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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.))

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.

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.

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.