Call it academic class warfare: Graduate students across the country, tired of growing teaching duties and diminishing rewards, are turning to labor unions for support.
The graduate teaching assistants say they want more job security, better benefits and, eventually, higher wages. Administrators counter that they are students and apprentices, not employees.Only a handful of such unions exist - mostly dating from organizing efforts of the early 1970s. But labor officials say the recent recognition of a union at the University of Kansas and campaigns under way in California and Illinois are signs of a new trend.
And, students who understand how to organize in the age of e-mail are being seen as the next generation of grass-roots labor leaders.
"This is a group of young workers who are highly educated," said American Federation of Teachers organizing director Phil Kugler. "Bringing their talents, perspectives into the labor movement . . . is a big plus."
The trend in higher education has been for professors to spend more time on research, and less on classroom instruction. Universities seeking savings hire fewer fulltime professors to replace retirees.
And graduate assistants do more teaching.
"You begin to look at them like employees when you realize they're doing a sizable percentage of the instructing and they often teach for three or five years," said Perry Robinson, AFT's higher education director.
Universities, on the other hand, often argue that teaching assistants are training to be professors, so their classroom work is like an apprenticeship.
"Yale views its graduate students to be primarily students, not employees," said Gary Fryer, special assistant to Yale's president. "As part of the pedagogical experience the graduate students are asked to teach."
Some graduate instructors at Yale University this winter briefly refused to turn in grades for their undergraduate students unless the university recognized their group as a collective bargaining unit. The university refused.
Teaching assistants receive free tuition plus a stipend - up to $4,500 a semester at Yale.
"We believe the appropriate relationship between students and their faculty is not collective bargaining," Fryer said. "The normal mechanism is discussion."
Teaching assistants say their stipends aren't much to live on and note they lack job security.