Since white-collar employees at universities across the nation first began to unionize about 15 years ago, administrators and union members have frequently clashed, creating tense and divided campuses.

The clerical and technical employees' unions, the newest wave of labor activity both inside and outside universities, have met with resistance from university administrations while organizing and, if they succeed in forming a union, during contract negotiations.

Among Ivy League and other universities, Cornell, Boston University (B.U.) and Stanford have experienced strikes by recently-formed unions, some of which include both white and blue-collar workers. Just after the clerical and technical employees' union at Yale was formed in 1984, the new union and its older blue-collar counterpart went on a highly-publicized 10-week strike when contract negotiations fell through.

And just last month, Yale narrowly avoided seeing what would have been the sixth strike by its workers in 20 years.

By the time Yale workers and administrators reached a settlement two weeks ago, the union had already extended the strike deadline by one week and was negotiating two days beyond their second deadline, having agreed to continue as long as they felt the university was bargaining in good faith.

After a 36 hour-negotiation session, the workers had a new four-year contract. The university agreed to union demands to change the present system of classifying jobs, which unions said allowed for discrimination against women and minorities. In addition, the new contract provides for a 26.2 percent pay increase over the four years, and guarantees that maintenance workers will not be laid off.

Yale administrators say the settlement this year signals a new era of cooperation for administration-union relations.

"I believe that in the long history of this university, this day will be recognized as a beginning of a new era of relative harmony and stability in our labor relations," Yale President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. told reporters in a press conference following the settlement.

But union officials, although hopeful, remain skeptical of the real benefits of the contract. While the university's concession to union demands for job reclassification was "certainly a change in heart, I don't know if it's a real change in attitude or just caused by the threat of a strike. The threat of a strike was immense and intense in those last 35 hours. The campus was on pins and needles," says Lee Berman, chief steward of the clerical workers union.

While the tension at Yale has subsided, workers at Columbia, B.U., and Stanford are just beginning to gear up for union-administration battles expected to accompany this summer's contract negotiations.

Clashes between unions and administration are nothing new at these schools and others. Stanford has seen two strikes, one in 1974 and the other in 1982. And when B.U. clerical workers began to unionize in the late 1970s, administrators hired outside people to assist in the anti-union effort. At Cornell last September, 900 service and maintenance workers went on a three-day strike, their third since 1980.

At Harvard, supporters of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) continue to hand out election cards to secretaries and technicians. HUCTW needs more than 30 percent of the employees to sign the cards, and the majority of workers to vote for the union in elections which would follow before it can become the legally recognized representative unit of the clerical and technical workers.

Taking Sides

In the drive for unionization, employees' unions and universities seem invariably to draw battle lines, at least initially, though union leaders say they believe unions help and do not hurt campuses, and that a polarized employee-employer relationship is not inevitable. But many university administrators say the unions, by their very nature, make adversaries of employees and employers.

When union leaders begin organizing, administrations often try to persuade workers to oppose unionization. Administrators barrage employees with mass mailings, pamphlets and also hold "captive audience meetings," which are held during the working day. Unions leaders say administrators instruct supervisors, who are often department chairmen, to discourage their office staff from joining unions.