Yale University may be at the forefront of campus labor issues lately, but that does not make Robert Farrish's issues with Wesleyan University any less frustrating for him.

Mr. Farrish, a public safety officer at the university, is the chief steward of Wesleyan's new arm of the United Federation of Security Officers. He said the university has been loath to acknowledge the union, so a federal mediator has been called to the campus for a meeting this month to talk to the two sides. Yet little has been publicized about the dispute. That is partly because the university isn't talking (indeed, Wesleyan officials refused to comment) and partly because Yale's much-publicized workplace problems have managed to drown out just about every other campus labor issue in the state.

But those issues are still there, from Wesleyan's 21 public safety officers calling for contract negotiations to the University of Connecticut Health Center's 140 post-doctoral fellows working to join a union. But elsewhere it has been quiet. There is mutual admiration between the administration and unions at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, and at UConn's Storrs campus, there has been a long tradition of the two sides getting along. Harry J. Hartley, UConn's president for much of the 1990's, was president of the professors' union before he led the university.

What makes labor issues at college campuses often more compelling than those in the corporate world is the notion that parity for workers probably should figure somewhere in the philosophies of higher education.

"As a university faculty member and a student who studied labor relations, I do believe there should be a higher standard on campuses regarding workers' rights," said Tom Juravich, director of the Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Part of that comes from a belief that we do have to model for our students what we study and what we profess, and it's a little ironic and a little scary when our talk and our walk are so different."

Private and public universities in Connecticut differ in their approach to labor strife. The federal National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, gave private-sector employees collective bargaining rights. Because public employees were exempted from the Wagner Act, states were left to determine how they were going to deal with their own employees. Connecticut enacted a law in 1977 that prohibited public employees, who included workers at state-run institutions, from striking, but allowed for collective bargaining. "Collective bargaining is working in most higher education institutions outside of Yale," said Leo Canty, second vice president of A.F.T.-Connecticut, the statewide arm of the American Federation of Teachers.

Connecticut's collective bargaining statute allows employees to form unions and requires employee and employer to bargain in good faith. According to the state's Office of Legislative Research, Connecticut has the broadest binding arbitration law of the four states the office studied: New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The law has managed to create an atmosphere of cooperation in the state's public universities over the years, union leaders said.

"This past year was no picnic," said Ed Marth, executive director of the American Association of University Professors at the University of Connecticut, alluding to the state's budget crisis. "But we were the first organization to propose renegotiation of our contract in order to help the university and the students. That's part of the longstanding goodwill here. If we didn't hold the president of the university in high regard, if we were at sore points like they are at Yale and other places, there would have been no such discussion."

Workers at private universities, alternately, retained the right to strike. Yale employees have used that right regularly, with 13 strikes in the 60 years unions have been present at the university. Strikes at other universities in the state, however, are rare. Even unions are still unusual on college campuses, union organizers said, which is why thousands of workers at one university get so much attention when they strike.

At Wesleyan, labor issues have been roiling for the last few years. In early 2002, Wesleyan food-service workers joined with students in a march and rally, complete with a band playing Samba music, to promote full health coverage for the workers in their new contract with Aramark, the university's food-service provider. The union eventually won a wage increase and kept much of its health benefits.

In the spring of 2000, almost half the student body at Wesleyan signed a petition supporting the school's janitors in their bid for a new contract. When change didn't occur quickly enough, student organizers, members of the United Student Labor Action Coalition, staged a sit-in at the university's Office of Admissions, at a time of year when the office was busy sending out notifications of admission.

Their efforts were part of a nationwide movement coordinated by the Service Employees International Union called "Justice for Janitors," which sought to unionize janitors nationwide. The successful efforts gained national attention not only because janitors were winning health coverage at a time when thousands of others were losing theirs, but because on campuses, students were sitting out in the cold for hours, missing classes and staying up at night to draw posters to rally for the working class. At Trinity College, Fairfield University, Central Connecticut State University, the University of Connecticut and Capital Community College, to name a few, students all worked to unionize janitors.

"Although the colleges all realized this was the right thing to do, it didn't happen overnight," said Kurt Westby, district supervisor of local 32bj of the Service Employees International Union. "The workers and students all had to campaign, and there was resistance by the contractors. The universities allowed the contractors to resist for a while, because the industry without the union is one of cutthroat lowball bidding down to minimum wage."

Both Fairfield and Trinity said they have good relations with the unions that are on their campuses. Only 76 of Trinity's employees belong to Local 32bj. "We have an excellent, longstanding relationship with them," said Mary O'Connor, a Trinity spokeswoman. At Fairfield, Martha Milcarek, a spokeswoman, pointed to the university's policy on worker rights. It reads: "The University recognizes, supports and respects the right of individual employees to express their own personal freedom of choice regarding union organization and membership."

At Western Connecticut State University, everyone seems to get along. One union organizer even holds up the university's president as an icon of good behavior.

In the spring, cafeteria workers who work for the university's food-service provider, Sodexho, decided to unionize. They joined with several students and a union organizer, marching into the president's office to demand a meeting with him. The president, James R. Roach, welcomed them.

"He immediately sat down to talk to us and was receptive to the workers' concerns," said Katharine Cristiani, an organizer with Local 217 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. "The president is a great guy." Such good feeling all around helped the workers succeed in their union effort. It also helped Dr. Roach keep labor complaints to a minimum on his campus, even if the university's costs for the Sodexho food-service contract might increase due to a raise in cafeteria workers' pay and benefits.

"To me, it was a matter of justice and a fair day's pay for a fair day's work," said Dr. Roach, who has a doctorate of philosophy in world religions. "We're in the business of education, which has many dimensions to it, and our concern for justice ought to be paramount. I don't wear two hats: I try to integrate both of the concerns I have, as an employer and educator. And my basic concern is for the human condition."

For John Wagner, a post-doctoral fellow at the UConn Health Center, the story was different. Mr. Wagner was one of 140 post-doctoral fellows who worked to join University Health Professionals AFT Local 3837 to improve base wages. These are not people who are schooled in the basics of unionizing: Mr. Wagner is a mathematician who works in computational biology and a Universal Life minister who periodically marries couples.

So when during the organizing effort an instructor at the health center walked around a lab filled with post-doctoral fellows yelling that unionization was evil and had no place in science, Mr. Wagner said, many fellows were unnerved.

"There was a lot of simple intimidation," Mr. Wagner said. "Certainly, we didn't encounter as much resistance as Yale. But considering we were a group of 140 trying to join a group of 1,900 at the health center already, we did encounter a good deal of resistance, from administration all the way to the top, and as the vote got closer, faculty applying pressure." The fellows voted to join the union.

Mr. Juravich of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst said he believed institutions of higher education are placing higher priorities on balance sheets than ever before.

"There is a disconnect between faculty that is connected to ideas and values and administrations that are increasingly committed to the bottom line," he said. "In earlier generations, administrators tended to come from the ranks of faculty, and there was much more of a recognition that there had to be some of a consort between action and ideas. Now, administrators are increasingly coming from the private sector, and they are looking to run universities like corporations."