"Graduate students at Yale voted overwhelmingly for GESO to represent them as a collective bargaining agent--in other words, they wanted a ,union," Pasachoff said.

"I think it makes sense that a group that does a lot of the teaching and the research has a collective voice," said Buju Dasgupta, a TA who was brought up on disciplinary hearings.

History

Despite the lack of recognition of TAs as employees at private universities across the nation, the Yale administration was the only one targeted by the lawsuit.

"I think that out of all the private universities that I'm aware of, TAs [at Yale] are more organized," Dasgupta said. "I think it could have been anywhere else, including Harvard."

The GESO said its main complaint is that the Yale administration and professors in particular treated the TAs unfairly.

"We considered the threats to be coercive and illegal," said Dasgupta. "We believe we have the protection that employers give to employees."

Brown said there was an atmosphere of fear among the graduate students during the grade strike last year.

"People were being threatened that they would not only lose their jobs at Yale but also lose their letters of recommendation," she said.

Losing recommendations is one of the most detrimental things an administration can do to graduate students, said Gordon Lafer, research director for the GESO.

"Letters of recommendation are the single most important thing to get a job," Lafer said. "It's really threatening to someone's career."

Toward the end of the grade strike, the administration called three of the elected union leaders up on disciplinary charges, Pashcoff said.

Brown said the action scared the TAs.

"By singling out one person, it threatened everyone," Brown said. "We knew it was illegal, but there was no precedent set--there was nothing stopping Yale from doing it."

The Possibilities of a Lawsuit

The Yale administration said it had every right to deny the TAs the right to unionize because they are not official employees of the university.