NYU Grad Students Petition

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“NYU President John Sexton sent an e-mail Monday to graduate assistants stating that those who do not resume their teaching appointments by Dec. 5 would be denied stipends and eligibility for spring semester assistantships.”

I presume that is what you mean by “apalling behaviour”.

The problem is that these graduate assistants fall into a weird place between “students” and “employees”. They are attempting to receive a graduate degree from the university, but part of that attempt involves teaching classes. Unionization will tend to minimize the “student” status and student emphasis. I’m not sure that is clearly a good thing.

I agree that the quote isn’t all that appalling. But if that isn’t it I don’t know what Henery means by “appalling behaviour”. Not giving them everything they want in a contract? (I haven’t followed the issue before googling it today so for all I know there is other appalling behaviour that I couldn’t find).

It seems to me that not paying the stipend makes sense if they are just employees because they aren’t working. But if they are students endeavouring to get a degree the removal of the stipend looks like an unfair attack on their education. The problem here is that both sides want to treat these people as students when it suits them and as employees when it suits them. The putative ‘union’ wants to bargain collectively for employee rights. But they want student treatment too. The university wants to treat them as students, but they also want to suspend pay for lack of work. It is definitely an odd middle area.

“Unionization will tend to minimize the “student” status and student emphasis.”

This is just silly. Grad students who carry significant parts of a university’s teaching load don’t become employees simply because they bargain collectively; they are employees whether they’re unionized or not. The argument that because graduate students are students they thereore can’t really be employees is obviously specious (and so is the claim that grad students teach only as part of their training.) Oddly, faculty can be teachers, employees, and researchers all at once! Nor does unionization have any discernible impact on one’s academic program, relationship with advisors, etc.

Assuming it’s accurate, the Sexton quote does not threaten to withold pay stipends for work not presently being performed. Rather, it clearly threatens to withold _future_ (i.e. spring 06 semester) employment.

As such, it amounts to punishment for a labor action, and therefore certainly meets my definition of “appalling behavior”.

Though I have bitched about it on CT before, let me again repeat that the reliance on grad student teaching by U.S. colleges and universities frequently transcends anything that can be charitably considered an “apprenticeship” and has landed in an area much closer to “exploitative”.

Your quote can’t be what is referred to as ‘the appalling behavior.’ The quote just says, in essence, that the graduate students who don’t work aren’t going to get paid for their lack of work.

Yes, in other words, the TA’s who go on strike are going to get fired, and expelled in their capacity as students.

Unionization will tend to minimize the “student” status and student emphasis.

Uh, how exactly do you see this happening? In what way is it minimized, or in what way is it detracted from at all?

But if that isn’t it I don’t know what Henery means by “appalling behaviour”. Not giving them everything they want in a contract? (I haven’t followed the issue before googling it today so for all I know there is other appalling behaviour that I couldn’t find).

Boy, that’s a good excuse for ignorance. How about “refusing to bargain a contract, period”? NYU doesn’t recognize the right of the union to collectively bargain, and is now taking action against them that would not have been legal had the NLRB not withdrew the union’s legal recongition. Let me emphasize that: the pre-Bush NLRB gave them the right to unionize, but the Bush-stacked NLRB (the same body, now stacked with Bush appointees) reversed their own decision. Activist judiciary, indeed. (I realize that the NLRB is not part of the judiciary, but their role is entirely equivalent in these cases, and if you don’t like their decisions, you can appeal them to the judiciary.)

Well, as someone who was in a teaching assistant’s union while being a graduate student 22 years ago, it is a little depressing to hear the same old fuzzy thinking still going on after all this time (pauses to grumble into beer).

TA’s who are also graduate students are not “between students and employees”, they are both. They have two relationships with the university, one as a student and a second as an employee. These roles are not completely independent, but they are independent in the most important ways.

