Universities exist to nurture intellectual life, not to bankroll the ambitions of professional activists.

Stanford graduate students came to campus to do research and pursue scholarship. Instead, as I learned reading this piece by Jon Hartley and Dylan Rem in the Stanford Review this week, many are discovering that their enrollment has made them targets in a union shakedown. Hartley also has a piece in the Wall Street Journal here.

In June, students received emails from the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) with the ominous subject line: “Termination Request.” The union demanded that Stanford fire graduate students who had not paid dues. Copies of these threats were sent to the university’s labor-relations office, ensuring that administrators knew the union expected compliance.

This coercion stems from a graduate worker union collective bargaining agreement Stanford signed in 2024 after the threat of a graduate student strike. Nonmembers may pay “agency fees” instead of dues, but the cost is effectively the same, and the money still flows to the union. In other words, in California, which is not a right-to-work state, graduate workers at Stanford cannot avoid financially supporting the union.

You can be a supporter of the right to unionize and still think this is excessive. I do.

In this case, Hartley argues, it matters because the SGWU is not a campus advocacy group narrowly focused on improving student life. It is formally tied to the United Electrical Workers, a national union that devotes much of its resources to salaries for its staff and to progressive political causes. By SGWU’s own disclosure, nearly two-thirds of dues are siphoned off campus. Students are forced to surrender hundreds of dollars each year of their relatively small stipend to fund activism that they may not support.

Adding insult to injury, the union has taken to harassment tactics. Graduate students report being peppered with unsolicited text messages and blindsided by automatic deductions from their stipends unless they explicitly opted out. SGWU looks less like a representative body and more like a collection agency.

Stanford’s administrators admit the union’s “termination requests” are unprecedented. They should also admit that they are outrageous. Graduate students are not steelworkers on an assembly line. Many of them are scholars and academics in training. Harvard University recently recognized that reality, exempting hundreds of Ph.D. candidates on research-based stipends on from its graduate union. Harvard rightly drew a line between stipends that support scholarship and wages that compensate employees. If Harvard can recognize the distinction, surely Stanford can, too.

The deeper problem is that SGWU is not primarily interested in protecting graduate students. Its mission is to collect money and funnel it into the coffers of a national union with a political agenda. The “termination requests” make clear that coercion, not representation, is its strategy. What it offers is not solidarity but blackmail tactics: pay up, or we’ll take away your degree and your livelihood.

Hartley is fighting against this. As he writes in the WSJ:

Because the union’s advocacy contravenes my Roman Catholic faith, I am seeking a religious-objector accommodation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Stanford claims qualification for such an accommodation is at the discretion of the union.

My understanding is that his case is now in the hands of the union, and whether he keeps his job will depend on whether it accepts his status as a religious objector.

I am not sure what Stanford can do legally to protect its students, but at the very least, it should follow Harvard’s lead and reclassify graduate students as scholars, not unionized employees. Universities exist to nurture intellectual life, not to bankroll the ambitions of professional activists.