Striking NYU Graduate Students May Face Penalties

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The New York Sun

New York University graduate student teaching assistants will have to forfeit thousands of dollars in stipends if they don’t end their strike by December 5, the university’s president, John Sexton, said yesterday.


University officials have long warned graduate students that they may be punished for going on strike, but Mr. Sexton’s ultimatum was the first time NYU has spelled out the penalties.


Mr. Sexton, who has repeatedly said NYU would not recognize a graduate student union, announced that teaching assistants would lose their spring semester stipends, along with their eligibility to teach in that period, if they did not resume their teaching duties by Monday.


Students who carry on their strike into the spring semester would forfeit two consecutive semesters of stipends. NYU pays doctoral students a minimum annual stipend of $19,000, or $9,500 a semester, and has said it would increase the annual amount by $2,000 over the next two years.


Mr. Sexton said students who continue striking beyond the deadline would not lose health care coverage or tuition benefits, and said NYU would provide loans to students who lose their stipends and face economic hardship.


“This has been a difficult and rancorous semester,” Mr. Sexton wrote in an e-mail to students. “While I do not condone what has been done by those who have been striking, their actions have caused us to take a hard and unflinching look at ourselves and our practices, and these self-examinations will lead to significant, enduring improvements.”


His letter was met with mixed reaction from faculty members. Some said the punishment was too harsh and that they doubted the university would be able to identify the strikers without information from departments. Faculty members who support the administration’s position said NYU had waited long enough to punish students who fail to meet their responsibilities.


It is estimated that hundreds of graduate student teaching assistants have since November 9 declined to perform teaching duties – such as grading papers and exams, leading class discussions, or serving as stand-alone instructors – to protest NYU’s refusal to recognize their union with the United Automobile Workers. Graduate students at NYU are required to serve as teaching assistants for two or three years while earning their degrees.


“For me, I have to make a decision about whether I want to stay in the country or not,” a 31-year-old doctoral student in the French department who is on strike, Jeppe Nielsen, said. Mr. Nielsen, who is from Denmark, said he would not be able to support himself in New York without a stipend. “I have to decide whether this is a matter of principle for me or not,” he said.


NYU, which since 2002 had been the only private university in America with unionized graduate students, chose not to negotiate another contract with the UAW after the first contract expired this summer. A year earlier, the National Labor Relations Board, reversing an earlier decision, ruled that graduate assistants are students, not employees, and therefore do not have statutory rights to organize and bargain with universities.


Mr. Sexton has been under pressure to resolve the strike before the end of the semester, when final exams and papers in undergraduate courses need to be marked and grades assigned. The announced deadline is nine days before the last day of classes.


NYU is the second private university in American to strip stipends away from graduate students who go on strike, according to a professor of labor studies at the University of Oregon, Gordon Lafer.


Yale University in the early 1990s docked graduate students of stipends, he said. Columbia University and Yale chose not to penalize students when graduate students staged brief strikes in the spring semesters of 2004 and 2005.


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