Unionizing in the role as an employee makes sense, and I see no way in which it minimizes the student emphasis. It clarifies the difference between the two and gives students a way to resist the pressure of being dragged into unrelated work and having their graduate student progress held over their head. It is too easy for cash-strapped universities to invoke some kind of apprenticeship/loyalty/intellectual development hokum as a convenient way of getting cheap teaching.

David Velleman–

Is anyone surprised that the phil. grad students aren’t supporting the strike when the dept. chair — Paul Boghossian — is a vociferous opponent of the strikes?

I teach at a (public) university where the grad student TAs are unionized. I have never had an experience that suggests that the unionized status of the grad students interferes in any way with their educations. I have never heard anyone else say so either…

But then again, we professors are unionized too here (and get a damn good benefits package because of it)… So maybe we get it in a way that some folks at NYU don’t…

No. Sexton’s letter establishes a blacklist. It says that if people don’t come back to work from the strike, they will be denied work after the strike is finished.

The University is threatening to fire its employees for not not doing their jobs?

Appalling!

Well I may have missed something in the flurry of comments on various blogs, but it seems as if Velleman and Boghossian always avoid addressing the issue raised by Henry’s post here.

In their comments they stick to the merits of the dispute, the _ius ad bellum_ as it were. But the post here isn’t about the _ius ad bellum_ but about the way the administration has conducted itself in the conflict: the _ius in bello_ .

Boghossian makes much (too much) of his liberal, Democratic and pro-labor views. Surely it is reasonable to ask about whether it is consistent to espouse such values at the same time as endorsing the tactics employed by the NYU administration? But perhaps Boghossian is embarassed by those tactics, which would explain why he fails to discuss them.

James: “these vaguely sinister explanations bubble to the surface?”

BZZZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong answer! ‘their department chair vociferously opposes the union’ does **not** equate to ‘vaguely sinister explanations’.

Sorry about the itals.

I would guess that a lot of the variation between departments is due to the obvious reasons – grad students will spend more time with people in their own departments. And if all of the students in a department strike, it’s harder for a department to fire them. If most back out at the last minute, the ones who kept going are more vulnerable.

Brandon, if they’re employees, they can legally organize.

In today’s Newsday, Gordon Lafer points out several more instances of “appalling behavior”:

1. Creating a blacklist of strike participants. (This is what Brandon so charmingly dismisses as firing people for not doing their jobs.)

2. Requiring that those who are given teaching jobs next semester promise not to participate in any future job actions. As Lafer mentions, making employment contingent on a promise not to engage in concerted actions is a “yellow dog contract” and was made illegal even before the Wagner Act. It’s unclear (at least to me) whether graduate teachers are currently covered by this prior act, and therefore whether Sexton’s requirement is illegal or merely unethical.

3. In Lafer’s words: “Sexton suggests that those who participate in strike actions but, God forbid, graduate before they can be punished, may have negative assessments attached to their university record when they apply for jobs at other schools. This type of blacklisting has not been seen since the dark days of McCarthyism.”

If that’s not appalling behavior, I’m not sure what is.

The funny thing about conversations like this and comments like Brandon’s is that they are nearly identitical–down to the rhetoric used by both sides–to arguments about unionization in the Gilded Age. It’s slightly absurd to me that we have had to have the same conversations about the rights of workers for the past 125 years. I can think of no other aspect of politics where we have progressed so little.

Brandon,

Your posts reveal a laughable ‘understanding’ (if I can call it that) of political and social life. You’re describing the employer-employee relationship (in this case, university-teacher/graduate student) as if all that mattered about it from a moral/social point of view was the fact that both side have signed a contract. Nothing else matters to you — certainly not the unequal power relations between the two sides to the contract.

No, it’s not morally okay for an organization to fire strikers — and many countries (including even the U.S., I believe) have laws about that. And the reason why it’s not okay is that the right to strike (and the right NOT to get fired while striking) is one of the only ways in which a fairer balance of power between employer and employee can be achieved. Of course, you can deny that equality of that sort is morally important. But then you’ll have to argue for it.