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76 NYU Arrests

Jill

I dropped by this protest yesterday, and it was pretty rad. I love NYU, but their administration is the most bureaucratic, difficult, business-minded entity I’ve ever dealt with in my life. They’re union-busters, plain and simple. They don’t treat their grad students — who teach many undergraduate courses — with the respect that they deserve. There are a variety of issues at play here, but one is that the NYU administration is basing its position on a Bush-appointed panel, which has said that grad students have no right to unionize because they are students, not teachers. During the Clinton years, the Clinton-appointed panel (and I can’t remember the name, but I’ll put it in when I do) ruled that grad student TA’s are both students and university employees (i.e., teachers), and therefore deserve the same right to unionize as other employees. It’s pretty clear to me that grad students, when teaching a class, are teachers.

If you’re an NYU student, support your TAs. They deserve the right to unionize, and they deserve a fair contract, now.

7 thoughts on 76 NYU Arrests

  1. When the Columbia grad students struck last year there was a depressing amount of apathy around (especially in the engineering school where I was). You guys seem like you’re having better luck, here’s hoping NYU knuckles under and negotiates a contract.

  3. Amen, sister! TAs are undeniably teachers. In fact, the title “Teaching Assistant” is misleading. I used to be a TA myself (not at NYU, though — at the University of Georgia), and let me tell you, I wasn’t “assisting” anybody. I wrote the syllabus, I graded the papers, I ran the class everyday. Nobody was in the classroom with me. I was the professor.

    If that doesn’t qualify as a university employee, what does?

  4. Question: if unionized grad students strike, can that in any way impact their student status such as loans, tuition deferments, etc.?

    As I also recall, one of their demands was healthcare (and perhaps a pension and ability to gain tenure, but I’m not sure). Is there any other parttime employee that receives this? I’m not aware of any.

  5. At Yale and other ginormous schools, GESO is asking for tuition waivers and loan forgiveness (among other things). Tuition is a paltry portion of Yale’s funding, and different grad programs pay different amounts of tuition depending on their individual endowments, so it does seem kind of petty to keep it going…

    Please note that I did not attend Yale (Public school all the way) but simply know some stuff about it…

  6. I’ve seen a lot of interesting college-employee-related attempts to unionize. My last year in college, the resident assistants tried to unionize, which led to a bunch of arrests (the RAs kept storming the administration building) but also a lot of bad press for the University, so they were eventually allowed to form a union (after being denied twice). Conversely, the food service employees at my brother’s college were talking about unionizing, and then some students caught wind of it and started protesting… in that case, the food service workers were not particularly favorable of being a union, as many of them would not have been able to pay the union dues. It was interesting to me that the students and not the workers got involved in that movement, though.

  7. The body is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB is a five member panel to which the party that controlls the executive branch appoints three members and the other party two. The 2001 NLRB precident establishing the right of the grad student employees at private universities to unionize was overturned in a 3-2 party line vote by the Bush NLRB last year.

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