The National Labor Relations Board has determined that graduate students at Penn are eligible to form a union. The Penn administration, like administrations at Brown, Tufts, and Columbia, will be appealing the decision, arguing that graduate students are primarily students, not employees, and contesting the coherence of the NLRB's decision. Here is Penn's official statement, issued yesterday:

This afternoon we received word that the National Labor Relations Board's Regional Director issued a Decision and Direction of Election finding that certain graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania are employees when they are teaching and research assistants at the University. The NLRB has directed an election to determine if a majority of these graduate students desire to be represented by a Union.

The complicated decision arbitrarily divides and discriminates among graduate students in determining who would be eligible to vote and who would not. For example, the decision includes some professional masters degree students in the proposed bargaining unit and excludes other comparable professional masters degree students. Even the regional director recognizes that there is no basis for the distinction drawn between PhD candidates in the natural sciences (excluded) and the social sciences (included). The regional director says that she is "compelled to follow the NYU case," even though she concedes that she would "otherwise agree with the University's contention that Natural Science RA's should be treated the same way as other RA's."

The decision makes no sense for graduate students at Penn. We hope that the students themselves, like their counterparts at Cornell, would come to the same conclusion.

We disagree with this decision and plan to appeal to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, as have Brown, Tufts and Columbia.

We will continue to keep you informed of future developments in this important matter.

I'm with the admins on this one. Yes, graduate students do the lion's share of teaching and grading on many university campuses; yes, they do an exceptional amount of lab work for research scientists. Yes, graduate students tend to have impoverishingly small stipends and inadequate benefits; yes, they deserve better. But the solution to the problem is not to unionize. The solution is to end the situation that currently enables graduate students to claim that they are employees of the university.

Grad students are not employees, though they are exploited sources of labor. The distinction is a fine one, but I think it is also foundational. Graduate students do not, for example, have to interview for their teaching positions; they are guaranteed a certain amount of teaching in their offer of admission, as part of their funding package. Graduate students need that teaching experience in order to be viable job candidates; learning to teach is part of their graduate education, and time spent in a classroom is essential to that process. Where universities break down is in failing to make graduate student teaching an adequately mentored, truly guided learning experience. Dumping grad students into undergraduate classrooms that the faculty would do just about anything not to be in--freshman writing, introductory language courses, and so on--sends a loud message that a) this is work no one wants to do; and b) graduate students are going to do that work because they can be forced to. It's not hard to imagine the alienation this causes, and it's easy to see how that alienation would crystallize as that of Marx's "alienated labor" (not least because so many grad students are steeped in Marxist theory).

But I still contend that even though this is an understandable response to an unpleasant, not to say abusive, situation, it is still a misguided one. The Penn administration has been right when it has argued that it is important for grad students to see themselves as members of the scholarly community, and that the oppositional relationship to the university that is embodied in the concept of the union will damage that. But they have erred--as have all other administrations who have opposed the move to unionize recently--in their response to the problem. Trying to block a union simply creates more antagonism in already alienated graduate students; more to the point, it does not address the problems to which the union effort is a response.

In its most elemental form, the problem is this: there are more students being taught at universities than the standing faculty are willing to teach. Graduate students bear the brunt of this unwillingness, picking up the slack for the faculty even as they are themselves the beneficiaries of the faculty's pedagogical neglect. Too often, grad students spend more time teaching than being taught; more specifically, they are too often expected to teach without the attentive guidance of experienced teachers. The rhetoric of apprenticeship is used to justify grad student teaching even as there is little or no attempt to make the experience live up to the language. That would, after all, involve extra work for the faculty. Which would defeat the purpose of putting so many grad students in so many unproctored classrooms.

Far from unionizing, which formalizes a wrongheaded institutional approach to graduate student teaching, the solution is to put the faculty back into the classroom (and the lab). At elite research universities like Penn, faculty have an absurdly light teaching load (usually two courses per semester, each of which meets two or at most three times per week), the idea being that the bulk of their time is dedicated to their research and their committee work. Much hot air is expended extolling the virtues of this pedagogical system, and loving attention is given to how teaching a 2/2 load is much more time-consuming than it looks. Be that as it may, the load is still too light, and the priorities are still wrong.

Increasing the standard teaching load for fulltime faculty to a 3/2 or even a 3/3 and hiring more faculty as needed will put more professors back in the classrooms where they should be, get more graduate students out of the classroom more of the time, allow more mentoring to happen for grad students when they do teach (perhaps by making it possible for them to team-teach with experienced teachers when they are starting out), allow grad students to feel more like students who are learning than like labor that is exploited, and send the strong message that teaching is indeed the primary project of university professors instead of an unpleasant afterthought.

I know it's a pipedream, but I'm going to dream it anyway. Even if this vision can't come true, just having it makes it more possible to see that graduate student unions are symptoms of a widespread problem in graduate education rather than the solution.