John Sweeney of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations was demonstrating yesterday with a coagulation of New York University graduate students to “Expose NYU’s Attack on Workers’ Freedom to Form a Union.” He was joined at the protest by the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten; the City Council speaker and Democratic mayoral candidate, Gifford Miller, and the actress Morgan Fairchild. It seems that in 2002, NYU signed a contract with the United Auto Workers recognizing the union as the collective bargaining representative for some graduate students. It was obligated to do so by a National Labor Relations Board ruling in 2000 that reversed 25 years of precedent and said that graduate students who taught counted as workers under the National Labor Relations Act.

This gave students “statutory rights to organize and bargain with their employer.” The contract the union signed in 2002 expired yesterday, and NYU has said it won’t renew it, which is why Mr. Sweeney was out with his banners. But it turns out that NYU is able to refuse to sign a new contract because on July 12, 2004, the NLRB reversed the 2000 decision in a 3-2 ruling in a case brought by Brown University.

The Board now said that “graduate student assistants are not statutory employees” because they have a “predominately academic, rather than economic, relationship with the school.” It explained that graduate students spend only limited time teaching, must first become students before they can teach, focus primarily on their degree and not teaching, and are paid not a salary but “financial aid.”

The Board further noted, citing pre-2000 rulings, 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.'” It continued that “in many respects, collective treatment is ‘the very antithesis of personal individualized education'” and that “collective bargaining would unduly infringe upon traditional academic freedoms.”

Academic freedom is the very reason NYU gave for not renewing the contract. In an August 5 letter, NYU’s executive vice president, Jacob Lew, and its provost, David McLaughlin, explained that it’s not about whether “NYU is ‘for or against’ organized labor,” nor whether graduate students “should or should not have a meaningful voice,” but whether collective bargaining is best for an academic institution.

Their letter said many of the grievances filed by the union sought to interfere with academic freedom. One such interference was “those seeking decisions from an arbitrator about whom the University could assign to teach in a classroom.” They wrote that had an arbitrator sided with the union in any of the instances of interference (NYU won all) there would have been a negative impact on academic freedom and the quality of teaching. So the showdown at Washington Square turns out to be about enormous issues that will reverberate around the country as defenders of academic freedom discover that the left wing of the labor movement is against them. Mr. Sweeney’s protesting ended when he was arrested for blocking the sidewalk in front of the NYU library – demonstrating exactly how much he cares about academic freedom. And as our Jacob Gershman reports, it appears that fewer than 100 NYU graduate students joined him at the protest out of a bargaining unit of 1,000 – demonstrating that most graduates realize who is on their side.