Eggheads
Unite
By DANIEL DUANE
May
4, 2003 -- New York Times
Michael
Janson, a tall, well-mannered University of Pennsylvania doctoral
student, seethes about the modern university: beholden to corporate
donors, enthralled by corporate-management strategies, all too willing
to exploit the workers -- including its own graduate students -- who
make the place run. With a gracious, raised-right humility in his
brown eyes, permanent-press khakis and a fashion-free haircut, Janson
makes an unlikely radical: he looks like someone whose life will work
out fine if he just keeps showing up. But for more than two years,
Janson, a budding political scientist, has played David to the University
of ennsylvania's Goliath.
In 2001, after watching N.Y.U. teaching assistants form a trade union,
Janson and a handful of others decided to try it at Penn. Motivating
them is their perception that the corporate university exploits teaching
assistants as cheap labor in a way that -- most galling of all --
eliminates the professorships those T.A.'s are ostensibly training
to get.
University fund-raising depends primarily on high-profile faculty
publishing, so the smart money cuts the total number of professors
in order to spend big on a few stars and give them enough free time
to stay famous.
Graduate students, serving as T.A.'s and even as lecturers, pick up
the teaching slack. This makes for a great fiscal model -- tenure
produces high fixed costs, while disposable T.A.'s work for peanuts.
But it also creates an ever-greater oversupply of Ph.D.'s competing
for ever-fewer tenured jobs.
Back when graduate students could reasonably see themselves as apprentices
bound for glorious lecture halls, the low pay was tolerable, but when
T.A.-ships look like the university's way of balancing the budget
at the expense of their graduate students' futures, it feels like
an outrage.
Administrators have made the mood only worse by sending their own
salaries through the roof; Penn's president, Judith Rodin, the highest-paid
of them all, makes more than a million dollars a year if you include
other corporate-board fees. No surprise, then, that fed-up T.A.'s
like Janson are at last taking matters into their own hands.
Private universities fall under federal labor law administered by
the National Labor Relations Board, and anyone seeking to start a
union and guarantee that it will be recognized by his employer must
follow the board's guidelines. The initial step is defining the group
of employees you are trying to unionize and getting a majority of
them to sign the board's authorization cards, which would allow the
union to negotiate a contract on their behalf. At N.Y.U., the graduate-student
organizers accomplished this in 2000. But the university disputed
the claim by the T.A.'s that they were employees, and the National
Labor Relations Board held hearings before going ahead with a union
election. At those hearings, the administration argued that T.A.'s
are just students learning how to teach -- and are therefore not entitled
to collective bargaining. Virtually every elite university, facing
an expensive future, rallied to support N.Y.U., with friend-of-the-court
briefs filed by Columbia, Johns Hopkins, M.I.T., Princeton, Stanford,
Yale and many others.
Despite the heavy firepower, the National Labor Relations Board agreed
with the contention that T.A.'s are employees, doing real work for
real pay. At the subsequent union election, T.A.'s voted in a new
United Auto Workers local, which quickly scored a raise and much improved
benefits. Almost overnight, T.A.'s began organizing at Brown, Columbia,
Cornell, Tufts and, most recently, Penn. Unwilling to share N.Y.U.'s
fate, administrators at these schools are fighting back with ferocity,
producing an unseemly family feud in which Ivy League doctoral candidates
-- arguably the blessed of the earth -- claim exploitation while their
appointed guardians pay millions to sic anti-union law firms on their
own best and brightest.
Following
the example set by N.Y.U.'s grad students, Janson reached out to the
national trade unions for help in organizing at Penn. Organized labor
has been steadily losing membership since the 1970's -- making academia
a welcome market -- and both the United Auto Workers and the American
Federation of Teachers vied to negotiate on behalf of Penn's graduate
students.
