Sides Clash Over Graduate-Assistant Organizing Outlook

The National Labor Relations Board's August decision giving graduate teaching and research assistants at Columbia University the right to organize, if it survives possible appeals, would lead to “years and years of unnecessary litigation” over grievances spilling over into matters of academic freedom, an attorney for the “Ivy-plus” universities said March 27.

Quoted in the article, "Sides Clash Over Graduate-Assistant Organizing Outlook," Attorney Joseph W. Ambash, said he expects the Columbia decision to be reversed, “if not by the NLRB, then by the courts.” But in the meantime, the ruling “will and does intrude” on management rights and academic decision-making, he said. The Ivy-plus group includes Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford.

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