“They’re so impressedd with what our country will become that they decided ded to do this before the fact.”t.”

Seen, But Not Heard

took time away from his own dissertation work to prepare for the class. “It’s reasonable to view that as a work assignment that I’d been given, not to pretend that this is about my development as a scholar and teacher,” Katz says. He’s joined other Columbia graduate students in petitioning the federal government for the right to unionize as they seek higher pay and other concessions, including better health benefits, for the teaching and research they do while pursuing their degrees.

The National Labor Relations Board is expected to rule sometime this summer. Katz and his co-workers have petitioned to join the United Auto Workers. The AFL-CIO has also weighed in on their behalf. “They’re providing a service and receiving compensation,” says AFL-CIO general counsel Craig Becker, who served on the NLRB during President Obama’s first term. “It’s up to them to decide whether, even though they’re also students, they think they would benefit from collective bargaining.”

Columbia, which opposes grad student unionization, has won support from all seven of its fellow Ivy League schools, along with Stanford and MIT. The schools joined together in February to file an amicus brief warning that collective bargaining would threaten faculty authority over educational decisions involving undergraduates as well as teaching assistants. “This is viewed as a fundamental issue of academic freedom,” says attorney Joseph Ambash, who wrote the Ivies’ brief.

In its own filing, Columbia compared its graduate assistants to student interns at Fox Searchlight Pictures: A federal court last year ruled the interns don’t have to be paid minimum wage if it can be determined that they benefit more than the company does from their time on the job. “The benefits they receive far outweigh any advantage the University receives from student-performed teaching or research,” Columbia’s attorneys wrote. “[T]he university exercises control for entirely pedagogical purposes.” Columbia declined to comment further.

Unionization among graduate students at public universities has been widespread for decades because those student workers are treated as government employees. In 2000 the NLRB, then dominated by President Clinton’s appointees, ruled in favor of letting graduate students unionize at New York University, the first such victory at a private institution. That precedent was overturned in 2004, under President George W. Bush, when the NLRB rejected a unionization push at Brown. “Being a graduate assistant working toward a degree is not a relationship that’s primarily economic. It’s primarily academic,” says former NLRB member Ronald Meisburg, who was part of the majority that voted in favor of blocking unionization at Brown.

After that decision, NYU ceased to recognize its graduate students’ union. Students filed a fresh unionization petition in 2010 to the NLRB, which signaled it might be open to undoing the Bush-era ruling and returning to the precedent set under Clinton. In 2013, NYU allowed the UAW to establish a union that covered most of the students the UAW had asked to represent. “We felt there was a middle ground,” NYU Executive Vice President Bob Berne said at the time. “We felt that both the union and the university learn learned from the first experience.”

Th That helped fuel student unionization effort efforts at other prominent universities. The A American Federation of Teachers is organizingorga at Cornell. The university announ announced on April 13 that it’s opened talks withwi student representatives about recogniz recognizing a union. “The university would completely fall apart without that labor force,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Graduate assistants at Yale have announced their support for the hospitality union Unite Here, which represents the school’s clerical and service staff.

In addition to Columbia, the UAW is organizing at Manhattan’s New School and at Harvard, where it announced on April 28 that it’s won majority support from teaching and research assistants. “I don’t think any powerful institution wants to concede power or voice to anybody,” says Felix Owusu, a firstyear Harvard doctoral student in public policy. “The administration at Harvard, I guess it’s not surprising that they’re not an exception.” �Josh Eidelson

Donald Trump in a May 11 Fox & Friends interview, where he was asked whether his campaign had influenced Budweiser’s decision to rebrand its beer “America” The bottom line Unions are targeting the wealthiest universities in the U.S. to win higher pay and benefits for graduate students who teach.

side and overturned the ban, and in February the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the city’s appeal. “I kind of feel privileged that I was able to help people have the right to do this,” says Norton, 55, who carries a cardboard sign asking for help.

His victory came thanks to a 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court in which the justices agreed with the arguments of Arizona pastor Clyde Reed, who wanted to put up signs directing people to Sunday services at his church. He challenged a local ordinance that put strict time limits on signs providing directions. Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said the law treated directional signs differently from other displays, such as those for political candidates. Under previous Supreme Court rulings, restrictions on specific types of speech were considered valid only if they were narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.

Lower courts have taken Thomas’s reasoning to mean that anti-panhandling ordinances unfairly suppress certain kinds of speech. They’ve overturned anti-begging ordinances as well as others outlawing ballot-box selfies and robocalls for political campaigns. “Any law distinguishing one kind of speech from another by reference to its meaning now requires a compelling justification,” Frank Easterbrook, a federal appeals court judge, wrote in the Springfield case.

Bans in Worcester and Lowell, Mass., have been overturned by lower courts, as have others in Grand Junction, Colo., and Portland, Maine. Similar ordinances are being challenged in New Hampshire and Oklahoma. Other states and municipalities have since decided not to enforce their laws because the Supreme Court refused to hear Springfield’s appeal. “You cannot declare a downtown zone a no-free-speech zone,” says Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “You cannot ban free speech, and so-called panhandling is free speech.”

Advocates for the poor say antibegging ordinances criminalize poverty and overlook the root problems of mental illness, drug addiction, and homelessness that can lead to panhandling. “The answer is not to deploy the criminal justice system to arrest people but to assure there are sufficient resources to resolve the problem,” says Maria Foscarinis, founder and executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, which advocates for policies that prevent and reduce homelessness.

The popularity of panhandling bans jumped at the beginning of the decade. The number of cities with blanket bans increased 25 percent from 2011 to 2014, according to a 2015 report from the Law Center. Springfield enacted its ordinance in 2007. Steven Rahn, Springfield’s attorney, says the city was simply trying to protect merchants’ economic interests. “We don’t think the Supreme Court ever intended to go with quite that broad of a ruling,” he says.

“Merchants would like there to be a respectful coexistence,” says Lisa Clemmons Stott, executive director of Downtown Springfield, a nonprofit that promotes cultural and economic development. “You can’t have people urinating in doorways and panhandling customers who are eating lunch outside.” Garret Moffett, who leads daily tours of the area dressed as Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s friend and personal bodyguard, agrees: “I don’t call it panhandling. I call it harassment.” Norton agrees that aggressive panhandling poses a nuisance. He seeks donations by holding a sign, not verbally asking for money. Mark Weinberg, a Chicago civil rights lawyer who represented Norton and Otterson, says there’s no compelling economic interest that justifies squelching free speech. “What’s going on in Springfield is broadly representative of cities around the country,” he says. “For Girl Scout Cookies, it’s yes. For panhandlers, it’s no.” �Tim Jones, with Greg Stohr

Homelessness in cities that have enacted panhandling restrictions Nationally, homelessness is down 11% since 2010

Cities that want to crack down on panhandling find courts siding with beggars after the Supreme Court expanded rights to free speech.

Edited by Allison Hoffman Bloomberg.com