Steve Brauntuch: Silence among the graduate body

Remember the graduate student unionization election?

It seems like ages ago that about 1,000 Penn graduate students headed over to Houston Hall to vote for or against union representation by the American Federation of Teachers. In less than a month, unionization went from a topic that had the campus buzzing to nothing more than vague memories of a two-year battle that remains unresolved.

How did Penn officials manage to silence some of the most vocal students on campus? They appealed the election. It's that simple.

Citing displeasure with the National Labor Relations Board's regional director, confusion over which students were actually included in the bargaining unit and 30 years of precedent in its favor (with the exception of one very recent, very notable case at New York University), Penn filed an appeal with the NLRB national office. In doing so, the University ensured that after election day, the ballots would be sealed, only to be counted if the appeal is rejected.

By finding a way to place unionization on the back burner, the University has scored a major victory -- but it may have come at an unseen cost. If Penn graduate students take umbrage with the University's stance against collective bargaining, Princeton and Yale will start to look much more attractive to current and future doctoral candidates, making Penn the eventual loser regardless of how the NLRB rules.

While the decision to appeal is well within the University's legal rights, it was a significant blow to GET-UP's momentum, silencing graduate students and creating what University President Judith Rodin called an "anti-climactic" election. Since the election results may be sealed for years to come, this appeal gives Penn the upper hand in bargaining regardless of the outcome. They have sapped GET-UP's energy less than a month after students thought they had earned a union fair and square.

The appeal process, though, may be causing irreparable damage to the relationship between University officials and graduate students. If Penn officials believe they are right in calling them graduate students, not employees, then it seems unjust for the University to treat them as employees and employ legal tactics to silence their voices. This apparent attitude toward students may blow over -- or it may linger when it comes time for the next group of undergraduates to apply for graduate education.

A long, drawn-out hearing before the NLRB could do permanent damage to Penn's reputation as a warm community for graduate students. And that is perhaps Penn's biggest problem -- the NLRB is awfully slow when it comes to graduate student unionization cases.

Already, Penn is waiting in line behind Brown, Tufts and Columbia universities to have its case heard. The University hopes to join the other three schools and create one uniform appeal, but there is no guarantee that the board will hear the four cases together. Since other schools have been awaiting a hearing for nearly a year, Penn's graduate students are forced to sit in limbo, hoping that the NLRB chooses to hear the case before they finish their Ph.D. work.

Penn administrators acknowledge that they can't compete financially with the packages offered by Harvard and Princeton. They also acknowledge, however, that they strive to be competitive with those schools in the education opportunities offered to graduate students. So if a graduate student has his choice between attending all three of these schools, will he be more likely to pick the school that has the better financial package, or the school that has silenced the voices of graduate students clamoring for better stipends and healthcare?

Maybe it's time the University dropped this appeal and allowed the votes to be counted. If Penn officials want to play hardball, they should do it with union negotiators, not with their students. They might be better off dealing with this group of polite, intelligent graduate students than the ones who come banging on the doors of College Hall five years from now demanding a raise.

Deputy Provost Peter Conn has said that it's not GET-UP that keeps him up at night worrying -- it's Princeton. But if this appeal drags on for much longer, it could prove to be the deal-breaker that sends a student to Stanford or Cornell instead of Penn. And if enrollment declines in the near future and revenues drop, Conn will be having nightmares about a time when all of this could have been avoided by dropping the appeal.

Steve Brauntuch is a junior Communications major from Tenafly, N.J. and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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