Strikebreaking

by Henry Farrell on April 26, 2005

There’s a very disturbing report in the Nation, about a memo in which Alan Brinkley, the provost of Columbia University, suggested that the university consider punishing graduate TAs who went on strike. The key paras:

In addition, the University should consider taking other measures to discourage teaching fellows from abandoning their instructional responsibilities. These will vary depending on whether the teaching fellows are still on the five-year funding plan or teaching in a later year of study. Students in their first five years of study could

1) Be required to teach an extra semester or year within the five-year period in order to meet the teaching requirements for their degree;
2) Lose their eligibility for summer stipends; and
3) Lose their eligibility for special awards, such as the Whitings.

Students beyond their fifth year of study could be told that

1) They are jeopardizing their chances of receiving further instructional assignments;
and
2) Those teaching in the Core will not receive the summer stipends normally given to preceptors who are reappointed to teach in the subsequent year.

It’s not at all clear that these threats were either made to the students or acted upon, but Brinkley should still be ashamed of himself. Punitive action against students exercising their right to strike would be flat-out illegal, had the administration-stacked NLRB not reversed its decision that graduate students had the right to organize. It’s certainly quite repugnant to the ideals of the university. This is a sorry day for Columbia.

(via Inside Higher Ed).

{ 23 comments }

1

John Emerson 04.26.05 at 3:42 pm

Heightening the contradictions. (Evil grin).

2

agm 04.26.05 at 3:44 pm

While the NLRB ruling is stupid, grad students who have not secured a right to strike risk just this behavior on the part of a school when they do so. Grad students are not employees unless they are explicitly hired to do something, or, less delicately, if you claim that you have an employer-employee relationship with an organization, then don’t be surprised if they stop employing you when you stop doing the work you claim to have been hired to do.

It’s merely Columbia protecting itself by taking a step to ensure that grad students perform the tasks they agreed to do (and I say this as a modestly ::cough:: paid but really shittily insured grad student myself).

3

urizon 04.26.05 at 4:22 pm

Fellowship is a type of indentured servitude — a servitude in which soon I hope to find myself shackled, assuming any schools accept my yet-to-be-submitted applications — but hey, usually it’s for fewer than the traditional seven years, and you get place some swanky letters after your name. And let’s not forget the enormous increase in earning power. I’ve heard tell that a gas station attendedant with a PhD can expect to earn as much as fifty cents per hour more than the mullet-head living up the street.

Sing it with me: “And I’m proud to be an American . . . .”

4

John Emerson 04.26.05 at 5:14 pm

As far as I know, every single argument against unionizing grad students was used at some time in the past for some other category of worker which is now unionized. The issue isn’t grad students and their special situation, it’s unions.

As the academic career gets less appealing, especially in the humanities, and as increasingly more PhD’s have crappy jobs both before and after getting their degrees, unionization is going to become more and more appealing. If the harsh apprenticeship were normally followed by a great job, the system could continue indefinitely.

5

Joel Turnipseed 04.26.05 at 5:41 pm

Voices of Protest indeed…

6

John Emerson 04.26.05 at 5:53 pm

Or even “often followed by a great job”.

7

David All 04.26.05 at 7:00 pm

Everybody’s in favor of Unions untill they threathen their own little serfdoms! It really does all depend on whose ox is gored. I.E. whose interest is effected!

Joel turnipseed # 5: “Voices of Protest indeed…” Yes that was the tittle of Alan Brinkley’s book about Huey Long and Father Coughlin during the Great Depression!

8

Colin Danby 04.26.05 at 7:25 pm

I can remember similar reversals at U.Mass. Amherst, where for example one famous lefty labor economist not only opposed our ultimately-successful unionizing efforts but, it was rumored, advised the administration on how to fight us. The positions people occupy in an organization have a lot of influence on how they behave. One of the reasons to pursue TA unionization is precisely to make TAs less vulnerable to the punitive whims of people higher up.

9

Jackmormon 04.26.05 at 8:22 pm

For what it’s worth, the university never threatened the grad students directly before the strike. Some of the union organizers are acquaintences of mine, and they had never heard of these punitive measures until the Nation article got ahold of this memo.

