feature stories

March of the ‘Nerds’

by Michael Hirsch

Feb 16, 2006 12:29 PM

Who’s a worker at issue as NYU grad assistants strike

They call themselves “Nerds on Strike.” They’re the unionized graduate assistants at New York University, who have been engaging in job actions since August in an effort to force the school administration back to the bargaining table.

Seeing them picket the administration building under the watchful eyes of the ubiquitous union rat, there’s nothing nerdy about this new breed of union activists demanding that their well-endowed employer negotiate with the Graduate Students Organizing Committee.

The GSOC, an affiliate of United Auto Workers Local 2110, won a contract in 2002 — the first ever for graduate students at a private university in the United States — that raised stipends some 40 percent on average for the university’s teaching and research assistants while providing paid health benefits for the first time.
Strikers cheered what UFT President Randi Weingarten said at an NYU rally last month: “A union contract makes for a better classroom.”
The university does not agree. It is cutting the stipends of strikers and unilaterally imposing new working conditions on a work force it calls “students, not teachers.”

The roots of the battle reach back to a 2000 National Labor Relations Board decision against NYU that held that graduate assistants at private universities were indeed “employees” and, as such, eligible for union representation. That’s a protection many states afforded teaching and research assistants in public universities but not private schools.

A second decision in 2004 — by a National Labor Relations Board whose members were appointed largely by President George W. Bush — in favor of Brown University reversed the previous ruling, holding assistants were not workers and that universities were not legally obligated to recognize graduate unions, even existing ones. NYU withdrew from talks with the union last summer, letting the contract expire. Hundreds of graduate assistants struck Nov. 7.

Upping the ante, NYU President John Sexton warned in a Nov. 28 e-mail that those “who do not resume their duties ... will for the spring semester lose their stipend and their eligibility to teach.”
The ax came down in January. Sexton defended his move by saying he wasn’t yanking student scholarships or health insurance — although tuition fees for graduate assistants, who typically take no classes, are minimal, as are health costs, frequently, for 20-somethings, while stipends are the sole income for many.

The UAW and the American Federation of Teachers, which have organized a combined total of more than 60,000 graduate assistants nationwide, are closely monitoring the strikers’ actions.

The New York Teacher interviewed a trio of strikers: a sociologist studying gender and media issues; a medievalist specializing in Northern France; and a scholar of the Victorian novel.

These young instructors don’t teach their specializations or even run sections for their advisors — something a previous generation of scholars did in learning their trade and where the argument could better be made that they were apprentices and not workers.
Today’s graduate assistants, who form the bulk of the freshman teaching staff, lead freshman survey sections of core curriculum classes, where they teach 18-year-olds writing and research skills, write and administer exams that professors rarely see, and grade papers.

Sociologist Amy LeClair was assigned to teach “World Cultures: China,” a core interdisciplinary course on a topic about which she freely admits she knew nothing. Nor was she expected to, though her lack of knowledge came as a surprise to those Chinese nationals who were her students.

Such a regimen is typical of the work NYU graduate assistants are hired to do, strikers say. And as they do the school’s intellectual scut work for a pittance, they battle an administration that claims they are not really teachers, but students.

LeClair was one of the first to lose her stipend, ironically because she teaches actual classes and not merely sections, and the university can quantify that she isn’t meeting with those classes. It was the union contract that brought LeClair to NYU, with a generous package “that was the direct result of a generation of graduate students who came before me.” She says she won’t go back until the union contract is restored.

While also teaching core undergraduate requirements, medievalist Susan Valentine calls herself such a locked-in specialist “that I’d be hard-pressed to do anything [outside of university life] other than to teach Latin at a privileged private school. But I wouldn’t be in academia if I didn’t care about teaching. I’m on strike because I love teaching and I love my students.”

Literary scholar Joanna Holzman likes the union because “the very fact that it exists means I get my paycheck on time.” She even sees an ironic twist in efforts to break a union composed of scholars. “They’re training us for jobs they are getting rid off,” she said about efforts to replace full-time faculty with a contingent teaching staff of adjuncts.

All three strikers agreed the villain was “corporatization,” whose more-bang-for-the-buck ethos puts the lie to the university mission’s claim to be “a private university in the public service.” It certainly doesn’t align with what author Paul Goodman called a self-governing “community of scholars.”

They note how John Sexton paradoxically describes “collegial decision-making and dedication to the enterprise” as the hallmark of his “New Leadership Team.” While Sexton is himself an accomplished theologian, and the deans have solid academic, research and teaching credentials, it’s a band of corporate lawyers and career managers with whom Sexton collaborates, the strikers say.

Case in point: the school’s second-in command, Executive Vice President Jacob Lew, was President Bill Clinton’s budget director, while Chief of Staff Diane Yu is a former managing counsel at the biotechnology company Monsanto. Sexton himself is also chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an attorney.
Among the school’s trustees is Vice Chair Kenneth G. Langone, currently embroiled in an effort to defeat gubernatorial hopeful Eliot Spitzer for being too abrasive in his investigations of Wall Street. The board also hosts Richard A. Grasso, former chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and one of Spitzer’s targets; Larry Silverstein, holder of the World Trade Center lease; and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, another real estate giant and publisher of the union-bashing New York Daily News.

When Sexton was hired in 2001, it was not through an open search, something that would have involved a faculty voice, but directly by the trustees.

Sexton has his defenders, who say the UAW local was itself a source of instability by straying beyond its typical collective-bargaining mandate into issues of “academic judgment” or control. The Law School’s Derrick Bell charged in the Feb. 13 issue of The Nation that “NYU’s decision not to agree to a new contract was based on continuing union violations of the provisions of the 2001 collective bargaining agreement …” and the union’s pursuit of arbitrations “that flew in the face of its commitment” not to challenge academic judgment calls.

“What violations?” counters Valentine. While GSOC did file some 50 grievances in the first year of the contract, she said, “That is not a large number for a bargaining unit of several thousand working under a new and untested contract.” She insists that the union was a stabilizing force that attracted competent graduate students to the school.

Trying to do an end run around the union, administrators got the Graduate Student Council to call a Feb. 8 Town Hall to offer the assistants what it called “a voice.” They got an earful from both striking graduate students and those who went back to teaching, confessing they were coerced by the university into doing so.
The strikers have been successful in getting activities, including conferences and classes, held off campus. For instance, last week’s legal job fair for law school students, in which some 42 employers participated, moved off campus in support of the strikers.
Some see an ominous trend that goes beyond injustice to the striking graduate assistants. Defending the strikers, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said she feared that breaking the union meant reducing graduate financial support to a level “where only the well-off will be able to become academics.”

Added Valentine, “At least in education, the bottom line shouldn’t be your net worth.”