The universities also make the argument that they could operate without the graduate students, if need be—something an employer couldn’t say of its workers. In hearings earlier this year over the dispute between the University of Chicago and its graduate students, for example, one professor testified that having someone else grading in his class of 19 students “is not a relief to me,” the idea being that his class was small enough that he could handle the extra work, if necessary. Another professor said that although graduate students taught many of his small discussion groups, “I could just teach all the discussion groups myself.” (When asked if he had ever done that, he responded, “No.”)

Joseph Ambash, a partner at the law firm Fisher Phillips who represents universities such as Columbia, Yale, and Brown, told me that an additional concern is that unionization could damage the “academic relationship” between students and universities. If graduate students are allowed to unionize, Ambash argues, they could be bound by union rules that might limit the number of hours they spend researching. They might begin to negotiate over what a curriculum includes, or how relationships between professors and students are structured—things that he says could create an adversarial relationship between professors and students where a teacher-student dynamic had once been. The union might require that students with the most seniority teach certain classes, even if other students are better teachers. “It will create great disruption and havoc among universities and graduate students,” Ambash told me.

I pointed out to Ambash that having graduate-student unions at public universities has not seem to have caused havoc. A 2013 study that looked at PhD students at eight public universities found that unionization did not have a negative effect on grad students' academic freedom or relationships with faculty, and in some cases had a positive effect, since graduate students represented by a union reported higher levels of personal and professional support, and had higher pay than those without a union. But Ambash said that the study looked only at the impact of collective bargaining on the graduate students, and not on the institution. No peer-reviewed studies have looked at the impact of unionization on the administration or on the university as a whole, he said.

“To suggest that it is not extraordinarily burdensome and impactful is not accurate,” he added, pointing to when, between 2001 and 2005, the union representing NYU grad students filed what he considered to be unreasonable grievances. One such complaint was over the university’s right to select which graduate students teach particular courses. An NYU faculty advisory committee later concluded that the readiness of the union to pursue grievances “leads the Committee to conclude that it is too risky to the future academic process of NYU for it to have graduate assistants represented by a union that has exhibited little sensitivity to academic values and traditions.” Because of the grievances, the University Senate, a body composed of deans, faculty, and students, advised against offering a new contract to the union that had been representing graduate students, according to an NYU spokesperson.