10

John Emerson 04.26.05 at 8:57 pm

This is an obsessive interest of mine, and I will try to be (against my nature) somewhat restrained. But everything is relative.

I think that the current deflation/labor oversupply situation in the humanities is having two really damaging effects on the future of scholarship.

The first effect is that a higher and higher proportion of the actual positions available are adjunct or grad student positions which are too labor-intensive to actually serve the function of supporting scholarship. This is fine for someone whose goal was jsut to teach, but anyone who also wanted to contribute to scholarship will be unhappy. Increasingly it seems that we have a two-track system made of of researchers who in some cases don’t teach at all, and teachers who don’t have time to do research. I don’t believe that that was the original plan.

Second, the system in place gives the whip hand to the ones making hiring and grading decisions. I believe, without being able to prove it, there has been a movement toward orthodoxy and methodological narrowness in the humanities. In particular, people I know in grad school ALWAYS seem to be looking over their shoulders and taking care not to say something which has been forbidden. This is more controversial than point one.

Third, I think that this kind of orthodox control of a dwindling but guaranteed base can easily lead to erudite, formalistic stagnation of the Scholastic type. And in fact, is leading to that.

11

Michael 04.26.05 at 9:58 pm

Par for the course, actually. Many such similar threats were floated at Yale in the late ’80s when we first attempted to organize the graduate TAs there. I vividly recall that the good-liberal English Department was an enthusiastic participant in the effort to intimidate grad student union activists out of their activism.

Oh, and what John Emerson says in the comment above is exactly right. I’m no longer in an academic department, but the drift of things toward orthodoxy and intellectual timidity was clear by the time I left, now almost eight years ago.

12

SamChevre 04.26.05 at 10:30 pm

I’m not a grad student and I don’t have a grad degree, so maybe I’m missing something–but what’s the problem with sanction (1)? If it’s a requirement that one teach for x amount of time to be qualified, why would time on strike count toward the teaching requirement?

13

David Noon 04.27.05 at 12:45 am

Alan Brinkley is the author of one of the best-selling — and most expensive — American history surveys on the market. One wonders how many graduate students labored over the years to research, edit, and (who knows?) write and revise that book, which has no doubt allowed Professor Brinkley to purchase an extra house.

14

lakelobos 04.27.05 at 2:04 am

Columbia has now two scandals in a row: the discussed strikebreaking talk and the failure to assemble an impartial committee to investigate students’ complaint against a group of professors. Way to go lice!

Sadly, however, academe is ruled by individuals who think, like the current administration, that position of leadership makes them superior to others. This holds for many presidents, VPs, Deans and even the lowly chairs. Enron, we miss you.

Too many of us, even on the left, started to regard labor union, labor and strike as blue collar entrapments. We, honkey collared, stay away from such nonneat rituals. Bad news, the right to unionize and the right to strike are as important as free speech. You kill the first, the latter will be next.

15

Zehou 04.27.05 at 8:51 am

The tactics described in the memo are familiar. I was told some years ago, for example, that, should the grad students unionize, depts. just might be forced to “look outside” to hire folks for adjunct teaching work.

(The idea was: as things stand, depts. hire students who are finishing up their dissertations even though there might conceivably be more qualified teachers available, and depts. do this because they know the experience will be good preparation for their students’ careers; but if the students start drawing attention to this practice and try to tell depts. that they are being hired as employees (nothing more, nothing less) to do work (a job), then perhaps depts. might be required by law to advertise the opening and hire any applicants who happen to be more qualified than student members of the dept., and then students may not do so well on the job market since they won’t have as much preparation. And while depts. and administrators will, of course, be very sad about the suffering of their pro-union students, their hands will be tied (by what those students did out of greed and lack of foresight (etc., etc., etc.))

16

John Emerson 04.27.05 at 9:16 am

It really seems that there’s a collapse on the way. If adjuncts were hired to replaced TA’s, there’d be many fewer grad students for the real faculty to teach, and less reason for them not to teach undergrads, so even a lot of the adjuncts might end up being unneeded.

