Pro-union protesters

In a scene suggesting nothing more dramatic than a student government election, a handful of Brown University students gathered last week around the entrance of Sharpe Refectory, a dining hall better known as "the Ratty," on a picture-perfect fall day. The sight of a few pro-union placards and a sign with the motto "At What Cost?" sparked barely a glimmer of curiosity as a passing tour group of prospective students and their parents paused for a brief description of the Ratty's fare before moving on.

Judging by the tranquil setting, a casual observer might conclude that the action inside Sharpe -- a federally supervised election to determine whether a union will represent Brown's graduate student workers -- followed the elevated kind of discourse associated with an Ivy League university. In reality, the administration's full-court-press against the organizing effort has sparked complaints that Brown's stance is at odds with its identity as a progressive institution.

During a hearing last summer before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Boston, Brown was represented by Seyfarth Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson, a Chicago-based international law firm with a record of fighting union-organizing efforts at Yale University, the University of Illinois, and companies including L.L. Bean and Caterpillar. In a landmark case involving New York University, the NLRB last year backed the right of graduate students who work as research and teaching

BROWN, continued from cover

assistants at private universities to form unions. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the NLRB's dramatic about-face, Seyfarth Shaw unsuccessfully pressed Brown's argument that graduate students are not employees for almost the entire length of the 28-day hearing.

George Nee, secretary-treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, cracks that Brown "could probably double the employees' salaries with what they paid for the law firm just for the summer." Although the NLRB in November backed the right of the Brown students to organize, the university obtained an extension to appeal the decision until Friday, December 14. Meanwhile, the votes of December 6 and 7 are impounded and they won't be counted any time soon unless Brown elects to skip the appeal. Nee characterizes the extension as a stalling tactic typical of Seyfarth Shaw, adding, "It seems as if their [Brown's] image as a liberal, progressive institution is certainly damaged by hiring a firm of this ilk."

While Beverly Ledbetter, Brown's general counsel, is known as a formidable presence, Brown spokesman Mark Nickel says the university's decision to hire outside counsel is unremarkable, and he describes Seyfarth Shaw as one of a small number of law firms that are experienced with employment law and unionization among graduate students. Noting the longstanding presence of union representation on campus among workers in security, food services, and plant operations, he disputes characterizations of Brown as anti-union. The university's reasons for opposing unionization among graduate students are, says Nickel, "very highly focused on the question of academic quality."

Support for unionization is far from unanimous among Brown's graduate students -- in part because the NLRB found only about 450 of 1300 of them eligible to vote. And in many ways, the debate is a fundamentally philosophical clash between those who view unions either as a path to progress or an obstacle to it.

Ruth J. Simmons

Lennart Erickson, spokesman for the anti-unionization group At What Cost?, says 350 Brown graduate students have signed a petition asking the administration to pursue the NLRB appeal. Erickson, a fifth-year grad student in economics, raps as undemocratic the way in which research assistants in the life sciences were excluded from the vote. Opponents also say that a union will create an antagonistic relationship with the university, and they believe graduate students would fare better by working with the administration of President Ruth J. Simmons.

For some opponents, Brown can't be too zealous in opposing the Brown Graduate Employees Organization's attempt to gain representation through the United Auto Workers. "I personally hope the university will hire the most vicious and aggressive law firm that it is able to find in pursuing this appeal," Erickson says. "I hope it will devote whatever financial resources it has at its disposal in this fight. The university is not oppressing graduate students in doing so. It is defending them."

Still, after the arrival on campus earlier this year of Simmons, who overcame poverty and prejudice to become the first black president of an Ivy League college, the intensity of Brown's opposition to the union-organizing bid caught proponents and some other observers by surprise. "I'm experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance precisely because Brown has a reputation as such a progressive and enlightened institution," says Sheyda Jahanbani, 25, a leader in the union-organizing effort, who's a teaching assistant and second-year graduate student in history.

The Ivy League would offer a prominent platform at a time when the union movement could certainly use it. Although labor's voice in politics has increased since AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney was elected in 1995, as the New York Times noted last week in reporting on the union's Las Vegas convention, union membership as a percentage of the US population has dropped since then from 14.9 percent to 13.5 percent.

