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The American Federation of Teachers and Brown University signed an agreement on Thursday saying that if at least 30 percent of the university’s graduate students sign union cards and a successful election is subsequently held, then Brown will recognize the union and negotiate with them in good faith. However, other Ivy League schools, like Columbia, continue to all-out reject the possibility of bargaining with a graduate student union. Brown’s decision to commit to recognizing an elected union is significant under the current hyper-conservative NLRB, which is currently graduate student unions’ only resource for taking on an administration who refuses to recognize them. The seven Ivies were initially uniformly against the idea of bargaining with graduate student unions when the decision which granted graduate student workers collective bargaining rights in 2016. However, that has apparently changed. The president of the American Federation of Teachers praised the Brown University administration for avoiding the “Trumpian low road”.