PHILADELPHIA, May 8 — Jason Esters, who is finishing a doctorate in English at Temple University here, always considered himself a scholar. But lately he feels more like a laborer, and one with rather oppressive working conditions.
These days, he says, conversations between graduate students have been less about Chaucer and Nietzsche and more about their burdens as teaching assistants — grading papers for 40 hours a week and having trouble affording health insurance.
After a decade of prosperity for American universities, there is growing unrest on campuses as graduate students and adjunct professors focus increasingly on bread- and-butter issues and turn for help to an unlikely place: labor unions.
In recent weeks, graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Brandeis have begun unionization drives. This week, a majority of Brown University's 650 graduate teaching and research assistants petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold a formal unionization vote.
All are following in the footsteps of New York University's 1,400 graduate teaching and research assistants, who, helped by a landmark labor board decision in October, voted to join the United Automobile Workers and thus became the first students at a private university to gain union recognition.
At public universities, the unionization movement is even stronger. In April, graduate students at Temple University voted 290 to 16 to join the American Federation of Teachers. That helped spur a unionization drive among Penn State's 3,300 graduate students. And in a vote in late April, 1,500 Michigan State graduate students formed a union.
"We need a union to protect us from the university working us to death," said Mr. Esters, who receives an $11,000 annual stipend from Temple, where some graduate students teach two courses each semester. "They work us hard as students, and they work us hard as teachers. There has to be some type of balance, and that isn't recognized by the university."
University officials say that graduate students are students, not workers, and that their stipends are financial aid, not wages. They say graduate students have a good deal — stipends usually running from $11,000 to $15,000 plus a waiver on tuition, which often tops $20,000.
Many administrators also argue that teaching assistantships are not a job, but a part of the scholarly process that prepares graduate students to become professors.
The upsurge in union activity stems in large part from universities' relying less on full-time faculty members and increasingly on graduate students and adjuncts to teach undergraduates. Those changes have been part of a broader effort by universities to run themselves more like businesses, cutting back on departments or programs that do not generate much income.
But many graduate students and adjuncts say they have taken on more of the burden, and thus deserve more of the pie.
Paralleling the push by graduate students, adjunct professors in Pennsylvania, California, New York and other states are trying to form unions. In recent months, several part-time professors have begun a campaign to organize 4,000 adjuncts at New York University, while 250 adjuncts at Emerson College in Boston voted to unionize last month. Over the past two years, thousands of adjuncts at community colleges in California have also joined unions.
Administrators say graduate student unionization could hurt their institutions, asserting that one-size- fits-all labor contracts will create rigidity. One fear is that there could some day be litigation arising out of a professor's telling a teaching assistant what to do without first clearing it with the union.
"It is an interesting collision of national labor policy and national educational policy that we're seeing unfolding," said Alison Richard, the provost at Yale, where there is a decade-long campaign to unionize graduate students. "I believe that higher education risks becoming the casualty as things are now headed."
But Ed Webb, a doctoral student in political science at Penn, said many universities viewed graduate teaching assistants as a form of cheap labor, enabling them to increase their undergraduate enrollments while keeping costs down.
"If we're not working, then let the university try to run without us," Mr. Webb said. "If we're not performing a central function for the university, then what are we doing?"
Mr. Webb, who receives a $14,000 stipend, said it was hard to make ends meet because he paid $5,500 for family health insurance and $8,400 a year for rent.
In October, the National Labor Relations Board opened the door to unionization at private universities when it ruled that N.Y.U.'s graduate teaching assistants should be considered employees and had the right to unionize. The National Labor Relations Act does not cover government employees, including graduate students at public universities, but 10 states, including California, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, have given graduate students at their public universities the right to organize.
For union supporters, the labor board's decision merely recognized the changes that have swept through academia over the past three decades. One study found that in 1995, 43 percent of the nation's college faculty members were part-timers, up from 23 percent in 1970.
Robert Berne, vice president of N.Y.U. for academic affairs, said negotiating the first-ever private university contract with graduate students would not be easy. "The union said this isn't different from an automobile plant," Mr. Berne said. "I worry about trying to force an industrial model of unionism onto what is not an industrial enterprise."
N.Y.U. also faces a campaign to unionize its 4,000 adjuncts, who complain of low pay and no benefits.
Kathy Hull, a part-time philosophy professor there, estimates that the 26 students in her Social Foundations course pay N.Y.U. more than $60,000 to take her three-credit course — they each pay about $800 a credit. She says she receives just $3,000 to teach the course.
Mariusz Osminkowski, a part-time communications professor at Citrus Community College in Los Angeles County, who led a successful drive, completed in April, to unionize 400 adjuncts there, said it was unfair that part-timers received $2,200 a course compared with full-time professors, whose salaries come to more than $4,500 per course.
With adjuncts earning as little as $1,500 per course, many part-timers, who often refer to themselves as "road scholars," shuttle between three or four colleges, trying to stitch together $15,000 a semester. University administrators have not stood by. Citrus College officials removed pro-union notices from faculty mailboxes and terminated Mr. Osminkowski's teaching contract. (He was later reinstated.) Yale's Web site lobbies subtly against the unionization drive, sponsored by the hotel and restaurant employees union, while Temple sent its graduate students a strongly worded anti-union letter.
Many adjuncts and teaching assistants say a union is needed for job security, noting that administrators often surprise people by telling them that they will not be teaching next semester.
"A union contract would make things more uniform and less arbitrary," said Joanie Mazelis, a graduate student in sociology at Penn. "A union should make for good stipends, good benefits and good working conditions. Penn's reputation will go up, and it will attract great graduate students. Isn't that what the administration wants?" [end]