Unionization: Teaching assistants need assistance

Last week, I attended a meeting of Maryland Teachers and Researchers, a group of graduate students who are trying to form a union. I support their goal, but they're not thinking big enough. Now may be a moment when adjuncts and tenured faculty should consider organizing as well.

A union protects its members from arbitrary and unfair treatment. Working under a union contract ensures that negotiated salaries, benefits and working conditions cannot be changed on the whim of a budget-cutting or mean-spirited supervisor.

A change in state law is necessary for a union to negotiate on behalf of grad students. Lobbying legislators requires commitment and a base of support that MTR has had difficulty sustaining. Union-minded graduate students may have more success if they ask adjuncts and tenured faculty to join their struggle.

Two weeks ago, the University Senate proposed an annual post-tenure review for faculty members. Spun positively, this would allow the university to monitor faculty performance and discipline anyone who was underperforming. Put another way, this would give administrators the broad power to reduce faculty members' salaries, possibly significantly because of vague terminology, for just about any reason.

You think I'm exaggerating? You think as long as professors are doing their jobs they have nothing to worry about? You think well-intentioned administrators would never use this power as a way to cut costs or settle a petty score? You'd better hope you're right, because the administration can ignore faculty objections and adopt this policy unilaterally if it wishes to do so.

Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. Professors need to be able to pursue specialized research goals even when the benefits of that research are not readily apparent to a bureaucrat. They need to be able to use creative and innovative methods to teach students to think critically, a "learning outcome" that is hard to "assess" on a bubble-filled evaluation form.

This university cannot function without professors, adjuncts and graduate students. We are the ones who do the research and teach the classes. There is no university without us.

We are at a critical moment in the history of education in this country. Decisions with long-range repercussions are being made right now, particularly the proposal on post-tenure review.

The Board of Regents and their cronies in Annapolis strongly opposed graduate student unionization and will try to divide and conquer those who attempt to unionize. In addition, there are surely some faculty, adjuncts and graduate students who have an ideological opposition to unionization - this will not be a quick or easy path.

If professors want to stand up in defense of tenure and academic freedom, if adjuncts and lecturers want more job security and better pay and if graduate students want salary and benefits commensurate with the work we do, a collective voice is the only voice that will be heard.

Jeremy Sullivan is a doctoral candidate studying American history. He can be reached at sullivandbk@gmail.com.