Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 16:55:18 EST From: George Rupp <rupp at CUVMC.AIS.COLUMBIA.EDU> Reply-To: cu-response at columbia.edu To: Columbia Community <colucomm at CUVMC.AIS.COLUMBIA.EDU> Subject: Student Unionization
Dear Fellow Columbians:
Next month, we will have an election at Columbia on whether or not the United Auto Workers will represent our teaching and research assistants. The dates of the election are still to be determined by the Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board. Whenever it occurs, its outcome will have a significant influence on the future of both our graduate and our undergraduate programs. It is, therefore, a crucial choice for our University.
While a small number of undergraduates who serve as teaching assistants will be entitled to vote, the overwhelming majority of the electorate will be drawn from the ranks of our graduate students. Those of you who are eligible to vote have an opportunity to decide if you wish to be members of a student body, part of which is also organized as a union. You also have a responsibility to serve as the voice of other current students who are ineligible to vote and to represent the interests of those students who will attend Columbia after you. I therefore urge you to familiarize yourself with the issues raised by the UAW's petition, to participate actively in the discussions that will take place in the next four weeks, and to vote. Beyond encouraging you to go to the polls, I urge you to vote against creating a union.
Unions play a valued role at our University. Over my nine years as President, we have maintained a productive working partnership with 14 bargaining units that represent various subsets of our employees. With these groups, collective bargaining has been positive for both sides because the relationship of their members to Columbia is that of employees to management. From a recognition of the constructive roles that unions can play, it does not, however, follow that our teaching and research assistants, who are first and foremost students and whose work in the classroom and the lab is an integral part of their educational programs, should be unionized. By its very nature, collective bargaining seeks to standardize terms of employment between employer and employee. Graduate education, by contrast, involves a mentoring relationship between faculty and students that necessarily varies across disciplines and with the changing needs of the students as they progress in their studies. The role of teaching and research in a student's graduate education and the form it takes vary for those reasons as well. A union would reduce the flexibility that faculty advisors and students currently have to structure teaching and research assignments to meet individual educational needs. It could also hurt other aspects of graduate training, by changing the nature of the relationship between advisors and students and by involving a union in educational and academic decisions.
A union could potentially be no less problematic for the educational programs in which graduate students teach and the research projects through which they learn the craft of being scholars and scientists. It is very difficult to draw a sharp line between issues that are typically subject to collective bargaining and academic questions. As the experience of other universities shows, unions -- the UAW in particular -- tend to make demands that are academic in nature, even when they have promised that they will not bargain over academic matters. In addition, unions have engaged in strikes and other job actions at other universities across the country, even where they are barred from doing so by state laws, that have disrupted the normal academic life of those institutions.
A union could compromise the ability of graduate students to make important educational decisions by shifting responsibility for deciding what is best to professional union agents who are unfamiliar with our University. The changing composition of the union's proposed membership itself makes this outcome likely since students would move in and out of the union from one semester to another, depending on whether they have appointments as teaching or research assistants. In addition, the UAW has shown itself not to trust students to direct their own negotiations. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for example, the UAW assigned one of its officials to run the local in place of its elected leaders after its student members voted to establish an independent local. Similarly, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the students on the bargaining team for the last contract resigned on the grounds that they were being excluded from the negotiations.
The shifting composition of the bargaining unit will most immediately affect who will participate in the upcoming election. Only students who have an instructional or research appointment this semester will have the right to vote. This group includes approximately 15 percent of all of our graduate students. Among the other 85 percent are many who will serve as teaching and research assistants in the future. The fact that so small a proportion of those affected is entitled to vote offers further evidence that the standard industrial model of union-employer relations makes little sense for our teaching and research assistants.
A vote against the union will give our incoming president Lee Bollinger the flexibility he will need to build upon the substantial progress we have made in strengthening graduate education at Columbia. During my presidency, we have materially improved the support we provide to graduate students as well as the caliber of the instruction they receive. We have provided full funding for most doctoral students in the sciences for decades regardless of whether they are teaching or participating in externally funded research. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has now developed five-year packages of full support for all incoming students in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We have increased graduate stipends at an accelerated rate over the past few years, significantly expanded our supply of housing for graduate students, improved the health coverage they receive, enhanced services, and addressed many quality-of-life issues to make Columbia a more hospitable place to study and live.
We have made these improvements without a union. The support we already give to our graduate students exceeds anything unions have managed to win at other universities. At NYU, for example, the UAW's new contract brings the salaries of its members up to the level of the stipends of incoming GSAS students. But the NYU contract includes summer funding only for students if they are teaching, whereas many students in the sciences are fully funded every summer and many in other disciplines in GSAS receive two summers of fellowship without teaching or serving as a research assistant. In addition, the NYU contract contains no provisions on housing, while our students have access to housing at highly favorable rents; and its health provisions are less generous than those we offer, in particular with respect to family coverage.
There is still more that can be done. I fully expect that Columbia will continue to improve both the quality of education and the support provided to meet the intense competition we face from other research universities for the very best graduate students. The importance of graduate education and research to Columbia provides far better assurances than a union that we will continue to invest in this area. In fact, a union could reduce our ability to make further enhancements in response to competitive pressures from other universities or to rethink how we prepare our students for their chosen careers.
The upcoming election campaign will be a significant event in the life of our graduate programs. I hope that those of you entitled to vote will be fully engaged in this issue. Read the materials prepared by those who favor and oppose a union, ask questions, and play an active role in the discussions that will take place. Reach a reasoned assessment of the implications of a union and think carefully about the legacy you will be leaving to those who will come after you. And when the days designated for the election come, vote to keep our University free of the unwelcome consequences a union could have for our graduate programs and, therefore, for all Columbians.
Sincerely,
George Rupp