Why a Graduate Student Union?
Reflections on Academic Freedom in the Research University
Michael Denning
Professor of American Studies, Yale University
To understand what is at stake with GESO, we need to ask: why are there graduate students? and why do graduate students have the right to organize themselves into a union?
Why Are There Graduate Students?
For graduate students, this is an easy question: it is necessary to get a graduate degree to pursue a career in university teaching. For everyone else -- faculty, undergraduates, administrators and staff, even one's own family -- it seems equally simple: graduate school appears to be a stage in life, a necessary if sometimes unpleasant apprenticeship.
However, this is misleading. For if one looks at the university as a whole, one quickly recognizes that graduate students are a central and permanent part of the teaching and research workforce of the modern research university.
Graduate students do much of the day-to-day undergraduate teaching in the modern university: in my experience at Yale, the majority of undergraduate teaching hours are done by 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th year graduate students. Indeed if Yale were to replace graduate student teaching with professorial teaching, the costs of instruction at Yale would skyrocket because graduate student teachers are paid so little. However, this large amount of graduate student teaching is not a bad thing. Graduate student instructors are highly qualified: recall that to be a Teaching Assistant, one must have a Master's degree in the field (or its equivalent), and to be a Part-Time Acting Instructor, you must have a M. Phil. (or its equivalent). For introductory writing and language courses, for specialized upper-level courses, and for large lecture courses which only work if they have discussion sections, it makes good sense for the university to employ teachers with the M.A. and the M.Phil.
Moreover, the majority of the research that is done at Yale is done by graduate students: if one were to look at the scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences that were written at Yale 10 years ago, the majority of them were written by Yale graduate students of the time, not by Yale faculty, in part because there are more graduate students than faculty members. I know that I have supervised more books than I have written. Insofar as the work of the university is the production of scholarly research, the graduate students are a central part of the university workforce.
Indeed, once one realizes that graduate students are a fundamental and permanent part of the teaching and research workforce of the modern research university, several curiosities about graduate "students" disappear. For example, it is not so surprising that the vast majority of graduate "students" pay no tuition, but receive full tuition "fellowships." (A curious way to run a university if they really were primarily students.) Nor is it so surprising that graduate students are required -- as an "academic requirement" -- to live in residence (in the New Haven area) even after they have completed all course work and are embarked on independent reading and research. Who would teach Yale undergraduates if all graduate students left New Haven after two years?
In fact, for more than two-thirds of their time at Yale, graduate students are not taking courses but are teaching in the university and conducting independent research, albeit under the general supervision of more senior faculty members.
Finally, if one looks at graduate students from the point of view of the university, one sees that their "temporary" status is an illusion. Though the faces change, the graduate students are a permanent and continuing part of the university workforce. Moreover, in my experience at Yale, their faces don't change much faster than any other faces; they are no more "temporary" workers than most of the rest of us. Graduate students work for Yale longer than many members of Local 34 and 35, and their time at Yale is only a year or two shorter than most assistant professors. And we all know that a graduate student is likely to outlast a Yale president or dean.
But one needn't work for a company for ten years in order to have the right to a union; indeed unions are particularly important for jobs with high turnover because new employees are far more vulnerable than long term employees who have learned the ropes. And this takes me to the second question: why a graduate student union?
Why a Graduate Student Union?
A graduate student union? Despite years of graduate student organizing and the continuing support of the Federation of University Employees for GESO, many people who work at Yale remain skeptical of a graduate student union. Graduate student concerns, we are told, are not those of a "real" union; they are not really "employees."
Even those sympathetic to the graduate students' grievances may be persuaded by the Graduate School Executive Committee who wrote that a graduate student union would "corrod[e] the collegiality, consensus, and community which we believe Yale should seek to foster....although we strongly believe that Yale should not recognize or bargain with any student organization as a trade union, we also strongly support the creation of a genuinely representative student government in the Graduate School."
Though apparently reasonable, this statement reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of Yale. Yale is fundamentally a university and a corporation, not a community; and therefore recognition of a graduate student union is a fundamental issue, touching on the freedoms of the academy and the rights of employees.
The strengths and weaknesses of the previous two Yale administrations derive from their views of Yale. President Giamatti understood Yale as a university, an association of scholars. He was respected by students and faculty for his closeness to academic concerns. But he could not see that his picture excluded the thousands of people who work at Yale who are neither teachers nor students, and whose rights were never covered under the traditions of academic freedom. He, like the Graduate School Executive Committee, mistakenly believed that a clerical and technical workers union would corrode the collegiality and community of Yale, and his intransigence led to the long and divisive strike of 1984.
President Schmidt's administration understood Yale as a corporation, and focused on issues of management, buildings and restructuring. He repeatedly maintained that Yale was not a community. The move toward "contractualizing" graduate student life came from his administration, not from graduate students. Before graduate students called for a signed contract, Dean Pollitt spoke of the newly-instituted graduate student progress reports as binding "contracts," to which students would be held if they did not make the promised progress. Though President Schmidt was eloquent on the issues of free speech, he ignored the larger issues of academic freedom.
