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Jewish World Review Feb. 7, 2001 / 14 Shevat, 5761

Bill Schackner

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Consumer Reports


Grad students of the world unite!?

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- STATE COLLEGE, Pa. | Beth Widmaier figured that her work as a graduate research assistant at Penn State University would be a high-minded academic pursuit.

That was before the doctoral candidate in English was assigned to make photocopies, told to alphabetize files and sent to the library to pick up books - tasks that left her feeling more like an office temp than an apprentice scholar.

"All I learned was I want a slave, too," Widmaier, 27, said of a year spent helping a professor put together a book. "It was all secretarial and clerical work."

Such discontent isn't hard to find these days at Penn State, which has become the latest setting for an unlikely labor movement spreading on America's college campuses. Many Penn State graduate students want the right to bargain collectively for better health insurance, intellectual property rights and a grievance process that is independent from the school. In addition to time spent on their studies, many spend 20 to 30 hours a week as undergraduate instructors and research assistants. They say the tuition waivers and stipends they get in return do not give their university the right to exploit them.

Student organizers at Penn State and elsewhere say they don't expect to be treated like senior faculty, but they want respect. They argue that, in many departments, they shoulder a growing workload because it's cheaper to have a grad student pulling down $15,000 a year teach a freshman literature class than a tenured professor.

"If you're teaching Italian 101 semester after semester after semester, it becomes very clear that it's a job, not an educational experience," said Lisa Jessup, an organizer at New York University, one of a dozen campuses nationwide where students recently voted to unionize.

In October, the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board reversed an earlier decision and said graduate assistants at Temple University had the right as employees to organize. The ruling cleared the way for an election at Temple as soon as this month and set a precedent that could make it easier for students at Penn State and other public universities in Pennsylvania to organize.

In a separate case involving NYU, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in November that teaching and research assistants at private colleges and universities also had the right to organize.

University leaders aren't pleased by either decision. They say they do not exploit graduate assistants and, in fact, are subsidizing their education. Their work is valued but it's not the primary reason they are there.

"It's an opportunity to be provided with a scholarship to come and get an education," said Eva Pell, dean of the graduate school at Penn State. "Let's not forget that."

Others warn that the spread of graduate student unions will poison the trust between faculty and students that is critical to developing young scholars.

The organizing effort at Penn State began quietly in October 1999, when a group of graduate students studying foreign language, political science, history and English met to air their complaints. A number of fixed-term lecturers, who are hired to teach as needed, have joined the movement, too.

The GFTEO, an acronym for the Graduate and Fixed Term Employees Organization, has affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, which has agreed to pay office rent and bring in organizing help.

Penn State doesn't have to provide labor organizers with a list of where its 3,432 graduate assistants work. So campus organizers seeking potential recruits have begun going door to door in pairs, collecting nearly 300 cards pledging support during the past few months. Organizers say they will need to line up many more pledges of support. An election could be a year or more away.

In 1969, teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin in Madison formed the first graduate union. But it wasn't until the 1990s that the movement began to catch on. Some 30,000 graduate assistants on two dozen campuses are now organized, double the total in 1994, said Jamie Horwitz, an AFT spokesman in Washington.

It's not just the unions typically associated with academe that are showing up on campus.

The United Auto Workers recently helped organize 10,000 graduate assistants across the University of California system as well as NYU's 1,400 graduate assistants. A hotel workers union is trying to help students unionize at Yale University, and at the University of Iowa, graduate assistants are now affiliated with the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America.

Unions at various schools have negotiated perks such as access to day care, English tutoring for assistants from abroad and assurances that no student worker will have to pay to copy materials for the courses they teach.

Penn State's Widmaier said she believed time was on the organizers' side.

"If we dry up and blow away, it's going to come back in another year or two,'' she said. "This won't go away forever.''

Bill Schackner writes for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Comment by clicking here.

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