U. increases anti-union effort

While the national question of graduate student unionization noisily works its way through the bowels of the National Labor Relations Board as cases across the country wait to be decided, the battle on Penn's own campus for the minds and votes of graduate student employees continues as ideologies and philosophies clash. The University filed an appeal of the National Labor Relations Board's November ruling to allow graduate students in the proposed bargaining unit to hold union elections. The elections will be held next month, but the results will not be revealed until the NLRB has ruled on the administration's appeal. Evidence of the Penn's continuing effort to encourage the graduate student population to "think about it," a bright yellow informational pamphlet appeared in many graduate students' mailboxes on Monday. A letter, "Grad Student Union Won't Serve the Academic Mission" written by Provost Robert Barchi and University President Judith Rodin was also released via the Penn's Web-based Almanac yesterday. A compilation of practical, pragmatic reasons for a graduate student to oppose unionization, the pamphlet cites statistics from The Chronicle of Higher Education that show non-union graduate student stipends to be higher across the disciplines than those of their union counterparts. The pamphlet also noted that, should graduate students unionize, they will "only receive union-negotiated benefits during the semesters when they actually serve as TAs or RAs," creating an organizational nightmare as their status and benefits shift from semester to semester. But the message from the president and provost made its case on more philosophical grounds. "Strip away the legal arguments and political rhetoric and the unionization question really boils down to this: applying for a doctoral or master's degree program simply isn't the same as applying for a job," Rodin and Barchi's letter said. "Graduate students come to Penn not to serve as employees but to become scholars in training under a world-class faculty." Deputy Provost Peter Conn agrees that, far from approaching Penn as an employer, "graduate students apply to Penn for academic reasons -- they are evaluated for admission on academic bases and they receive years of academic training. "We don't build cars or produce fertilizer, though we may produce the research that leads to more fuel-efficient cars or more ecologically sensitive fertilizers," he said. "We don't generate profits or returns to shareholders.... The returns we seek are in a better-educated, healthier society." Many base their pro-unionization stance on the supposition that, as a "corporate university," Penn should be treated as a regular corporation and should in turn, treat those on its payroll as regular employees. "They're concerned about the bottom line," Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania co-chairwoman Elizabeth Williamson said. Philadelphia City Controller Jonathan Saidel, an outspoken supporter of GET-UP's efforts, suggested that not recognizing the University as a regular corporate entity with regular corporate responsibilities is to ignore the modern character of the University. "The Penn that was originally envisioned by Benjamin Franklin was just a place of learning in a loosely-knit organization," he explained. "Today it has... more employees, I believe, than the city of Philadelphia. If it looks like a horse, sounds like a horse and runs like a horse, then it's a horse." Administrators and faculty, however, maintain that academic institutions must remain horses of a different color. "The critical point for students and faculty alike... is that higher education is not an assembly line," Conn said, referencing Professor Emeritus Robert Rutman's letter to the Almanac that ran alongside the statement from Rodin and Barchi. "Each program and each student is different, especially in graduate education. "I think that Professor Rutman has put it well in raising questions about whether the formalized policies and procedures of an outside union should be imposed on the flexible and largely faculty-driven endeavor of graduate scholarship." Penn administrators and faculty are not alone in their convictions. Brown University has also appealed a regional NLRB director's ruling allowing graduate students to hold union elections. "Brown submits that the Board's analysis... fails to take into account the realities of the higher education environment... jeopardizing the essential elements of academic freedom and institutional independence, which lie at the heart of American higher education," the petition said.