If other institutions serve as any sign of things to come, the road to unionization for graduate students could be a long and difficult task at Penn.
But things look a little bit more optimistic after Temple University formally recognized a graduate union earlier this month.
And Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania, which wants to organize a union at Penn, hopes that the victory at Temple will help in their cause.
Two weeks ago, Temple's board of trustees voted to recognize the union after the state rejected an appeal by the school last month, making Temple the first university in the state to allow graduate students to unionize and bargain over working conditions. The announcement comes two and a half years after Temple students began efforts to unionize.
However, the decision at Temple does not set legal precedence for GET-UP because Temple is a public state university and falls under the jurisdiction of the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. Penn, as a private institution, is subject to the National Labor Relations Board.
Still, Mark Callahan, president of Temple University Graduate Student's Association, said a union at Temple is an encouraging sign for those at Penn.
"I'm confident that a lot of people who supported us in our fight will be inclined to support GET-UP in theirs," he said, noting that community members, elected officials and other labor organizations in Philadelphia had offered support to the Temple effort.
Temple's graduate association and GET-UP are both affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, and the two groups have worked together informally on unionization issues.
Graduate student unions have existed at public universities since the University of Wisconsin at Madison became the first in 1969. However, it was not until last fall that the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate students at New York University had the right to unionize.
Traditionally, university administrators have argued against graduate student unionization, maintaining that graduate students are not employees and that the teaching and research they do is an important part of their education.
In recent years, several unionization efforts have sprung up at private universities across the nation such as Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Brandeis universities.
However, many of these campaigns led to struggles with the administration. At Columbia and Brown, petitions seeking recognition are being disputed. And students at Yale have been trying to gain recognition for more than 10 years.
GET-UP members, however, remain optimistic that things will be different here.
"Basically, this is a Penn campaign, and while we're aware of all those [problems], we're really focused on how things work here, and how they should work here," GET-UP spokesman Ed Webb said.
Callahan attributed some of his group's successes to the support lent by the community.
"We showed we had strength beyond just our members, and that there was widespread outrage at the university's attempt to thwart our free exercise," Callahan said.
GET-UP has been busy trying to garner support since it first launched its campaign for unionization last spring.
After establishing its presence on campus, the groups' leaders say the next step is to distribute and collect authorization cards to graduate students. Once a majority of graduate students have filled out cards, the University has the option of recognizing GET-UP as graduate students' representative in bargaining. Should the University choose not to, the authorization cards would be turned into the National Labor Relations Board and supervised elections would be held.
When supervised elections were held at Temple last March, students voted 290 to 16 in favor of unionization.
GET-UP launched its card drive earlier this week, hoping to find such enthusiasm at Penn.
"There's a great deal of support," Webb said. "A lot of times when you convince people of the case, they are prepared to go talk to their colleagues. It's very grassroots, it's very personal, it's about building from the ground up."