After
choosing the American Federation of Teachers, Janson and his colleagues
immediately received financing and legal support. They also received
the help of a professional organizer named Rich Klimmer. A silver-haired
ex-Teamster, Klimmer has a penchant for real-world pith that acts
like a natural tonic on young scholars. (''I'll tell you,'' Klimmer
grumbles, ''I had more control over my job wrestling drums at Big
Ben Chemical than any T.A. on this campus.'') Together, Klimmer, Janson
and their newly christened Get-Up (Graduate Employees Together-University
of Pennsylvania) again followed N.Y.U. in defining their group of
union-eligible employees as all T.A.'s, except M.B.A. candidates,
and all social science and humanities research assistants.
Once
they collected a majority of pro-union signatures from the group,
Get-Up asked the National Labor Relations Board for a Penn union election.
Because the university objected to the union, a hearing was held in
January 2002, and the university's lawyers staged 28 days of testimony
arguing that T.A.'s are not employees. (The union testified for four
days.) But the labor relations board followed its own N.Y.U. precedent
and scheduled a union election for February of this year.
The A.F.L.-C.I.O. recently announced a campaign to reposition the
dying labor movement as a ''counterweight to unchecked corporate power,''
and in the days before the Penn vote, Get-Up followed the new A.F.L.-C.I.O.
script to the letter -- demanding not just more money but also the
more noble sounding ''voice in employment'' and pitching the freedom
to organize as a fundamental human right, akin to the freedoms of
speech and religion.
In the Get-Up office, bright-eyed 20-somethings surrounded by cookie
boxes, coffee cups and the beat of radical rap music, frantically
prepared for a pre-election get-out-the-vote rally, to be held outside
President Rodin's office. Janson himself was nowhere to be seen --
he was off browbeating individual T.A.'s into promising to vote pro-union.
But his presence was everywhere. ''Hey, Janson,'' someone yelled into
a telephone, ''wait, you organized this girl where? At the ballet?''
A rosy-cheeked sociologist laughingly admitted that Janson ''organized''
an education student at a recent funeral: ''He said it was O.K. She
didn't know the deceased very well.'' So dogged is Get-Up's determination
that during an afternoon of in-person cold calls, I overheard one
female grad student tell the union crew, ''You know, you're like the
third group that's visited in five days, and I don't even know any
of you, so I'm getting kind of freaked out.''
Chuckling and bashful, that rosy-cheeked sociologist admitted, ''Yeah,
it is kind of like a cult.''A few days before the election, walking
around the Penn campus feels like moving back through the growth rings
of an ancient tree, passing first Sansom Common, a new corporate-partner
development that includes a Barnes & Noble Penn bookstore and
a DoubleTree Penn hotel. The next ring records a simpler age of industry-education
alliance, the midcentury Modernist box of the Annenberg School for
Communication. After that comes the first ring old enough to merit
the Colonial Williamsburg treatment, with date-of-construction signs
on classic old fraternities. Penn's symbolic center, where Get-Up
will hold its get-out-the-vote rally, is College Hall, the 19th-century
Victorian masterpiece housing Rodin's wood-paneled office.
Brought in by the trustees in 1994 in part to trim the staff, Rodin
infuriated Philadelphia's working class by appointing the management
consultants Coopers & Lybrand and eliminating more than 3,500
positions -- breaking a decades-old union in one instance, simply
by moving the Penn Faculty Club across the street to the new DoubleTree
hotel. In addition, she appointed a Coopers & Lybrand employee
as her executive vice president and publicly referred to herself as
Penn's C.E.O., making her the perfect windmill for the tiltings of
anxious graduate students.
With contemporary art on her walls and her hair expertly frosted,
Rodin offers an absolute stonewall to every pro-union claim. The corporatization
of the university is ''completely spurious,'' she says. ''It's obviously
a great rallying point. 'They're so corporate!' Or, 'She's so corporate!'
And we are the largest private employer in Philadelphia, but we don't
sell soda. We provide a terrific education.'' Rodin also offers the
unusual opinion that ''there is no crisis in doctoral education,''
suggesting instead that the recession is simply squeezing the national
employment picture. Doesn't Penn rely economically on the T.A.'s who
teach, by union easures, about 70 percent of Penn's undergraduate
instruction time? ''Absolutely not.''