Not everyone was surprised, though, by Simmons's opposition to unionization among graduate students. Ivy League institutions might embody progressive values in many respects, but graduate students TAs represent a tremendous savings from what it would cost to have tenured professors perform the same work. This could help to explain why the administration at Yale University, for example, has fiercely fought a union-organizing effort over the last five years. It's this kind of stiff resistance that leads Frank Annunziato, executive director of the American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Rhode Island, to say, "My assumption has always been that the Ivy League is going to make a last stand and not go along with this."

BROWN CITES THREE beliefs in contending that unionization isn't appropriate for its graduate students: that the students are not employees; that collective bargaining with a third party would intrude into the special relationship between faculty and grad students; and that unionization would divide the graduate students.

"The question for the university is not whether labor unions per se are good or bad," Simmons wrote in a September 7 letter to faculty and graduate students. "Rather the question is whether the unionization of graduate students at Brown is a model that might alter the kinds of relationships on which extraordinary advancements in knowledge have been based. Should the university permit an outside entity to change the relationship between the faculty and students in such a way that the production of knowledge is altered and in which the teacher becomes an employment supervisor with all that such a relationship implies?"

Although Jahanbani didn't agree with the viewpoint, she considered Simmons's letter thoughtful. But in the run-up to the NLRB-supervised election, the graduate student became increasingly struck by the vehemence of the university's opposition, particularly after learning of Seyfarth Shaw's involvement -- a detail that has gone unreported in the Providence Journal -- and following an e-mail sent to faculty by Joan Lusk, associate dean of the graduate school, in which she wrote, "Please urge your students to vote, and vote No."

Such an attempt to inject faculty members into the debate, union supporters say, flies in the face of the administration's concerns about how a union might adversely affect faculty-student relations. "In their very quest to protect this vaunted relationship, it would seem that the administration has placed it in unprecedented peril," Jahanbani and Jonathan Hagel, another graduate student who support the unionization effort, wrote in an e-mail to their peers.

Brown's active stance against unionization also came under fire from the Brown University Undergraduate Coalition for Neutrality, encompassing such groups as the College Democrats, Brown Green Party, and the International Socialist Organization, which gathered more than 700 cards calling upon the administration to remain neutral. "We believe in the basic right to organize and that it shouldn't be infringed upon," says Peter Asen, a spokesman for the coalition. "We realize that an appeal can be very costly to the university and we see it as a very divisive thing."

It's no surprise that Democrat lawmakers, including more than 30 members of the General Assembly and the state's two congressmen, US Representatives Patrick J. Kennedy and James Langevin, quickly lined up behind the organizing effort and called on Brown to adopt a position of neutrality. But some observers were stunned that Ruth Simmons, whose arrival was greeted with widespread exultation, would emerge as an opponent. "It's amazing to me that the president of Brown University, who's obviously a bona fide liberal in every manner, decided she wanted to draw the line on this," says Scott Molloy, a professor who specializes in labor history at the University of Rhode Island's Schmidt Labor Center.

Brown officials remain unapologetic. In rejecting requests to remain neutral, the administration notes that neutrality would mean bias in favor of the union's perspective. And Simmons, who has touted the importance of free speech, held a certain trump card, particularly after right-wing polemicist David Horowitz triggered division on campus last spring by placing a provocative anti-slavery reparations advertisement in the Brown Daily Herald.

"As I said during my remarks as convocation, I believe that free expression is the cornerstone of knowledge," she wrote in responding to the United Auto Workers' request for neutrality. "I told our incoming students that, `While comfort may be found in silence, truth cannot dwell there.' Not only am I committed to free expression as a principle, I believe free expression on the issue of unionization is important because of the profound effect unionization of graduate students could have on the entire community, including undergraduates and faculty members. To silence any segment of our community on such a topic would be completely contrary to everything that Brown stands for."

Then again, there are those who believe that the opposition of university officials in these kinds of cases doesn't rest solely on academic reasons. "I don't think universities are really different from most employers," says Lisa Jessup, an organizer with the United Auto Workers at New York University. "They resist because they know it's going to cost them more money."

