This past Tuesday, at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences orientation for new TAs, the university attempted to tell participants they could not discuss unionization at the event, even on breaks and during lunch. Of course, the experiences of research and teaching assistants struggling against NYU’s resistance to unionization only add to the myriad critiques of NYU President John Sexton’s administration in recent months.

In fact, Sexton and fellow administrators have received an onslaught of negative public scrutiny lately, led first and foremost by faculty opposing the NYU 2031 expansion plan and voting “no confidence” in the president. Ben Miller’s Aug. 25 opinion piece in WSN sums up the critique nicely and adds an important student voice.

Overlooked in the current outcry against the administration is that this tide has been rising since at least 2005, when the administration aggressively stripped RAs and TAs of the right to collective bargaining.  With the NYU Board of Trustees’ recent commitment to be more responsive to campus constituencies, we urge the administration to publicly declare that it will henceforth remain neutral on the issue of unionization by respecting our majority choice, and, upon certification that a majority of us have chosen unionization, to bargain in good faith for a contract. In other words, we feel that the undemocratic tactics of last Tuesday should end there, and the Sexton administration should reflect on how its stance against unionization has and continues to tarnish its legacy at NYU.

Our experience as RAs and TAs seeking to win back representation by the Graduate Student Organizing Committee-United Automobile Workers sheds important light on the failures of this administration’s leadership in recent years.  Refusing to bargain with GSOC-UAW in 2005 not only created rancor among RAs and TAs, but it also galvanized significant numbers of faculty who urged the administration to continue bargaining with our union. Beyond refusing to bargain, the administration made things even worse when it attempted to direct faculty to do surveillance on striking TAs. In the recent no-confidence votes, many faculty members included the administration’s handling of the graduate employee union in the long list of examples of ignoring faculty sentiment.

For most of us, the current situation is fairly clear-cut — while NYU relies heavily on us to help teach thousands of undergraduates and carry out innovative research projects that make NYU world-renowned, the administration’s unilateral power over our working conditions has yielded unreliable and increasingly deteriorating benefits in return for that critical work. For example, in contrast to the booming salaries and lucrative summer home loans of administrators, NYU made massive unilateral cuts to our health benefits last fall, including a 33 percent increase in the cost to insure spouse or partner and child dependents and a 150 percent increase in the annual out-of-pocket maximum.

Consequently, it costs an RA or TA more than half of our annual stipend of roughly $25,000 to insure family members. These prohibitively expensive dependent premiums — which hit women and international RAs and TAs the hardest — mean many of us choose between further debt, subsisting without family insurance or looking to state-subsidized plans instead.  Like workers at Wal-Mart, we should not have to make these types of choices.

Perhaps the most striking fact is that this long running struggle does not have to continue. NYU does not need to wait for the National Labor Relations Board to re-assert our legal right to collective bargaining in order to respect our choice. Sexton’s administration can do so now. We urge the administration to make good on the trustees’ recent commitment to be more responsive to campus constituencies by respecting our democratic right to choose collective bargaining. In so doing, the administration has the opportunity to contribute to a more collegial and inclusive university, and to leave behind a more positive legacy for itself in the process.

Brady Fletcher is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, and has worked as both an RA and TA. Jacob Denz is a Ph.D. candidate in German at the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and has worked as a TA.