Staff Editorial: Student, not employee

All around the University, many of Penn's 10,000 graduate students are now being asked to make a choice: whether or not they think a union is right for them.

The debate rests upon a number of crucial questions: Are graduate students employees of the University, or are their working responsibilities tied more closely to their status as students? Would a union threaten the academic mission of the University, potentially pitting students against faculty and administrators? And are standards at Penn such that a union is really necessary?

Answers to these questions, and many others, vary greatly.

On the whole, there is little evidence to suggest that graduate students at Penn are hamstrung by either wholesale mistreatment or inadequate representation.

And as such, it appears that a graduate student union -- at least at the present time -- would serve to benefit neither the applicable students nor the many University constituencies that rely on them as part of the whole academic environment.

Unionization would undermine the fundamental principle that graduate students -- despite the many roles they fill in the pursuit of their degrees -- are at Penn primarily to learn. And any activity that threatens that concept may put the whole definition of the graduate student in jeopardy.

Furthermore, the unionization movement at Penn -- embodied by Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania -- has failed to demonstrate that students here are, in general, the victims of poor working conditions, unreasonable wages or unsatisfactory means of redress. Nor has GET-UP managed to deliver the support of either of the two main graduate student assemblies. Fulfilling both of these conditions is crucial if a union is to have any clout, and both are indicative of the relatively little support that the union movement enjoys on campus.

With that said, the goal of GET-UP -- to provide a mechanism for obtaining better conditions -- is a noble one, and University administrators would be wise to remember that graduate students' concerns should be heard, union or not.

At the present time, though, neither the conditions nor the ideals are present to suggest a graduate student union, with its many inconsistencies, is a choice that any Penn student should make.

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