Rodin's objections to the union, she insists, are not economic at
all, but academic -- what if professors have to negotiate educational
matters with labor representatives? And even emotional -- what if
unions damage campus collegiality? ''We don't think our students are
our employees,'' she says. ''We think they're our protegees. We think
we're nurturing and nourishing them, and the first time a student
files a union grievance against a faculty member, it will transform
that relationship forever.'' She glosses over, of course, the fact
that at public universities that have long had T.A. unions there is
little evidence of this happening.
Rodin's anti-union major domo and deputy provost, Peter Conn, who
looks as if he loves to eat, loves to argue and gets most of his exercise
gesticulating, is considerably more worried about graduate-student
malaise.
As for why those students continue to be so outraged upon finding
that the bad job data apply to them too, well: ''The way they hear
'chances are one in five' is: 'I'm one. I'm terrific!' And they are
terrific! You could probably open every Coke can in the building with
the Phi Beta Kappa keys some of these people carry.'' Conn also, however,
offers a compelling counterargument to the T.A.'s. At a cherry-wood
table beneath dusty old oil portraits, Conn points out that like all
private universities, Penn gives Ph.D. students free health care and
tuition and even a monthly stipend. Penn assumes this burden to fulfill
its core mission, producing the next generation of professors. Conn
says: ''I've told Janson that what keeps me up at night is not the
union. It's Princeton. Princeton provides students with better financial
support than anybody. Princeton has a lot more money, and it worries
me. Harvard has a lot more money. Yale has a bit more money.
It's a little deceptive. They don't have as much more money as you
think.'' A result of trying to keep up, Conn explains, is that Penn
now offers Ph.D. candidates five-year financing packages that require
only two years of teaching, an investment that will cost $125,000
per student, if the waived tuition is counted as income. ''Add all
this up,'' Conn says, ''and we're paying $145 an hour for the teaching
required. Now that's a good job.''
Janson will point out that these five-year plans were enacted well
after he started organizing, that they are a neat new way of decoupling
pay from teaching -- making it easier to argue that these are just
apprenticeships -- and that nobody pays to get an academic Ph.D. because
the return on investment stinks even when they're paying you. Janson
also calls tuition waivers ''imaginary funds,'' and this sends Conn
into near-hysteria.
''There's no Monopoly money here!'' Conn sputters. ''Every tuition-waiver
dollar is an actual American dollar in my budget! This drives me nuts!
Go ask medical or law students who's picking up their $27,000. They
are. What you've got here is a group of students being paid to get
doctorates! It's so preposterous that, I'm sorry'' -- he glances at
his press secretary -- ''she's going to be very angry at me, but it's
like looking in a fun-house mirror!
''And you'll hear this, too.'' With a revolutionary's tone, perhaps
mimicking Janson, Conn says: '''I want a voice. I want a voice!' And
I say, 'O.K., let's take a typical graduate program. They're going
to make a new hire. That person comes to give a job talk. Who's invited?
Faculty and graduate students. That's a voice. The new graduate-student
center cost over a million bucks. Why did we do it? Because the --
not unionized! -- graduate students said they needed it. I've been
a graduate student myself. I lived in a garage! What more do you want?
No, I think unionization is a marker for legitimate concerns about
the larger health of Ph.D. education, and there is also this conception
that unions are somehow ennobling, but to take that to the conclusion
that an Ivy League graduate student researching Edmund Spenser is
to be identified with a sanitation worker makes no sense.
''In
fighting Get-Up, Penn has employed an anti-union strategy appearing
across the Ivy League. It surfaced in a memo to Cornell by the law
firm that later represented N.Y.U. and Columbia, and then in a series
of talks given by a University of Iowa dean discussing his anti-union
experience. At the initial National Labor Relations Board hearings,
which are typically held before a regional board officer, this mostly
means beating the old dog about T.A.'s not being employees. Once the
local board officer follows the N.Y.U. precedent and rejects your
plea, the next move is the one N.Y.U. failed to make, appealing the
decision to the full five-member National Labor Relations Board in
Washington. Brown, Columbia, Tufts and now Penn have all embraced
this tactic, finding it especially attractive because, though it allows
the elections to proceed, it requires the board to impound the votes,
uncounted, until all the appeals can be heard -- thus delaying the
results indefinitely. This can be particularly devastating to the
momentum of graduate-student movements, their members constantly graduating
and moving on with their lives.
