Graduate student unions that are affiliated with teacher unions gave “lopsided critical attention to Israel” compared to other foreign conflicts, according to a report that the Defense of Freedom Institute released this week.
The report author Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the institute who focuses on Jew-hatred on campus and teacher unions, told JNS that three-quarters of the unions “have official positions on Israel at a much higher rate than Ukraine or Iran.”
“The language of their communications about the other conflicts are restrained and sober, while their communications with respect to Israel are overwrought and extreme,” he said. “That is the obsession of these organizations.”
“Rather than working to advance wages, benefits and working conditions of graduate students, they are devoting their energies to attacking Israel in extreme ways,” he said.
The report states that “graduate students effectively run universities by teaching introductory classes and operating research laboratories,” affording graduate student unions “outsized influence.”
Graduate student unions are quickly growing even though they consist of a small portion of teacher unions, according to the report. K-12 schools are experiencing declining enrollment, causing teacher unions to look at other options to expand their presence, it says.
The report examined the online activity of 26 graduate student unions affiliated with the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. It found that 21 were active online. All 21 were AFT affiliates, and some had joint affiliations with the NEA and American Association of University Professors.
Of the 21 unions, 16 issued anti-Israel statements. Just two commented publicly on the Russia-Ukraine war. Three also expressed support for the protesters against the Iranian regime, and two opposed military action against Iran, according to the report.
“None of the graduate student unions that commented on Ukraine or Iran had more than two statements on these issues, and most only had one,” according to the report. “With respect to Israel, however, most of these unions had dozens and sometimes hundreds of public comments critical of the Jewish state.”
The tone of the statements from the graduate student unions was harsher toward Israel than toward Russia and Iran, according to the report.
The ones on Israel “regularly contain inflammatory language, such as ‘genocide,’ ‘settler-colonialism’ and ‘oligarchs,’ while the statements regarding Russia and Iran at most denounce repression but do not attribute broadly evil motives to countries other than Israel,” it says.
The report cites the Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Michigan, which has issued more than 100 anti-Israel statements over the past two years, as it “repeatedly accuses Israel of genocide, engaging in apartheid and being protected in the U.S. by ‘oligarchs,’” per the report.
The union also reposted on social media comments authored by an anti-Israel student group that said “power to our freedom fighters, glory to our martyrs.”
By contrast, the union has only made one statement on Ukraine. It said in 2022 that it “stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine in their struggle to defeat the Russian invasion.” It hasn’t said anything about Iran, according to the report.
The unions examined in the report also “frequently display Marxist iconography and language” on their social media accounts. The University of Michigan union shared an image of Karl Marx in a car stating, “Get in loser. We’re unionizing researchers.”
Greene told JNS that Al Shanker, a longtime American Federation of Teachers leader, was staunchly opposed to communism. Shanker also resisted efforts from black power activists to replace white teachers, many of whom were Jewish, with black teachers in New York schools whose student bodies were primarily black.
Shanker, who was Jewish and who died in 1997, was “pretty roughly attacked by the radical left and many antisemitic accusations were hurled at him and the AFT for their defense of Jews,” Greene said.
“It’s ironic that these graduate student unions that are affiliated with the same AFT that Al Shanker led are now themselves the radical leftists hurling antisemitic abuse and promoting communism,” he told JNS.
‘Highly unusual’
Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, requiring unions to sign affidavits certifying that none of their affiliate leaders were members of the Communist Party. The law came in response to attempts from foreign organizations, many of them communist, to infiltrate the labor movement. Congress later repealed that provision.
“Unions have special privileges granted them by law,” Greene told JNS. “They have the privilege to engage in collective bargaining on behalf of workers, and they have the privilege of bringing complaints to the National Labor Relations Board.
“Conditions can be placed on those privileges,” he said.
A “very large percentage” of graduate student union members are not U.S. citizens and are in the country on temporary visas, which Greene said is “highly unusual” for unions.
“Imagine, for example, if tourists were to have a union to represent them,” he said. “That would be very strange. They don’t have a permanent stake here. They’re only temporarily here. The same is true for graduate students on an F-1 visa. They’re only here, in theory, temporarily while they engage in their studies.”
“To have access to controlling these institutions that are meant to represent American workers is not in keeping with the original purpose of labor unions,” Green said. “Not surprisingly, it’s distorted the activities of these unions away from the focus on wages, benefits and working conditions to an obsession with foreign agendas and international conflicts.”
The report states that 27% of graduate students at universities sufficiently large to have graduate student unions are international students.
Between one-third and half of graduate students at elite universities are foreign students, which “means that as many as half of the members of these unions are not U.S. citizens, who are then able to collect money involuntarily from other graduate students to fund their organizations to engage in political activity on behalf of foreign powers,” Greene told JNS.
Most of the graduate student unions examined in the report have issued statements repeatedly offering legal and financial aid to foreign graduate students and calling on them to participate in union activities, the report states.
The union at the University of Michigan has stated that the university should “proactively protect the livelihoods of over 4,200 international graduate students and workers.” Thirty-two percent of the graduate and professional students are international students on student visas, per the report.
The report outlines a series of policy recommendations for Congress, including requiring unions to sign affidavits stating that they do not support “other kinds of foreign, radical movements in addition to communism” and restricting federal funding to universities that have extremist graduate student unions.
It also suggests legislation stopping graduate students from forming unions altogether, as “no other industry employs such a large number of foreigners legally entitled to work in the U.S. for a short period of time.”
The report also states that executive action can be taken to limit the number of student visas granted to curb “the radicalism imported into American unions.”
Greene told JNS that the logic of the affidavit requirement is that “labor unions should be serving American purposes for American workers, not serving international agendas of foreign powers.”
“So maybe we need to bring back the same kind of affidavit, and would require defining which kinds of foreign affiliations would be inappropriate for the leaders of labor organizations,” he said.
If universities want federal taxpayer money, “they may have to behave in a way that does not promote or facilitate extremist organizations with official recognition,” Greene said.
