House Republicans Denounce Federal Labor Board’s Actions as Threatening Colleges

By Peter Schmidt

[…] Several Democrats on hand for the hearing repeatedly challenged the premises underlying the hearing and the witnesses critical of the labor board. Among them, Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from California, argued that the assumption private colleges would deteriorate if their employees used unions to assert more control over the institutions was based on the false assumption that “all of the wisdom resides on the employer side” of the bargaining table.

Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, produced a graph that, he said, shows that tuition figures at colleges with unionized graduate assistants and researchers “are all over the map” and that whether graduate assistants are organized appears to have no bearing on tuition costs.

Representative Andrews, a ranking member on the labor subcommittee, repeatedly pressed the witnesses to offer any evidence that the unionization of private colleges’ faculty members or graduate assistants threatens academic freedom, and seemed to give little weight to Mr. Weber’s proffer of an e-mail from a Brown faculty member asserting that unionization hurts faculty-student relations. Arguing that the subcommittees should be tending to more pressing matters, such as the nation’s budget crisis, he said, “This is a classic case of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”

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