Two weeks after graduate students at Columbia and Yale united for their first multi-campus protest in the Ivy League, there have been no signs that their unionization efforts have — or will — spread to Princeton.
Members of Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United and Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) spent the week of April 18 on strike in an attempt to alter their schools' longstanding positions against graduate student unionization. Graduate students on both campuses rallied especially for equalized pay and affordable health benefits for teaching assistants (TAs).
Dean of the Graduate School William Russel said he has not heard of any efforts among Princeton graduate students to unionize.
"Princeton for a very long time has compensated its teaching assistants well and provided good benefits to them," Russel said. "I'm not aware of any discontent about those issues."
Sinead MacNamara GS, who has represented the University's Graduate Student Government (GSG), said in an email that the GSG "is very emphatic on the point that it is not a union."
"The general consensus ... is that since we have no real power in our relationship with the administration, taking an adversarial stance is not in anyone's best interest," MacNamara said. "[O]n average, graduate students are treated relatively well here by comparison with peer institutions."
The joint weeklong protest at Yale and Columbia is the latest in GESO's 15-year fight for official recognition and benefits for graduate students.
Melissa Stuckey '00, a TA in the history department at Yale and a member of GESO, joined a group of Yale students who traveled to New York for a protest on April 20. She said the protest was crucial in bringing GESO's concerns to the administration's attention.
"It was about having a say in your workplace and having a conversation with the administration of how teaching takes place," Stuckey said. "There are questions about the size of a precept ... Such issues are important and [graduate students] don't have a voice."
Stuckey said she was one of about 200 TAs who refused to teach approximately 450 classes over the course of the week.
GESO spokeswoman Rachel Sulkes said high costs posed a major problem for TAs with families.
"Right now if you have a family, you're expected to pay $3,000 to $6,000 for health care and over $1,000 for child care out of a maximum salary of $17,000," Sulkes pointed out.
Tom Conroy, deputy director of Yale's Office of Public Affairs, said, "The university's position is that a graduate student union wouldn't be in the interest of the graduate students or higher education."
Representatives of Columbia could not be reached for comment.
Shawn Woodruff GS, a master's degree candidate in Princeton's civil and environmental engineering department, said University graduate students are generally content with their stipends and benefits.
"The stipends [here] are especially generous," he said. "I have to pay for the health plan, but it is affordable."
He added, "I have heard some complaints from graduate students in non-science related fields because [their] stipends are lower, but I'm sure that it is not a Princeton-specific complaint."
MacNamara said some concerns remain, however.
"There are some areas that could do with serious improvement," she said. "But real progress has been made in the last few years on a number of issues."
Sulkes is optimistic that graduate students at Yale can achieve the same progress if their administration and board of trustees formally recognize GESO. She said a Yale trustee briefly agreed to a meeting with GESO last week before retracting the offer.
"It became clear that there was not a unanimity of opinion in the administration," Sulkes said. "I'm hoping we'll see productive dialogue — a strike isn't what you want to do all the time as a teacher, and it isn't what you want to see as an administrator either."
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