UChicago grad students sue student union for forcing them to contribute to anti-Israel activities
The union makes graduate students who serve in certain teaching roles pay fees, even if they are not union members.
The union supports certain initiatives and rhetoric that are perceived as anti-Semitic, including support for the controversial BDS movement.
Graduate students at the University of Chicago are suing the graduate student union at the school, stating they are forced to pay dues to the union and fund anti-Semitism, violating their First Amendment rights.
Graduate Students United-United Electrical (GSU-UE), the union in question, was sued on July 22 together with its “parent union,” the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. The plaintiff, Graduate Students for Academic Freedom (GSAF), is a group “founded to promote academic freedom, and combat compelled speech and association across American campuses.”
GSAF’s 42 page complaint states that the GSU-UE forces graduate students to pay the union–whether or not they are members–if they want to keep their jobs as research assistants, teachings assistants, or “similar position[s].”
The lawsuit claims that both GSU-UE and and its parent union, UE, both support anti-Semitism: “Graduate students at the University of Chicago have been put to the choice of halting their academic pursuits, or funding antisemitism.”
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The complaint states that UE “has a long history of antisemitism,” being a supporter of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) campaign–a movement that has been called anti-Semitic–and has a “consuming fixation with the world’s only Jewish state.”
Describing GSU-UE’s actions, the lawsuit says that the graduate student union “has not only echoed its parent union’s rhetoric, but has added to it.”
“It took pains to publicly ‘reaffirm’ its commitment to BDS just one week after the October 7 terrorist attacks. And it has joined the ‘UChicago United for Palestine Coalition,’ which gained notoriety for its protest encampment and hostile takeover of the Institute of Politics. Through it, GSU-UE has joined calls to ‘honor the martyrs’; fight against campus ‘Zionists’; resist ‘pigs’ (i.e., police); ‘liberate’ Palestine from the ‘River to the Sea,’ and by ‘any means necessary’; and ‘bring the intifada home,’” the document details.
GSAF believes that forcing graduate students to fund such union activities in order to retain their teaching positions violates their First Amendment rights.
“[I]f the First Amendment means anything, it means students cannot be compelled to fund a group they find abhorrent as the price of continuing their work,” the lawsuit claims.
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Some of the students “have quit pursuing RA work so long as it comes at the cost of their values,” but others were not able to do so. The lawsuit mentions the case of an Israeli student studying at UChicago who must keep his teaching assistant position in order to remain in the U.S., and another student who needs his research assistant role to support himself financially.
“Others are deeply torn—tortured as to how to weigh their consciences against their careers,” the lawsuit adds.
“What is happening at Chicago is thus as clear an example as it gets of an agency-fee scheme that violates the First Amendment, by the Supreme Court’s own lights,” the document states.
Campus Reform has contacted the University of Chicago and UE for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
