Private university graduate students now have the right to unionize, thanks to a landmark ruling by the National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday, August 23.

The independent federal agency’s ruling stemmed from a case involving Ivy League graduate students and higher education trustees at Columbia University in New York. The four-person board of three Democrats and one Republican (who was the only dissenter) determined that the petitioning students fit the description of “statutory employees” as it is defined by the National Labor Relations Act, and are therefore legally entitled to form their own union.

The ruling overturned a 2004 ruling involving Brown University in which the board ruled that graduate students were not employees because their relationship with their employer was “primarily educational,” Slate reports. In that board’s opinion, collective bargaining between a university and its employed graduate students couldn’t “coexist successfully with student-teacher relationships, with the educational process, and with the traditional goals of higher education.... [It] would unduly infringe upon traditional academic freedoms.”

“Having our multiple statuses—as students and as employees—established and clarified better enables everyone (students, employees, faculty, administration) to prevent and address workplace-related issues,” said Matilda Stubbs, who is pursuing her doctorate in anthropology at Northwestern University, in an email to the Chicago Tribune. “This is a positive move for all parties involved.”

Columbia has opposed the decision, and said in a statement following the ruling that it “disagrees with this outcome ... and we believe that there are legitimate concerns about the impact of involving a nonacademic third party in this scholarly training.” (Read more about the opposition at Inside Higher Ed.)

Related reading: In The Crimson, Harvard’s student-run newspaper, contributor Leah S. Yared reported that “though organizers of Harvard’s student unionization movement have gathered support from a majority of graduate students employed by the University—meaning they have the numbers to call a union election—Harvard is not legally obligated to recognize a graduate student union.”

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