8 companies, one accelerator

TRU life

Happy hump day, Baltimore. Today, I want to talk about something true. Or, more accurately, TRU.

That’s the acronym for Teachers and Researchers United, which will now be representing over 3,300 Johns Hopkins University graduate students after they voted this week (at a margin of 2,053-67, according to the Baltimore Business Journal) to form a union. The grad students of Baltimore’s preeminent private university — whose Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures, the Social Innovation Lab and other entrepreneurship activity frequently appears in our coverage — are the latest in a grad student unionizing push that’s swept American college campuses over the past few years.

As the new union awaits official certification by the National Labor Relations Board and its first collective bargaining agreement negotiation, my interest now lies on how this might impact entrepreneurship among these students. Do the guardrails and minimum stipend of $40K per year that organizers reportedly seek put them in a position to more clearly produce the innovative ideas that Johns Hopkins could help them commercialize? Does it risk an adverse affect beyond these students potentially being blackballed by university leaders who didn’t want the union in the first place (which, to be clear, is horrible and probably illegal)?

These issues clearly matter in a city like Baltimore, where so much innovation comes out of our universities. So let me know your thoughts by emailing baltimore@technical.ly, and thanks.