9 of 10 Professors Say Grad-Student Unions Don't Strain Advisor-Advisee Ties
By ALISON SCHNEIDER
University administrators have complained for years that graduate-student unions poison relations between professors and their advisees, but a new study challenges that theory.
Gordon Hewitt, an institutional research analyst at Tufts University, asked nearly 300 faculty members at five universities with collective-bargaining units whether they felt that the unions were impeding their ability to advise and educate graduate students. The survey respondents -- located at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Universities of Florida, Massachusetts at Amherst, Michigan, and Oregon -- overwhelmingly answered No.
Ninety per cent of the surveyed faculty members said collective bargaining does not inhibit their ability to advise their graduate students. And 92 per cent said that unions did not make it more difficult to instruct graduate students. When asked whether graduate students should be considered employees, rather than merely apprentices, an overwhelming majority of professors said Yes and supported the students' right to bargain collectively.
Professors did express concern about the increased labor costs caused by collective bargaining. Contracts that call for better wages for graduate students could eat into university resources that might otherwise be spent on research, some of the survey respondents said. Unions also generate more bureaucratic paperwork -- for firings and hirings, for example. That's something overworked professors worry about, respondents said.
"If you look at the response from administrators who are facing a union drive, they say, 'We can't have a collective-bargaining agreement because it will affect the educational relationship,'" said Mr. Hewitt, who completed his study as part of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But that's a "specious" argument, he added. "Educational matters aren't the problem here. It's a business and economic issue. Professors consider their relationship with graduate students a sacred trust, and they don't let a collective-bargaining agreement affect it."
Strikes can put a strain on relations between graduate students and their professors, Mr. Hewitt acknowledges, but "a strike is really a blip in the relationship. All the institutions I surveyed had strikes at one point or another. In the long run, a strike doesn't affect professors' feelings about their relationship with their graduate students."
Chris Golde, an assistant professor of educational administration at Wisconsin who worked with Mr. Hewitt on his study, agrees. "Unions help establish what you get paid. Is there health insurance? Is there child care? None of that has anything to with the relations between faculty and students," she said. "That's the business of being a university employee, not the business of being a student. As a faculty member, you probably don't worry about grievance procedures because it's probably not going to involve you."