News & Publications

As anticipated, today the National Labor Relations Board published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ("NPRM") proposing a regulation which would establish that students at private colleges and universities who perform any services related to their studies for compensation, including teaching and research, are not "employees" within the meaning of Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act. The proposed rule would bring certainty to the student employee-status issue, which the Board oscillated on three times in sixteen [...]

The National Labor Relations Board took the latest step in the long-simmering debate over whether college teaching and research assistants could unionize when it released a proposed rule on Friday that would once again block such efforts. Declaring that university students should not qualify as employees under federal labor law, the Board took the first step to reverse a 2016 ruling by the Obama-era NLRB that opened the door for certain graduate and undergraduate students to form unions. The [...]

On August 7, 2019, a federal district court in Rhode Island rejected a student's disability discrimination claim against Bryant University. The student enrolled in the University’s Physician's Assistant program, a rigorous program that requires enrollees to maintain a 3.0 grade point average. The student fell short of that average in his first term. At the start of his second term, he requested an accommodation for ADHD in the form of time-and-a-half for each exam. The College granted [...]