The Penn State Harrisburg Campus. (Photo: Penn State; Edited: LW / TO)
Penn State University is no stranger to controversy. In the past decade, its ethical crimes and cover-ups include the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal, administration-approved student cheating, the harassment of faculty and journalists by Paterno Truthers and its president’s hypocritical refusal to give sanctuary to undocumented students.
In the newest chapter of Penn State’s fall from grace, [President Eric] Barron rejected a request by the university’s graduate students for union recognition, claiming that they are students first, not employees. He then initiated a university-wide misinformation campaign about the negative impact of student unions on academic freedom. Barron and the university administration have deployed a host of vicious anti-union scare tactics to undermine and delay the unionization process.
As a tenured faculty member at the Hazleton campus of Penn State, I stand in solidarity with the graduate student-workers in their struggle to form a union. I reached out to Penn State’s grad student union organizers in order to help them document the increasingly hostile actions of the university administration and its executive leadership team, led by Barron, to bust the union.
A Half-Century Struggle by Grad Student Labor
The graduate student union movement has been a long and hard-fought struggle spanning at least 50 years. The demands of grad students are typically for better pay, reasonable hours and humane working conditions. However, their efforts to form unions and gain employer recognition have been met with growing resistance by university administrators and executive leaders.
According to the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU), a total of 32 graduate employee unions currently exist in the US. Most of these unions were formed at large public universities. Among the 14 universities composing the Big Ten Conference, six have graduate student unions: Michigan…