Yale University graduate students plan to walk out of classrooms and laboratories today in a labor strike that may be the first to involve a large number of students in the sciences.
Student labor movements at universities across the US have been gaining popularity, but few have involved students in the life and physical sciences. This may be in part because science students generally receive more substantial financial support than students in the humanities, but is also partly a result of science students supported by external grants having been exempted from eligibility to join unions in previous court rulings.
Few science students participated in Yale students' last major unionizing effort in 1995, when graduate student teaching assistants threatened to withhold the grades of their students.
This time, the weeklong strike will involve a sizeable portion of the university's science graduate students, say organizers with the Graduate Employees and Students Organization ...