To fight these delaying tactics, Get-Up has employed a strategy used
with success by the United Auto Workers against DaimlerChrysler. Organizers
have asked potential members, in advance of the election, to sign
a petition declaring their support. The hope is to show that a strong
majority of students want a union so that Penn will feel compelled
to drop the appeal and allow the vote count to go forward. (At Yale,
grad students are trying to achieve the same goal but are taking a
different course. They are circumventing the National Labor Relations
Board by holding a nonbinding union election under the auspices of
the League of Women Voters, with the hope that they can pressure Yale
into negotiating with them.)
Thus, in the weeks before the election, Get-Up's organizing has involved
not just begging for votes but also for these petition signatures.
Meanwhile, Rodin has counterattacked with tens of thousands of fliers
making such arguments as the fact that recent health coverage increases
-- enacted since Get-Up got up -- might not have been possible under
a union, and that unionized graduate students make less money than
nonunionized graduate students. (Even Conn acknowledges this last
as a howler, given that until recently the only unionized graduate
students were at underfinanced public schools.) Most insidious, of
course, is the not-so-hidden message behind warnings of a loss of
''collegiality'': if you think your job prospects are miserable now,
wait until you join that union and fall out of favor with your faculty
adviser.
Conn called the pro-union impulse a ''marker'' for something else,
and he is right, because T.A. unions can't get grad students the professorships
they really want. But the anti-union arguments are markers, too, for
an affection for the status quo and a lack of the moral leadership
needed to drag higher education out of its mess. Concerned bodies
like the Carnegie and Woodrow Wilson Foundations have suggested remedies
like cutting graduate admissions, creating a new class of full-time
university teachers and even changing the nature of the Ph.D., but
there's no central authority to make it happen, and university self-interest
runs the other way.
At the rally a few days before the election, Janson takes the bullhorn
in front of College Hall, within sight of the stacked red letters
of the classic 1960's ''LOVE'' sculpture. Looking dignified in a pressed
shirt and yellow tie, in contrast to his shabby-chic friends, Janson
focuses the small crowd's attention: in a moment, he says, he will
reveal the results of Get-Up's petition drive, the attempt to get
people to declare union support before their votes are impounded at
the election two days later. But first Janson wants to say a few words:
''I am honored,'' he begins, in a sincere and booming voice, ''to
be out here with all of you in the cold while the highest-paid administration
in the country sits inside in the warmth, with nobody to comfort them
but their anti-union lawyers.'' Janson goes on to give a rousing speech,
saying, ''It has become clear that we stand for an idea established
in these United States over 70 years ago, and in the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights, that every employee has the right to
vote for a union of their choosing.'' Then, with a great sense of
moment, Janson declares that through the petition drive, Get-Up can
show a clear majority intending to vote pro-union. Turning to College
Hall, he calls out: ''So, I say to you, C.E.O. Rodin and Peter Conn,
if you really care so much about collegiality, open your door to us
and drop this appeal. Because we're going to win this election.''
The crowd erupts into cheers, but the only person opening College
Hall's door is a stout, gumshoed police officer chatting with the
building's guard. And over the next week, as the election goes forward
and the uncounted votes are indeed impounded, it becomes clear that
the university has no interest in retracting its appeal. For its purposes,
the longer things remain in limbo, the better -- and the National
Labor Relations Board gives no indication when it may decide the issue.
Further frustrating to the students is that President Bush took advantage
of a Senate recess last year to shoehorn in three strong anti-labor
appointees to the board. It is possible that the board will decide
to overturn the N.Y.U. precedent and assert what administrators have
contended all along: that T.A.'s are not employees after all but professors-in-training
with no need for a union. If there were professorships to be had,
all those T.A.'s would, doubtless, be delighted to see it the same
way.
Daniel
Duane is the author of ''A Mouth Like Yours,'' a novel to be
published next year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
May
4, 2003 -- New York Times