Another criteria for those of us in academia or related fields has to do with both the health/well-being (as well as justice) regarding how people are treated in our profession. When University administrations (and, sadly, enabling faculty) use reactionary Bush-appointee NLRB decisions to bust unions and threaten the livelihoods (and therefore careers) of graduate students, well, that feels like our business. At least it does to me. I feel as though I have an interest in being part of a profession that reacts strongly against this sort of treatment. Just another rationale for me, and probably for a number of readers of this blog, who skew toward that profession.

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(I take it the point is it’s hard to live in NYC on a small salary.)

As for the idea that contributing to the strike fund is an act of “charity”—maybe this is a Britishism (I don’t know who in this discussion is from where) or something, but I cringe at that word in this context. “Charity,” to my ears, means the kind of direct meeting of needs you get through, say, a soup kitchen. Politics—including union politics—is something else, and political decisions are (or should be) governed by more strategic and less emotional criteria than charitable decisions (Weber, anyone?): whether the plight of NYU grad students pulls our heart-strings matters less than the importance of the NYU strike in the broader academic labor movement, and the place of the academic labor movement in the US labor movement in general. By both of those criteria, I’d say the NYU strike is fairly important—but that’s a longer argument (parts of which have been covered before on Crooked Timber—see the posts Henry links to in comment #9).

I think there is another important criterion which is that grad school is generally an optional vocation for reasonably intelligent people who could therefore be otherwise profitably employed. When you are talking about coal miners in West Virginia, that is really not the case. So even though there may be people worse off elsewhere, the coal miners do get more of my support. And maybe I’m mistaken, but I find it hard to believe that looking at it this way, a lot of people wouldn’t agree.

I’ve observed people in these comment threads suggest similar sentiments, but they usually follow it up with at least somewhat disparaging remarks about their unionization efforts. But I’ll cheer them on instead.

No they don’t; they’re not on strike.

Living in NYC on

Is this information inaccurate?

Probably because for many of us absolute deprivation rate is only one factor amongst many in our allotment of charity. To take your logic a bit further, there’d be no plausible justification for financially supporting any strike fund in the US or the West generally, as there are much worse off and needy people than even janitors and farm workers all over the world. I’m not criticizing this criteria for allocating charity, it’s not a bad one I don’t think. But it does diverge pretty sharply from how just about everyone actually allocates charitable resources.

That being said, I’m not particularly sympathetic to the grad students’ cause. What I mean is that I’m not likely to donate to their fund or whatever. And my reason is pretty simple: people who choose to be grad students generally have other better options. And they also aren’t at the very bottom anyhow. So my attitude is: more power to them if they can do better, but don’t look to me for help. I’m surprised that so few people seem to hold this position. I guess its b/c most of you guys are in academics so it impacts most of you pretty strongly one way or the other.