A ruling by the National Labor Relations Board involving students at Columbia opens the door for teaching assistants at private universities to organize.

If the fear is that unions will impact academic matters, then create regulation that extends unionization only as far as the matters pertaining to the working section of the university- grad/teaching assistant relationship.

These students are fighting for increased recognition by the university. It is their research and their names that universities will associate themselves with, yet the work that these students put in is continuously undermined because of the difference of power between faculty and “student.”

As universities pay these teachers, they are in part employees and in so being should legally have the right to unionize. By content alone, their work will be credited to institutions, as an employee’s work is credited to his/her employer. That factor in the complicated relationship allows for the possibility of unionization.

 

Source: Graduate Students Clear Hurdle in Effort to Form Union