Employee discontent has been building, say faculty and student activists, many of whom credit a tenure battle at the University of Minnesota with opening faculty members' eyes to group action as an effective way to defend their jobs. This fall, several national meetings brought graduate students and professors together to discuss academe's troubled labor force. The hottest issues were higher education's heavy reliance on teaching assistants and adjunct faculty members and growing complaints that institutions are cutting back on tenure-track posts. So, not surprisingly, it's graduate students who have pushed the issue into the public arena. Kitty Krupat, a graduate student in American studies at N.Y.U. and one of the conference organizers, said the meeting sought to show the connections that exist among graduate students', professors', and non-academic workers' all losing their job security.
Many professors believe that the ferment signals the beginning of a national movement.
It's time to secure a place in the academy, and the only way to do that is through collective bargaining. Graduate-student organizing may get a boost from the National Labor Relations Board. The strong stance against Yale taken by the board's lawyers came as a surprise to many across academe. The N.L.R.B. regulates collective bargaining in the private sector. Since the 1970s, the board has sided with universities that argue, as Yale does, that teaching assistants are students, not employees.