Harvard Cuts a Deal With Its Grad Students on Union Drive

The Ivies united to oppose union rights for graduate student workers. Now they're taking different tacks.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
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Harvard’s teaching and research assistants will vote next month on whether to form the Ivy League’s first formally recognized graduate student employee union.

In a precedent-setting August ruling, the National Labor Relations Board determined that graduate students at Columbia University were employees with the right to unionize, rebuffing pleas from Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League not to make schools bargain with their students.