Stanford Told Faculty Not to Publicly Share Opinions on a Grad-Student Union Drive. Then It Reversed Course.

Last week, soon after news broke that graduate-student workers at Stanford University had initiated a unionization campaign, a professor there weighed in with a public statement of solidarity.

“I support the rights of Stanford Graduate Workers to unionize,” William Giardino tweeted on April 3. That tweet, he later worried, may have violated guidelines put forward by the administration that sought to limit faculty members’ social-media use about the issue. Giardino, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, felt conflicted, and wondered if he should delete the tweet.

After an outcry, those guidelines were removed. But the administration’s since-deleted statement raises questions about the role of faculty members during graduate-worker unionization efforts, particularly at private institutions, and poses implications for academic freedom.

In response to Stanford graduate workers’ push to unionize, the university’s administration initially posted guidelines for students and faculty about the unionization effort. In an original version of the message shared with The Chronicle, Stanford included a guideline saying faculty members “should not post your opinions about union organizing on your office door, in your faculty office or on social media. You should not send letters or emails to communicate your views to graduate students regarding the pros and cons of union representation.”

The guidelines also expressly said that faculty members can discuss and share their opinions on union organizing with graduate students, as long as they don’t threaten, interrogate, promise, or coerce graduate students on the subject.

Since then, the guidelines have been updated to omit the part barring faculty from sharing their thoughts on social media, but they continue to state that faculty “should not” post opinions about union organizing on office doors or in faculty offices.

But the initial version of the guidelines struck some observers as an example of administrative overreach and a restriction of faculty freedom.

Timothy Reese Cain, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Georgia whose expertise is in labor and academic freedom, said Stanford’s initial move to restrict all faculty members’ social-media use on the topic of unionization on campus was an “explicit infringement of academic freedom.”

In an emailed statement, Stett Holbrook, a Stanford spokesperson, said academic freedom is a “core value” at Stanford and that the administration’s initial statement about social media was meant to protect graduate students from undue influence.

“The reference in the university’s FAQs to faculty posting on social media was included out of an interest to ensure that our faculty did not inadvertently infringe on graduate students’ rights during their publicly announced unionization drive,” Holbrook wrote. “It has been pointed out that this guidance could be misinterpreted as an infringement on academic freedom and we have removed it.”

In part, the potential concerns about tenured and tenure-track faculty members exerting undue influence stem from the particular status they occupy at private institutions, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. It ruled in 1980 in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University that tenure-line faculty at such institutions have responsibilities, like participating in hiring and promotion decisions, that made them managers, not employees.

Cain said that, while barring expression about the topic of the unionization effort was a clear violation of academic freedom, Stanford could still have a “legitimate concern” if faculty members were perceived to be coercing graduate students to either join or refrain from joining the union, because, as managers, it would be a violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

“The issue here would be if a faculty member is viewed as a representative of the university, and they promise a graduate student some sort of outcome for voting one way or another, either a good outcome or a bad outcome, then they’re coercing them and they’re violating law,” Cain said.

A lot has changed in 40 years. Cain said that in the “modern era,” faculty members have become increasingly concerned that strong, centralized, administrative power has limited their voice in shared governance and has distanced them from identifying with management. Additionally, Cain said, working conditions and pay issues for faculty members have, in some cases, “pushed tenure-line faculty to either support unionization or themselves organize and unionize.”

While Stanford walked back its guidelines about posting on social media, Cain said the continued prohibition on faculty members posting opinions about the unionization efforts on their doors and in their offices raises “serious concerns” for academic freedom. It would be fine, he said, if Stanford had a blanket ban on all signage and stickers on doors and office walls in order to preserve the property; targeted bans on certain topics threaten academic freedom.

Cain added that Stanford seems to be arguing that the presence of signage or stickers expressing a view on the union organizing is inherently coercive. “That would imply that the faculty-office space creates such a power differential that just having a faculty member express their opinions in that space, in written form or in signage or on a graphic, would tend to, maybe inherently, coerce students,” he said. “I’m not a labor lawyer, but that sort of argument about a power differential there, as being inherently coercive, seems like a leap.”

The topic of graduate-student unionization is one that higher education is still navigating after a 2016 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that recognized the right of graduate students at private universities to form unions. Grad students are conducting unionization drives in increasing numbers, as part of a larger groundswell of labor activity.

For his part, Giardino, the professor who posted his support on Twitter, said that over the years, there had been many topics that Stanford probably wished faculty members didn’t discuss on social media. But he couldn’t recall administrators ever putting out a statement prohibiting speech about specific topics until the other day.

“I don’t remember any other instance within the past almost 10 years in which faculty were specifically forbidden from expressing their opinions on social media about anything,” Giardino said, “so it definitely stands out in that regard.”