By Josh Keller

San Francisco

Research universities should prepare for the possibility that postdoctoral researchers will work to form unions by developing consistent policies on how postdocs are treated and establishing student support groups as alternatives to unions, a panel of deans said on Thursday at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools.

Postdocs have only recently started to organize into unions at American public universities, starting in Connecticut, California, and New Jersey. The push for postdoctoral unions may extend elsewhere, forcing universities to deal with a variety of academic and workplace issues at the bargaining table, the panelists said.

Universities should act in advance to more clearly define policies toward postdocs, panelists said. Establishing guidelines on compensation, tuition, visas, and intellectual property—and ensuring they are consistently applied—may discourage unionization, and it will help ensure more productive negotiations if a union does form, they said.

Jerome J. Kukor, who is acting dean of the graduate school at Rutgers University, recommended forming more-effective campus groups for graduate students and postdocs to improve communication among researchers and give them a way to voice their frustrations. A union of Rutgers postdocs was certified in July, making it among the first in the country.

At the University of California, where 6,400 postdocs won union certification in August, union officials are negotiating with the university over pay and other issues. Christine Des Jarlais, an assistant dean at the University of California at San Francisco who also spoke on Thursday's panel, said negotiations were aided by the fact that the university already had put in place systemwide guidelines for postdocs.

In discussions with unions, universities must preserve the ability of faculty members to make final decisions about the academic performance of postdoctoral researchers, she said. If a case is sent to arbitration, outside arbitrators should not be able to substitute their judgment on academic matters unless a faculty member has failed to follow an established procedure, she said.

"Faculty absolutely have the right to recruit, appoint, reappoint, not appoint, to communicate and mentor, to set the standards for work performance," she said.

Universities do have an advantage when dealing with postdoctoral unions, compared with other unions, she said, because postdocs are less likely to strike than other groups.

"That's what's so unique about the postdoc world," she said. "It's almost like the university has the upper hand now, because postdocs who want careers are typically not going to go out on strike. They're just not going to do it."