The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 21, 2015
Professors and graduate students must navigate all kinds of tricky topics in their relationships. Dissertation deadlines, Ph.D. career paths, and the occasional lapse in research ethics are just a few examples.
Now add to that list graduate-student unionization.
Or at least that’s what Harvard administrators think.
This month the university published a two-page "guide for discussion" to help faculty members talk with graduate students about unionizing. Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences created the discussion guide after fielding inquiries from faculty members about a push by Harvard graduate students to establish ties with the United Auto Workers union.
The document lists 15 dos and don’ts, many of which seem like common sense: Don’t spy on union meetings. Don’t threaten students for supporting a union. Don’t interrogate students about union activity.
Yet the fact that Harvard felt the need to write such a guide is a sign of how much the unionization of graduate students is a growing issue, even though it exists at only one private university. And the guidelines do point to the tough spot faculty members can be in when stuck between administrators and students in this debate.
Some professors have viewed certain suggestions with skepticism: Do explain the downside of unionization, for example, and do correct misleading union statements. They note that there’s no "do" that says, Do explain the upside of unionization, and that the guide assumes that all faculty members are opposed to graduate-student unions.
"We have a university dedicated to the free exchange of ideas," says Alison Frank Johnson, director of graduate studies in Harvard’s history department. "We need to be particularly careful to make sure that the expression of all different kinds of ideas are welcome around a topic that has been polarizing at other institutions."