Over a thousand teaching assistants, grad students and union members from across the US marched on Columbia University last week, demanding that Columbia, Yale and the National Labor Relations Board grant graduate teachers union recognition.
The weeklong strike by Columbia grad students prompted provost Alan Brinkley, a liberal historian, to issue a memo to deans outlining punative actions to be taken against students fighting for union recognition.
Grad students at public universities have had the right to organize since 1996. In 2000, the NLRB granted grad student employees at private universities the right to unionize. Columbia University has hired one the US’s leading union-busting law firms to fight grad student unions and succeed in having the union election ballots impounded, then last year the NLRB recended the rights of grad students at private universities to unionize.
Jennifer Washburn, author of Univerity, Inc., reports in the current issue The Nation on the latest developments at Columbia.
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