Young people doing postgraduate work n American universities can already wear at least four hats—as student, researcher, teaching assistant and dissertation-writer. But how about shop steward? For the first time, graduate students at private American universities have been granted the right to belong to trade unions. Two-thirds of America's "working students" are at public universities where, as in effect employees of the state, they have long been allowed to unionise. Private universities, which include most of America's most famous academic names, insist they are different. For the past three decades, places like Stanford and Yale have contended that graduate students are not really employees—that their work is to go on getting themselves educated, that the money they receive is merely financial aid for their continuing studies, and that collective bargaining would be an infringement of academic freedom.
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