We must see Yale as both university and corporation. And the peculiar situation of graduate students who are both students and employees is crucial because it illuminates the issues before us.
The rhetoric of community and representative student government mystifies our situation. In real communities -- the city of New Haven, for example -- we need representative governments. But we are not the town of Yale, a New England town ruled by its inhabitants. President Schmidt was perfectly right to argue that Yale is not a community in any meaningful sense.
What are the real issues? There are two bodies of freedoms and rights that are relevant to this institution: academic freedom and the rights of employees.
Academic freedom is not simply the right of free expression. Though it is not codified in any single place (the American Association of University Professors, founded in 1915, has given several formulations, and the most important recent statement is the World University Service's 1988 Lima Declaration on Academic Freedom and Autonomy of Institutions of Higher Education), academic freedom can be divided into external and internal freedoms.
The external freedoms are those that establish the autonomy of the university from the churches, states, and corporations which finance it. This includes protecting heretical or politically unpopular views, and insisting on the free publication and debate of the results of research. The complex questions raised by government and corporate grants and the turning of university research into private property are a focus of this aspect of academic freedom, and they are treated at length in the Faculty Handbook. When President Levin refused to let the donor of the Bass gift choose the faculty, he was invoking this sense of academic freedom.
The internal freedoms of the academy establish the rights and responsibilities of faculty and students, faculty and administrators, and students and administrators. These include the freedom of inquiry, research, and teaching, the freedom of students to select a course of study, the responsibility to be honest in conducting and reporting research, and the responsibility of teachers not to intimidate or harass their students. Students generally do not have the right to harrass or insult other students. Administrators may not prescribe or proscribe the kinds of faculty or student research. The freedoms of the academy also concern issues of student residence and privacy, of autonomous student organizations and autonomous student political activity.
A central freedom of the academy is the right of students to form student unions, to organize collectively to bargain with administrators about student life. Indeed the Lima Declaration on Academic Freedom notes that "All members of the academic community have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests. The unions of all sectors of the academic communities should participate in the formulation of their respective professional standards." Though we do not have a national student union in the United States, many countries around the world, including most Western European ones, have national student unions. They are not the same as trade unions, but they are often affiliated to the national trade union bodies. Student unions organize for a variety of student interests, ranging from aspects of everyday life like travel discounts and reduced-price textbooks to wider political and educational issues.
These freedoms of the academy are precisely the "academic and community standards" that the Deans have recently invoked in their letter to faculty and students: they are what make universities a major human invention, "a place," as the Deans say, "in which all of us come together to encourage and participate in the advancement of knowledge." To refuse to recognize an organized and democratic student union is a serious breach of academic freedom.
But the university is also a corporation, part of a large industry -- part public and part private -- employing many people at a variety of jobs. The limits of academic freedom lie in its imagination of the university as an association of scholars; Yale is that, but it is also a workplace. Therefore we must also consider the rights of employees in corporations. These rights are no more codified in the Bill of Rights than is academic freedom; nor are they simply the rules of labor law. They are the legacy of two centuries of struggles by workers in the factories and offices that did not exist at the time of the Bill of Rights. They include the right to form unions, the right to strike, the right to recognize the picket lines of other employees, and the rights of privacy and free speech in the workplace. These are fundamental rights in democratic societies. Indeed, the unionization of a work force is as central an indicator of a free society as a free press or free universities.
Unions, like universities, are an extraordinary human inventions; indeed they remain, with all their checkered and all-too-human history, the most democratic voluntary association in the world, more democratic than churches, universities or political parties.
To understand Yale we must reflect on both the freedoms of the academy and the rights of employees, not on some imaginary community or "student government." Indeed, a graduate student union looks weird precisely because it combines elements of both university and corporation, embodying both the academic freedom of students to form student unions and the workplace rights of employees to organize, to bargain, to come to binding contracts: all employees, not just miners and steelworkers, but teachers, clerical workers, baseball players, even graduate student teaching assistants.
GESO Recognition Week is not just about the specific grievances of Yale's graduate students, as important as those grievances are. It is the status of freedom at both Yale University and the Yale Corporation, about the rights of students and the rights of workers. In their letters to the graduate students and faculty, Deans Brodhead and Applequist remind us of our "principled commitment" to the university and ask us to uphold "academic and community standards." We ask them, as administrators of this university, for their principled commitment to uphold the freedoms of the academy and the workplace rights of employees. I hope that they, along with President Levin, will avoid the mistakes of their predecessors, and will agree to recognize the results of the April 6 election.
Michael Denning
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You may contact us by email |
This page was last updated on: November 5, 1999 |
|
Graduate Employees and Students Organization |
http://www.geso.org |
|
|
|