Anti-Israel National Union Has Taken Hold at College Campuses, UChicago Lawsuit Reveals

Anti-Israel National Union Has Taken Hold at College Campuses, UChicago Lawsuit Reveals

When the anti-Israel campus protests broke out last year, they had the support of an ally whose role until recently has been largely overlooked: graduate student unions. These unions are a growing presence at both public and private universities. And now, they’re defendants in a University of Chicago lawsuit brought by the outraged students who are forced to fund them, whether they agree with their antisemitic rhetoric or not.

Academic unions aren’t like traditional trade groups pushing for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions. They’re a new breed—an affiliation of graduate student unions with a “parent,” frequently the national United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), a radical group known for its anti-Israel activism.

At Legal Insurrection, we’ve been keeping tabs on UE since it first endorsed a “boycott, divest, and sanction” (BDS) campaign against Israel in 2015. More recently, when Cornell graduate students voted to federate under UE, Prof. Jacobson warned that the new alliance meant trouble: “On a campus wracked with anti-Israel activism and antisemitic invective, the connection to an anti-Israel national union raises concerns of a renewed BDS effort,” he wrote. In fact, UE has repeatedly called for the “union at all levels to become engaged in BDS.”

Graduate students weren’t always unionized, of course, and it’s not obvious how they fit into the “labor” mold. True, they work as research assistants and teaching assistants, but that work is incidental to their academic pursuit.

How did these doctoral candidates become UE labor union brothers?

As usual, the answer lies in partisan politics. Before it got graduate students to join in droves, UE’s membership was dwindling. At the July House Committee hearings on union antisemitism, labor attorney Glenn Taubman explained that UE needed new blood:

So they searched for low hanging fruit to organize – and that is typically young people like graduate students, medical residents and interns, and legal aid lawyers, people whose political views might previously have aligned with the unions but who had no experience actually dealing with them.

And, as usual, all paths lead to Obama’s pen-and-phone administration, Taubman continued:

The current travesty of herding graduate students into anti-semitic unions finds its source with the Obama-Biden National Labor Relations Boards, which have by fiat turned graduate students into graduate employees – subject to unionization under the NLRA and, of course, the payment of forced union dues as a condition of their academic careers.

That condition puts Jewish students in a bind. Taubman said he’s fielded phone calls from “Jewish and Israeli graduate students at the nation’s elite educational institutions—MIT, Columbia, NYU, the University of Chicago and Northwestern to name a few—asking how they can disassociate … from the antisemitic anti-Israel union that is menacing them on campus, protecting their tormentors, or forcing them to pay dues to subsidize the union’s pro-Hamas activities.”

At the University of Chicago, the Graduate Students for Academic Freedom (GSFAF) is fighting back. They’ve filed a First Amendment lawsuit against their union over its anti-Israel activism.

The group says the union’s mandatory fees amount to compelled antisemitic speech and association with a group whose ideology they abhor.

The university historically opposed unionization as a threat to academic freedom, according to the complaint. But in 2022, a group of students called Graduate Students United (GSU) voted to join the national UE.

Under the GSU-UE collective bargaining agreement, UChicago graduate students must either become duespaying members of the union, or pay it an equivalent “agency fee,” if they want to keep their jobs as TA’s and RA’s, the lawsuit says.

That’s a problem for the students who don’t support UE’s long record of antisemitism.

And the newly formed GSU-UE is following in its parent’s activist footsteps, the lawsuit says.

In addition to promoting BDS, the union has branded Israel an “apartheid regime” and has charged it with “ethnic cleansing.”

After the October 7th Hamas massacre, UE escalated its attacks on the Jewish state, calling for an immediate ceasefire and cutting off military aid to Israel. GSU-UE joined in those calls, the lawsuit says:

And this past spring, according to the court filing, GSU-UE joined the Coalition that ran the anti-Israel protest encampments on UChicago school grounds:

It joined their “violent rhetoric”:

And their call to arms:

And their true endgame, beyond the campus protests—a global intifada:

The students’ group has asked the court to block the mandatory union fees. “If the First Amendment’s shield for academic freedom means anything,” they argue, “it means students cannot be forced to fund an ideological group they abhor, as the price of continuing their work.”

We’ll have to wait and see whether the court will grant relief before September 30th, when the fall term begins at UChicago.

And when everyone comes back to school, we should expect the anti-Israel campus protests to come back, too, with a vengeance, Prof. Jacobson said in a recent interview. Like other schools, UChicago was unprepared for the Coalition-run eight-day-long “tentifada” and takeover of one of its buildings last year.

And it doesn’t help that the university continues to signal weakness in the face of the protesters’ violence and aggression. There were reportedly no arrests after police dismantled the encampments. And the school just dropped the disciplinary charges against students involved in last year’s protests, caving on its threat to withhold their diplomas.

.@UChicago just greenlighted repeat "tentifadas" this school yearhttps://t.co/RYZYfYfRdU

— Jane Coleman (@JaneBColeman) August 18, 2024

Why should this year’s anti-Israel activists fear any consequences when nothing happened to them last year? Now that the school has given them the green light, the protesters will likely be back next month. But if the court rules in the UChicago students’ favor, at least they won’t have to fork over their money to the union that’s aiding and abetting them.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.