Yale Grad Students’ Fast Ends: What Did It Achieve?

A monthlong fast by Yale University graduate students advocating for a union ended Monday with mixed success: Protesters attracted plenty of national and even international attention, but the university is no closer to taking a seat at the collective-bargaining table.

Graduate students at private colleges won the right to form unions in a National Labor Relations Board ruling in August. Since then, many campuses have held union elections. Students voted overwhelmingly to unionize at some places, like Columbia University, while drives in others, like Duke University, were soundly defeated.

But some colleges, including Yale, have tied up union drives in litigation, leading to accusations by students that administrators are stalling with the hope that a newly constituted labor board under President Trump will take away the students’ right to unionize.

Those concerns sparked the fast at Yale, which had the goal of pressuring the administration to the bargaining table. Charles Decker, a fifth-year doctoral student in the political-science department, didn’t eat for two weeks as he camped out in a wooden-structure the activists made near President Peter Salovey’s office. He says the protest helped clarify to the community what was at stake, and forced the administration to pick sides in a broader struggle.

“Are they actually going to act on their stated mission of being this beacon of liberal education in this incredibly difficult political time?” Mr. Decker says. “Or are they going to wait for Donald Trump to bail them out by appointing conservative judges to the labor board and eviscerate laws that protect working people across the country? Are they going to be complicit with that?”

The protest wasn’t exactly a hunger strike, as new protesters took the place of striking students when a doctor determined it wasn’t safe for them to continue fasting. Critics, like the conservative website New Boston Post, derided the graduate students with headlines like “Yale Grad Students Conduct Hunger Strike In Between Meals.”

But despite the snarky headlines, the protest was effective in attracting attention and prominent supporters. The students received visits from several politicians and celebrities, including U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and the musician Melissa Etheridge, who dedicated “Bring Me Some Water” at a local concert to the Yale protesters. And the fast became a cause among fellow graduate-student activists and others who signed a petition in support of the students.

The protest effectively put a spotlight on labor relations on campus and for graduate students more generally, says William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. “A hunger strike can also lead to gaining support from faculty groups and other student groups from around the world,” he says. “The ultimate success would be to compel Yale to begin to collectively bargain.”

The Yale union drive is unique from others. Students there tested a novel strategy in higher education of forming unions within departments. The union, Unite Here Local 33, filed for elections in nine departments, and eight of those voted to unionize. A regional office of the labor board allowed the departmental bargaining units, but Yale is appealing the decision to the full board. The strategy, if upheld, means the university could one day manage 56 different collective-bargaining agreements with graduate students — an administrative nightmare, critics say. The strategy has been controversial even among graduate students sympathetic to collective bargaining.

Thomas Hille, a third-year Ph.D. student in mathematics, says he and many students in his department, which decided to form a union, could not vote because they weren’t currently teaching a course. That meant a small number of doctoral students, he says, decided on unionization for the department. The fast, he says, didn’t change many minds. “I doubt it’s going to change anything,” he says. “Graduate students here would be happy to be in a union. It’s just this specific union we don’t want to represent us.”

Meanwhile, to the surprise of some fasters, they became a proxy in a broader political war. While receiving plenty of support from liberal icons, conservatives blasted them. “Graduate students at Yale are paid a stipend of $30,000 a year while they get their doctorates,” said Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, adding that they also receive free health care and tuition. “In other words, it costs them nothing, and yet it’s not enough.”

Mr. Limbaugh’s theme of graduate-student entitlement was one that Yale administrators also seized on. Shortly after the fast began, the university released a statement that noted the cost of supporting a Ph.D. student for six years is nearly $375,000 after stipends, tuition, and health insurance are counted.

The university has called the union’s department-by-department strategy “questionable” and “unprecedented in higher education.” In a statement, Yale argued that declining to bargain was the only recourse it had to challenging a decision it views as “deeply flawed.”

“Yale’s request for a review is still pending,” the statement, from a university spokesman, Thomas Conroy, says. “As the NLRB process in which Yale and Local 33 are engaged is still under way, Yale has informed Local 33 that requests to engage in collective bargaining in the eight departments that voted to be represented by Local 33 are premature.”

It’s clear that the administration and union activists are no closer to a non-legal solution to the union question than they were decades ago. Even so, some of the fasters remain hopeful. Julia Powers, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in comparative literature, says the protest showed the level of support the union enjoys. “The law is on our side,” she says. “And Yale has a history of doing the right thing — but only when pressed very hard to do so. I think they’ll do the same in this case.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.