THE ORGANIZING EFFORT by Brown's grad students can be traced to a handful of single-issue battles that have been fought in recent years. When a student group known as the Committee for Responsible and Affordable Student Health (CRASH) was able to deliver some improvements in health-care coverage, it showed that "with a little bit of activism, a little bit of unity, grad students could assert their voice," says Jahanbani. At the same time, some teaching assistants have been contending with miserly stipends and steadily growing workloads that, in some cases, represent twice the recommended ratio of students to TA.

Another aggravation came last year when Brown eliminated the access of grad students to an off-campus modem pool. Although the cost of an Internet connection might not seem like much, Jahanbani says, "When you're making $12,800 a year, an extra $30 a month adds up."

These kinds of concerns aren't restricted to Brown, of course. In fact, as the New York Times reported in 1999, the number of part-time faculty and teaching assistants who are teaching undergraduate classes increased to 47 percent by 1995, up from 22 percent in the mid-1970s. And although the trend was sparked by a need to cut costs, the practice of utilizing part-timers and TAs continued through the strong economy of the '90s.

In a similar way, graduate students "have been used and abused as inexpensive labor by the university almost wherever you go," says Malloy, the URI professor. "It might seem nice on paper that they get free tuition, a stipend, or some other recompense, but in reality, with the amount of work that they do, they really get shortchanged. They basically have very little power within the university structure to do anything about that."

Graduate students have formed unions since the '70s at almost 30 public universities, including the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, but this kind of effort was precluded at private universities because of the long-held position of the National Labor Relations Board. All this changed, however, when the NLRB ruled in November 2000 that graduate student assistants at New York University -- as well as research assistants and teaching assistants at other private universities -- had the right to unionize.

The decision, which noted how NYU's graduate assistants are paid for their work and included on the university's payroll, made sense to those grad students, like Jahanbani, who felt much like employees -- as well as students -- in their relationship with Brown. "It's not an either/or proposition," she says. "[But] if you say that we're not employees, you negate that teaching is a job." And the concept of using a representative institution to seek improvements, rather than pursuing a stream of single-issue fights, was appealing. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers, which represents 15,000 academic student workers, and is aiding organizing efforts at Harvard and Columbia, didn't hesitate to get involved.

Some observers see the unionization of graduate students as a potent way of expanding the definition of what constitutes work in this country. "They're going to come out with union consciousness and worker consciousness, and I think the trickle-down of that should be significant," says Jessup, the UAW organizer at New York University. NYU has offered improved stipends and subsidized health-care to its graduate students during ongoing contract talks and the presence of a union, she says, hasn't hurt student-faculty relations at the university. John Beckman, an NYU spokesman, didn't return calls seeking comment.

Information about the impact of graduate student unions seems largely anecdotal. The Times, in editorializing on the NLRB's decision in the NYU case, described concerns about diminished student-teacher collegiality and the faculty's control over academic affairs as overblown: "Whatever discomfort occurs will be a price worth paying for the basic right to unionize." As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a Tufts University study, which surveyed faculty at five universities, found that 90 percent said collective bargaining didn't adversely affect their ability to advise their graduate students.

It's not difficult, of course, to find grounds for criticizing particular unions. Erickson, the spokesman for the opposition group At What Cost?, cites episodes at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of California at Santa Barbara in which graduate student unions have been beset by conflict between elected student representatives and UAW officials. Generally, though, according to Malloy, the URI professor, the UAW tends to be among the most democratic unions.

Simmons, an impassioned educator who moved quickly to bring need-blind admissions to Brown, may prove to be the best ally that underpaid and overburdened graduate students could hope for. Then again, a union could also be an effective mechanism for helping graduate students to overcome their growing role as a source of cheap labor.

As Malloy says, "Unions are what you want them to be. That's what I tell my students -- it's your responsibility. If you're waiting for Godot, you're going to get what comes knocking on the door. It's like anything. You take any group, club, or organization in America. If people are involved, it tends to do well."

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: December 13 - 19, 2001