Here’s a good rule of thumb in respect of the battle over academic freedom at New York University. When E.L. Doctorow comes out on one side, you’re probably on the other. The author of “Ragtime” was one of the faculty members who signed a letter to NYU’s president, John Sexton, saying they’re losing confidence in his leadership. This was reported yesterday by our Jacob Gershman. Doctorow & Co. are ragging on the university administration for allegedly spying on communications between teachers and students in the context of a dispute with striking graduate students, though as the fight escalates, it looks like it’s Mr. Sexton who has the interests of the students and of academic freedom at heart.

The striking graduate students and the 200 professors who wrote Mr. Sexton are in a last-ditch attempt to win a battle they really lost in August. That was when the university decided not to renew a contract signed in 2002 with the United Automobile Workers recognizing the union as the collective bargaining representative for some graduate students. NYU decided not to renew the contract – after negotiations with the union and consultation with the university body – because it said the union was infringing on academic freedom.

The university signed the contract in 2002 after the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate students who taught were to be regarded as workers under the National Labor Relations Act. This ruling, reversing 25 years of precedent, gave these graduate students “statutory rights to organize and bargain with their employer.” But in 2004, in a 3-2 ruling involving Brown University, the NLRB reversed the erroneous ruling and said that “graduate student assistants are not statutory employees” because they have a “predominately academic, rather than economic, relationship with the school.” It turns out that their primary focus is learning and not teaching, and that the money they receive is actually financial aid and not a worker’s salary.

Wrote the NLRB: “In short, the Board determined that collective bargaining is not particularly well suited to educational decision making and that any change in emphasis from quality education to economic concerns will ‘prove detrimental to both labor and educational policies.'” In addition, “The Board observed that in many respects, collective treatment is ‘the very antithesis of personal individualized education.'” The “Board concluded that collective bargaining would unduly infringe upon traditional academic freedoms.”

A professor of public policy, Robert Berne, who is the senior vice president for health at NYU, told the Sun that violations of academic freedom were why the university decided not to renew the contract. Mr. Berne told the Sun that while when signing the original contract the union had promised not to “contest academic issues” and would contest only economic disputes, the union violated this and “wanted to dictate” academic issues such as “who would be in a doctoral program” and other “academic decisions.”

The professors questioning Mr. Sexton’s leadership, as Mr. Gershman reported yesterday, alleged that the university administration was spying on a program that teachers use to communicate with their classes. A university official explained that NYU was just giving access to the program to departments so they could communicate with students whose teachers were on strike so that their education wouldn’t be disrupted. The school apologized for accessing the program and said it would seek alternative methods of communicating with affected students. What’s clear is that it’s the school that has academic freedom at the forefront of its actions. Striking graduate students and the professors supporting them show little regard for undergraduate students, whose educations are being hurt.

We’re told that the 200 professors who signed the letter to Mr. Sexton are but a tenth of some 1,950 full-time academics, the rest of whom didn’t sign the letter. And that of 2,700 classes held every day at NYU, graduate students teach 165. In July more than 150 professors sent a letter to Mr. Sexton expressing support for his decision; they warned that accepting unionization, which means accepting the “conception of students as workers rather than as developing colleagues – is fundamentally inimical to our goal of shaping the minds of future scholars of distinction. Sooner or later that distortion would come back to haunt us all.”

Hard though this may be for the left to imagine, a university is not a factory. All the more painful, no doubt, for Mr. Sexton, an amicable and easygoing educator who is dedicated to his students, to have protests against him. But we’d like to think that most New Yorkers, like most at NYU, know that he is in the middle of an important fight, one with national implications. The outcome of his stand against the encroachment on academic freedom by the left will have reverberations across the country.

The context includes a similar “no confidence” effort by the faculty at Harvard, another university where a president loosely identified with the political left is getting an up-close lesson in the academic left’s hostility to the free exchange of ideas. Mr. Sexton’s key aides include top Clinton administration officials Jacob Lew and Cheryl Mills; Harvard president Lawrence Summers was treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The academic left, in other words, is so far to the extreme left that even Clinton Democrats face resistance. One is tempted to say these institutions and administrators are reaping what they sowed by loading their faculties with radicals. But the institutions are important enough to be worth fighting to save as bastions of free speech, as Messrs. Sexton and Summers are each doing in their way. Some day it will all make a great novel for a writer of the new generation with a more modern social conscience than Mr. Doctorow.