Study: Bargaining doesn’t inhibit grad education

Collective bargaining with graduate assistants doesn’t interfere with the faculty’s ability to instruct and advise those students, says the first national empirical study of collective bargaining’s effects on faculty-student relationships.

The study was conducted by Gordon Hewitt, until recently a university doctoral student. He did the study in consultation with his adviser, Chris M. Golde, assistant professor of educational administration.

Hewitt surveyed a random sample of nearly 300 faculty members at five universities that have had graduate student collective bargaining for at least four years. They included the State University of New York at Buffalo and the universities of Florida, Massachusetts-Amherst, Michigan and Oregon.

Among the results:

• Ninety percent of faculty members said collective bargaining does not inhibit their ability to advise their graduate students.
• Ninety-two percent said it does not hurt their ability to instruct their students.

  The survey did find that many faculty members have concerns about the increased labor costs and bureaucratic procedures inherent in the administration of a collective bargaining agreement.

“These findings demonstrate that the relationship of faculty and graduate students is not negatively affected by collective bargaining,” says Hewitt, who now works for Tufts University. “Administrators are using a specious argument when they invoke the disrupted educational relationship theory in defending their campus against an organizing effort.

“Instead, administrators may want to focus on the faculty’s concern shown in this study over administrative and cost issues of implementing a bargaining agreement.”

Graduate student employee organizations claim teaching and research assistants are entitled to collective bargaining rights. Many university administrators, on the other hand, argue that graduate assistants are primarily students, not employees, and should be governed by educational policy, not a collective bargaining agreement.

Coincidentally, UW–Madison in 1969 became the first university to enter into collective bargaining with graduate students. But it is only in the last eight years or so that large numbers of graduate students have attempted to unionize at colleges and universities.

Graduate students in the University of California System, for example, went on strike in 1992 and 1998 and this year won recognition for collective bargaining. New contracts have also been signed at the universities of Iowa and Kansas, with recognition battles going on at several other campuses.