As the majority opinion in the Columbia ruling points out, medical students, a reasonable analog for graduate students, have formed unions for years with little or no demonstrable ill effect on medicine or medical education. Graduate students at many public colleges have organized without significant controversy for decades under their state labor laws. The union established at NYU in the wake of the earlier ruling and then disbanded after 2004 was revived again two years ago under an agreement with the university, and it has improved pay and working conditions for graduate students there.
You can’t tell any of that to opponents of efforts by grad students to unionize. Columbia was joined by other elite private universities in releasing statements of disagreement with the ruling. The American Council on Education called the ruling a federal overreach and a blow to student opportunity and cost containment. Perhaps most remarkable, a dissent written by Philip A. Miscimarra, the lone opposing board member, laid out a host of unpleasant effects that would “predictably follow,” including public litanies of f-bomb-laden profanity flung with impunity at professors by their student assistants.
But it’s important to remember that while there is power in a union, it’s a power balanced by the often enormous power of the institutions in question, and by the inertia of academe itself. Higher education is unlikely to transform into a worker’s paradise, or a smoking ruin, overnight.
Exeunt Chancellors
Have you been thinking lately that your reputation could be shinier than it is? That you’d like speaking engagements with fewer Rotarians and more pizzazz? Have you been wondering about bringing on a hired-gun PR firm? Well, don’t — not if you’re a college president and you want to remain one.
That appears to be one lesson from the University of California system, which in August saw two chancellors resign in quick succession.
The first resignation — that of Linda P.B. Katehi, chancellor at the Davis campus since 2009 — ended a prolonged controversy that began after campus police officers used pepper spray on students during a 2011 protest. The controversy was fueled partly by the university’s having hired public-relations firms to spruce up its online reputation, along with Ms. Katehi’s, in the aftermath of the pepper-spray incident, and also by what an investigator suggested was Ms. Katehi’s dissembling when asked about her involvement in the PR effort. The university system’s president, Janet A. Napolitano, placed Ms. Katehi on leave in April, so her decision to return to the faculty was not entirely unexpected.
But the second resignation was a surprise — that of Nicholas B. Dirks, chancellor at Berkeley for the past three years, who will also return to teaching after his replacement is found. Mr. Dirks had faced several challenges as chancellor, among them a $150-million budget shortfall, accusations that the university had not responded forcefully enough to sexual-harassment charges against professors, and complaints about a $700,000 fence built to protect the chancellor’s campus residence. The day after his resignation was announced, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the university had spent $200,000 on consultants to promote Mr. Dirks as a “key thought leader” and book him for events like TED talks and the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
Packing
As classes began at public universities in Texas last week, some students were, presumably, armed. Many students at the University of Texas at Austin were clearly equipped with sex toys.
A state law allowing people with concealed-carry permits to bring their guns into public-college buildings went into effect August 1, despite a great deal of upset from many on campus and a failed bid for a last-minute injunction filed by three faculty members at the flagship to block the law.
University Democrats, a student group, decided to protest the occasion of the law taking practical effect by distributing nearly 5,000 donated dildos to students. The event, dubbed “Cocks Not Glocks,” was intended to satirize the fact that while “campus carry” is now legal, public display of multicolored artificial phalli went against university conduct codes. “We wanted to fight absurdity with absurdity,” said Ana López, a sophomore.
Carved in Stone, or Not
Vanderbilt University is returning a 1935 donation so that it can change the name of the residence hall for which the money was given, Confederate Memorial Hall. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, which made the $50,000 gift, will be paid the current equivalent, $1.2 million, out of contributions “from anonymous donors.”
Once the inscription is removed from the pediment on its porch, the building will be known simply as Memorial Hall, which is what the university has been calling it since 2002. An earlier renaming attempt foundered when courts ruled that the name couldn’t be changed unless the gift was returned.
Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Nicholas S. Zeppos, said in statement that the old name “spoke to a past of racial segregation, slavery, and the terrible conflict over the unrealized high ideals of our nation and our university, and looms over a present that continues to struggle to end the tragic effects of racial segregation and strife.”
Meanwhile, Yale University’s president, Peter Salovey, said in an interview with the Yale Daily News that the university may reconsider its April decision not to change the name of Calhoun College. The residential college, opened in 1933, is named for an 1804 Yale graduate who was vice president of the United States and an ardent defender of slavery and states’ rights.
Mr. Salovey said that once a new Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming has set guidelines, he will consider “any request for the removal of a historical name up against those principles.” He added: “I expect that a request will come in for John C. Calhoun. And then any outcome is possible.”
Borrower Beware
Last week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau slapped Wells Fargo with $4 million in penalties after determining that the bank had “hit borrowers with illegal fees,” among other violations. Borrowers will receive refunds of just over $400,000, the agency said, while the bank will pay the government a $3.6 million fine.
The agency said Wells Fargo had “processed payments in a way that maximized fees” for borrowers, misrepresented how making partial payments could have helped borrowers, charged illegal late fees “even though consumers had made timely payments,” and failed to give credit-reporting companies accurate information about some borrowers.
“Consumers should be able to rely on their servicer to process and credit payments correctly and to provide accurate and timely information,” said Richard Cordray, the agency’s director.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
