"We want Yale to recognize our union, negotiate with it, and negotiate a contract," Dugdale said. "Yale pretends like we don't exist."

TAs of the World, Unite!

While graduate students at Yale University have not experienced much success in their dealings with the administration, students at other schools across the nation have made great strides in improving their working conditions.

One of the most recent victories occurred at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor this month when graduate students and university administrators reached an agreement which raised wages and other compensation for international graduate students who are required to stay in Michigan during the summer for English workshops.

Nicholas R. Olmsted, a second-year student in Michigan's philosophy department and vice-president of the Graduate Employees Organizations (GEO), believes that unions played a critical role in achieving these concessions. The GEO is associated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO.

"There's no question that graduate students who are unionized are much better off than graduate students who aren't," Olmsted said. "People at universities who don't have union affiliation should work as hard as possible to get a union together."

Kevin C. Wehr, a third-year sociology student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and president of the Teaching Assistant Association, agrees that their union, the AFL-CIO, was a powerful weapon in recent contract negotiations that resulted in tuition wavers for many graduate students.

"Unions are a good thing because they help to define the relations between the administration and its employees," Wehr said. "Unions can act as an incredible participant in politics and can model democratic practices on a large scale."