Washington Square News Campus News Profs make case for union Speakers argue for grad student rights and democracy by Ali Weinberg
November 17, 2005 Supporters of the graduate students' union discussed the reasoning behind the campus-wide strike at a town hall meeting in the Silver Center yesterday. The nine speakers, who included seven faculty members, one graduate student union member and a representative from a pro-union undergraduate group, urged the packed lecture hall to consider the multiple levels of justification for the graduate students' union. The speakers addressed everything from the necessity of a union for graduate students to protect their quality of life to the larger question of the place of democracy in the university. The event was organized by Faculty Democracy, a group of more than 240 professors devoted to bringing transparency to decision-making at NYU, to provide a chance for members of the community to hear first-hand accounts of those affected by NYU's refusal to negotiate a contract with the graduate students' union, United Auto Workers Local 2110. No administrators were invited to speak at the event because they already have a monopoly on communications, including the campus- wide e-mail service, NYU Direct, said history professor Molly Nolan, the event's moderator. American studies professor and a founding member of Faculty Democracy, Andrew Ross, said the Silver Center itself is evidence of NYU's long and troublesome history of union- busting. "Most of you probably don't know that the building was constructed by convicts from the Sing-Sing prison in New York State," Ross said. "However noble their intentions are, NYU has always had a labor problem." When graduate students first unionized, it had a positive effect on the quality of graduate assistant work, Tisch cinema studies associate professor Anna McCarthy said. "As faculty, we know from the past three years that the presence of the union has done nothing to alter the educational climate of the institution, except perhaps to make it better," McCarthy said. She said that teaching assistants play a vital role in the daily life of students at NYU. "The TAs who graded your papers, met with you in office hours and listened to your complaints about your professors' lectures were union members," McCarthy said. "They were doing their job, not interfering with educational decision-making." Union benefits allow TAs to spend more time helping their students learn, said Joanna Holzman, a doctoral candidate in the English department. She said graduate students were making heavy sacrifices to go on strike, but that they had no other choice. "I love my job and I want to get back to it desperately," Holzman said. "I can't do it without the protection of a union contract." As universities around the country try to reduce their expenses and shift more of the teaching work of the university to graduate assistants and adjunct professors, unions have become increasingly necessary to ensure fair working conditions and reasonable wages, said Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center. Without unions to protect them, these part-time laborers would become desperate to keep their jobs, which poses a threat to academic freedom, he said. "It becomes an environment where everyone is afraid to challenge sources of power," Lafer said. "The only people that have any meaningful input are the president and a few of his cronies." Several professors also voiced their outrage at the administration's intrusions into their Blackboard websites last week, when a number of CAS and Tisch faculty members discovered that administrative deans and directors of undergraduate study were listed as instructors on their Blackboard accounts. This move temporarily gave those administrators access to course documents and communication between professors and students. After several departments expressed their outrage, the names were quickly removed. In a "faculty speak-out" at the picket line in front of Bobst Library before the meeting, Nolan read a letter on behalf of professors like herself whose Blackboard sites were accessed. "We understand Blackboard to be a virtual classroom annex," Nolan said. "To enter it uninvited by the instructor is the same as entering a classroom uninvited or secretly recording proceedings. This action strikes at the heart of the ethical standards that animate and govern our university and all places of higher learning." American studies professor Adam Green said that what university administrators call "reality" was itself actually "rhetoric." The university says it wants to preserve freedom of expression, but its actions speak otherwise, he said. "Why then, in reality, are they going out, infiltrating Blackboard sites, compromising the sense of safe space - not only that faculty and graduate students have worked hard to establish in relation to their teaching, but that all of you as undergraduates rely upon in relation to the learning process that takes place in your classes," Green said. When asked by an undergraduate audience member what responsibility professors have to their students' academic progress, Green said that while professors needed to continue their students' education, they have a second overarching responsibility. "I think there is another responsibility we have to you - and it's not just a short-term responsibility of how to address this struggle over the next few days or weeks - it's a long-term responsibility of ensuring that we stand with those who are asking that this university be run according to a more democratic, a more egalitarian, a more sensitive, a more responsible understanding of administration." Audience members also voiced their frustration at the stress the strike was putting on the entire community. One Tisch transfer student, who refused to give his name, demanded the speakers tell him what the union will do if the university continues to refuse to negotiate. After expressing his frustration with having to go to attend classes all across the city because his professors won't cross picket lines, he said he wasn't sure if he should register for classes taught by graduate students because of the strike's unknown time frame. "Why am I being told that I shouldn't register for a class next semester?" the student asked. "What is your contingency plan?" -------------------------------------------------------------- Please Note: Due to Florida's very broad public records law, most written communications to or from College employees regarding College business are public records, available to the public and media upon request. Therefore, this e-mail communication may be subject to public disclosure.
