When joining a union is not the answer

Late last month, the National Labor Relations Board voted to allow graduate students with teaching or research jobs to unionize. If you believe that professors today focus too much on research and not enough on teaching, this decision was another step in the wrong direction.

I did my graduate work at Yale University in the 1990s, which was riven by the issue of graduate student unionization, so I have personal experience with the subject. As a result, I came to believe that unionization is a bad idea.

For its part, the NLRB has gone back and forth on the subject. Before 2000, it held that graduate students who worked at private universities were not employees. Then in 2000, it decided they were, only to change its mind in 2004, and again this year.

These decisions give every sign of being made on the basis of politics, not law. When Bill Clinton’s appointees dominated the NLRB, graduate students won. When George W. Bush’s led, they lost. Now, in the age of Barack Obama, the graduate students have won again.

But I don’t want to consider this issue as a legal or political one. This is about education, and the problems with unionization are educational.

Most lecture classes today feature a professor, who lectures twice a week, and graduate students, who as teaching assistants run smaller discussion classes based on the lecture that meet once a week.

The graduate students do get paid for this, but they’re doing it to learn how to teach. They hope to be hired as professors, and the only way to learn how to teach is to go to a classroom and figure out what works.

Here’s the problem: Grad student unionization is a tax on graduate student teaching. It discourages professors from offering lecture courses, because their teaching assistants might strike on them. And it discourages universities from allowing graduate students to teach their own courses, for the same reason.

The more graduate students push to unionize, the less teaching they’ll be allowed to do. Since they won’t be learning how to teach, they’ll be even worse at it if they do graduate and get a teaching job.

Graduate students at universities willing to pay the teaching tax will also end up worse off. Unions exist to improve conditions for their members. But the more being in graduate school is like a job, the more graduate students are encouraged to stick around forever.

It already takes too long to finish graduate school. On average, it takes more than eight years to get a Ph.D. in the United States. That’s insane. Unionization supporters say that’s because graduate students take part-time jobs to pay their way, and that claim has merit.

But teaching’s work, too: graduate students won’t finish faster by exchanging one part-time job for another. Raising teaching pay merely makes sticking around in graduate school more attractive. And unions have no interest in speeding up the Ph.D. process: every time a student graduates, they lose a member.

The central problem for graduate students today is that there aren’t enough faculty jobs. The drive for unionization is an expression of anxiety about this fact, but it won’t help address the problem. It will only encourage professors to teach less, and to teach in ways that don’t rely on graduate students.

So in the end, unionization will lead both faculty and graduate students to focus even more on research. And from the perspective of undergraduates and parents, that’s the problem with it. Because while universities say they care about teaching, faculty are increasingly researchers first.

College costs a lot of money. The least your kid should get for that money is an education from faculty who want to teach and know how to do it. Unionization increases the chances that this won’t happen.

I understand while unions want more members. But they shouldn’t find them in universities.

Ted R. Bromund is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Thatcher Center for Freedom.