At some point I think that the grad school system expanded farther than it should, and will soon rapidly shrink. My own alma mater, Portland State (a third rank school) had big plans around 1970 or so, and has been shedding programs for decades. About 10 years ago it reinvented itself as a business/ engineering/ tech/ vocational “urban university”, and the humanities types are still fuming. They’re mostly ancillary personnel now, providing required courses for non-humanities majors.

17

roger 04.27.05 at 10:54 am

If David Horowitz seriously wants to change the political coloring of universities, he should throw himself into unionizing grad students. The best liberal academics, clucking about the oppression visited upon miners in Bolivia and the like, are galvanized by the very idea into acting like Walmart executives. I saw this happen when the grad students struck at Yale in the nineties. That produced amazing changes among star Yale academics, as if suddenly they all understood the point of God and Man at Yale and agreed heartily. It was a neat study in mass hypocrisy.
I do hope some sociologist is researching the Yale and Columbia cases.

18

M. Gordon 04.27.05 at 11:58 am

I hate to admit that I watch this (my girlfriend got me hooked, I swear!) but on “Gilmore Girls” this week, in a scene that takes place at Yale, striking graduate students are marching in the background.

19

sara 04.27.05 at 3:50 pm

So you can study Marxist and critical theory, but you’re not invited to put it to use?

20

Colin Danby 04.27.05 at 5:18 pm

Actually, Sara, you can put the Marxist theory to excellent use as a grad student by figuring out that you’re at the bottom of a feudal hierarchy.

Many anti-unionization arguments have a distinctly 18th-century flavor: TAs are seen as wards, apprentices, people who have not yet attained the full adult humanity that would let them be seen as independent workers.

21

Ancarett 04.27.05 at 9:14 pm

Wow, such hostility to TA unions. I was part of one when I was a graduate student. We went on strike twice (walking picket lines in a snowy Canadian winter is not loads of fun) and still kept comfortable relationships with most of the faculty (ironically, non-unionized).

Now I’m at a university where the faculty are unionized. We’ve even gotten the part timers organized. It’s time to move onto the graduate students/TAs and help them get organized, if they want. I can’t see any reason to be hostile to this — they’re woefully underpaid, especially those in the humanities who lack stipends.

22

Peter Woit 04.28.05 at 8:22 am

Before people get all outraged about the Columbia university administration’s behavior, they should be aware of several facts:

1. “It’s not at all clear that these threats were either made to the students or acted upon” is nonsense. No threats were made or acted upon and no one is claiming otherwise.

2. My understanding is that graduate student stipends are paid in lump sums relatively early in the semester, so there is no way for the university to dock the pay of students who refuse to teach their classes. As far as I know, all students who went on strike last year and this year were fully paid for the period they were striking. Given this situation, if you’re a student TA, why not take the week off and go on strike? It costs you nothing. Brinkley’s memo was just an attempt to see if the university had any viable options for imposing some cost on students who went on strike. The decision was made to take no such action and to continue to pay and reappoint students who went on strike.

3. Support for unionization among the graduate students is remarkably weak. No one seems to have any reliable numbers about how many students went on strike, but it appears to be at most a hundred or so out of a couple thousand graduate student TAs. I walked by the striker’s picket line several times each day during the strike last week, and there were never more than 20 or so people on the picket line. The union claims to have held a strike vote, but both this year and last year has refused to release the number of students voting to strike because it is embarassingly small. At Yale, when a vote was last held about unionization, the graduate students voted against unionization by a significant margin.

3. The treatment of graduate students at Columbia has improved dramatically in recent years, and the current dean (Henry Pinkham) has worked very hard to improve conditions for them. All new doctoral students are now supported for five years, there’s no such thing anymore as students being admitted for graduate study towards a doctorate and not being fully supported. Stipends have increased dramatically in recent years.

Personally I see nothing wrong with graduate students unionizing, but all indications I have seen are that a large majority of the students at Columbia, for quite good reasons, don’t want this union to represent them.

23

David All 04.28.05 at 7:05 pm

Soldarity Forever! The Union makes us Strong!

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