The University of Rochester’s Ph.D. students have been attempting to unionize for more than a year, part of the historic surge in graduate workers organizing that began during the Biden administration. While such union drives are often fraught with tensions between students and university administrators, Rochester officials expressed openness to hosting a private election.

If both student union organizers and the university agreed, the election wouldn’t have required the involvement of the National Labor Relations Board, which usually handles union votes at private nonprofit institutions such as Rochester. The two sides, which began discussing the plan a year ago, appeared to have ironed out disputes over which students should get to vote on whether to be represented by the proposed UR Graduate Labor Union.

“Honestly, things were going surprisingly well,” said Katie Gregory, a sixth-year Ph.D. student and a teaching and research assistant. “We kind of anticipated maybe a harder fight than we received up until December.”

By December, President Donald Trump had been re-elected. And after he retook the White House on Jan. 20, he ousted the NLRB’s general counsel as well as a Democratic NLRB member, leaving the board without enough members to make decisions. If Trump eventually does appoint a conservative majority to the board, some union supporters worry it might rule that grad workers can’t unionize through the NLRB.

On Feb. 22, a lawyer representing the university told the student organizers the university no longer wanted a private election, according to a document provided to Inside Higher Ed by union members. Instead, he said, they could pursue an election with the Trump-era NLRB.

The lawyer, Steve Porzio, pointed to a December decision involving Vanderbilt University, where a group of grad workers were attempting to unionize.

NLRB policy required Vanderbilt to reveal names, job classifications and other information about student workers whom the union might represent. But more than 100 students objected to sharing that information, and Vanderbilt sued the NLRB and one of its regional directors, arguing that requiring students to turn over the information would violate their privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee ruled that Vanderbilt was likely right and granted a preliminary injunction blocking the NLRB requirements.

In light of the Vanderbilt decision, Porzio said Rochester was concerned about being “seen as facilitating the dissemination of potentially protected student data to a third party” if it went forward with the private election. But he also cited other reasons for abandoning the private election, including the new political landscape.

He said not requiring a prospective union to go through the NLRB would be a “significant deviation from the university’s typical practice,” noting the recent “sweeping and still unclear changes in the federal government’s support for the university’s missions.” He said the Trump administration’s upheaval “includes a likely reduction in federal funding.”

Some union organizers aren’t buying the university’s reasons. They say the university knows the Trump-era NLRB won’t approve the union and might even use the case to try to overturn the precedent set by the 2016 Columbia University case that found that private nonprofit university grad workers can unionize through the NLRB.

“They know the NLRB is broken,” said Emefa Amoah, a fifth-year Ph.D. student and teaching assistant at Rochester. “They know it’s stacked with anti-union appointees, they know it’s designed to delay and deny workers their rights, and it’s like: What game are you trying to play?”

Amoah said the university could have moved forward with the private election before Trump’s inauguration. “I feel as though they are hiding behind Trump,” she said.

“If the administration actually wants to respect our rights and actually saw our rights as something that’s valuable and worth acknowledging, they had every opportunity to do so for like the past year,” she said. “And instead they just deliberately bided their time and waited for an excuse to betray us.”

In January—before university officials called off the private election, but after grad students had begun pressuring them to speed up the election process—Rochester suggested to Spectrum News 1 that the union side had slowed things down. “There have been multiple times when the union took large blocks of time (lasting months in some cases) to review the draft private election agreement and provide feedback,” administrators said in a statement, adding that they needed time to review the Vanderbilt decision’s ramifications.

A university spokesperson provided a statement to Inside Higher Ed last week, giving the same general reasons Porzio did for the shift without specifically mentioning federal funding concerns. The statement did say, however, that “the federal government has already significantly altered its approach to supporting science, and the university is operating in new, uncharted territory. The NLRB does offer graduate students the same process used by other groups to pursue union recognition, without a private election agreement.”

Backing Away From the NLRB

Student workers at other private universities across the nation may also be wary of going before the Trump-era NLRB. Since the November election, petitions to form graduate or undergraduate student unions have been withdrawn at Berea College, Clark University, Dartmouth College, Kenyon College, the New School and New York University, said William A. Herbert.

Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, said reports of what’s happened at Rochester suggest the university “has decided to shift to a pre-litigation mode that might include an effort at overturning current NLRB precedent.”

NLRB spokesperson Tim Bearese said Monday he couldn’t comment on potential cases. He said the agency is still handling petitions to form unions, but any appeals of election results to the board won’t move forward for now due to the lack of quorum.

At Rochester, grad workers say they’re preparing to strike to pressure the university into holding the private election. As for the chance of a strike, Gregory said, “At this point, it does seem a matter of when and not if.”