While the vast majority of Americans who dwell outside the ivory tower may roll their eyes at the crazed, fanatical politics that have festered at many college campuses across the country, this extremism hits much closer to home for level-headed college students and faculty. Recently, the Trump Administration has been using its control over federal education grants to push back against campus radicalism at some of America’s most elite universities.
Yet still untouched is the massive power that the Obama and Biden Administrations granted to campus union bosses who are frequently at the center of the most extreme and sometimes even violent so-called “activism” taking place at universities. It is time that Trump appointees go to work to fix it.
You see, currently, union bosses on dozens of campuses across the country are exercising government-granted powers that require unwilling graduate students to associate with (and often subsidize) campus unions. College administrators are also forced to “negotiate” with these union officials over campus policies, including discipline for violent campus agitators.
Those unfamiliar with labor law might wonder how union officials obtained such clout on college campuses in the first place – aren’t graduate students students, and not workers on a production line?
It all traces back to controversial rulings by the Obama and Biden National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which handed union bosses the power to obtain monopoly “representation” power over graduate and doctoral students. In states that lack Right to Work protections, that power includes forcing students to pay union dues.
This means union bosses can upend graduate students’ academic careers if they refuse to fund a group whose ideology they find abhorrent, which threatens both academic freedom and religious freedom on campus.
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Take the case of David Rubinstein, a Ph.D. student in history at Cornell University whose research concerns the postwar Jewish diaspora in Europe. David, who is Jewish, wants as little as possible to do with the Cornell Graduate Student Union (CGSU-UE, an affiliate of the United Electrical union), knowing union officials’ virulent opposition to Israel and affinity for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
But when David exercised his right under federal law and demanded an accommodation to union dues payment based on his religious beliefs, union officials refused. They harassed Rubinstein and other religious objectors with unnecessary and illegal “questionnaires” that demanded they divulge particulars about their religious practice, their faith organizations, and faith leaders. As a result, with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation, David is pursuing a federal civil rights case challenging CGSU-UE’s illegal tactics.
Numerous graduate students at other campuses have similarly needed to take legal action just to get campus union bosses to respect their legal rights. Yet graduate students shouldn’t need to jump through union-created hoops and tangle with union lawyers just to pursue a graduate degree in the first place.
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Fortunately, a more comprehensive solution is on the horizon. Russell Burgett, another Ph.D. student from Cornell, recently launched a groundbreaking NLRB case to strike at the heart of union bosses’ monopoly bargaining powers on campuses. A victory for him would free any dissenting graduate student – whether their opposition is political, religious, financial, or otherwise – from having their academic fates dictated by union apparatchiks.
His Foundation-backed case argues that Obama and Biden NLRB appointees were wrong to “reinterpret” federal law to allow union officials to collectivize graduate students. Nothing in the statute’s plain text suggests that students, whose primary reason for being on campus is to pursue a degree, should be included in the National Labor Relations Act’s definition of “employees.”
If he wins, militant campus union bosses would be stripped of their government-granted powers that let them dragoon unwilling students into their ranks, while also freeing administrators of their current obligation to “negotiate” with union boss radicals over the conditions of all graduate students.
President Trump is currently staffing up his NLRB. He should ensure his appointees get to work quickly on ending the monopoly “representation” and forced-dues powers that previous administrations improperly handed to campus extremists.
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Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
