The Service Employees International Union–affiliated Duke Graduate Students Union is currently trying to earn recognition after a failed attempt in 2016–17. Matthew Thomas, a Duke teaching assistant who co-chairs that union, told Inside Higher Ed that “Duke is declaring war on the grad union movement.” “Undergrads, postdocs, non-tenure-track faculty and academic researchers are forming unions,” Thomas said of the national picture. “Looking at this landscape and then saying that all this should be rolled back and erased is, in a sense, hitting the nuclear button … It’s an attack on grad workers across the country.”
