Wall Street Journal - March 25, 1999
Commentary The International Brotherhood Of Eggheads
By Paul Kennedy, a professor of history at Yale University.
Given the excitement of NATO's military strikes in the Balkans, even the most avid newspaper readers may have missed reports that graduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles, voted on Monday in overwhelming numbers to form a union affiliated with the United Auto Workers, and that their brethren at seven other University of California campuses may soon follow suit.
Before rushing to conclude that we have here just another example of the unreal world of the West Coast, readers should note that this is a national trend. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the UAW already represents graduate students at the University of Massachusetts and has a bid for similar representation at New York University. The Communication Workers of America represents graduate assistants at most of the larger campuses of the State University of New York, and have bids in at Indiana University. The United Electrical Workers (I kid ye not) are similarly active in union negotiations for graduate teachers at the University of Iowa.
Not to be outdone, a "graduate employees" association (acronym GESO) at Yale University is asking the National Labor Relations Board for recognition as a chapter of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union. Further research might reveal that the National Candlestick Makers Union is active among the Ph.D.s at Duke or Texas, but the pattern we can draw from the above examples is already clear.
The reasons for certain groups of graduate students to seek outside help are not difficult to fathom. While well-heeled private universities like Princeton, Stanford and (latterly) Yale nowadays waive tuition costs and offer five-year stipends to incoming Ph.D.s, their less fortunate peers at the under-funded state universities receive far less assistance and can only survive by teaching large number of undergraduates. With dreams of becoming future Ivy-League professors cramped by the glut of candidates for any teaching job, especially in the humanities and social sciences, it is easy to imagine oneself as an aggrieved member of an exploited academic proletariat, requiring the same protection as the mineworkers and railwaymen of a century ago.
Besides, association with the UAW gives the protesting Ph.D.s hitherto unheard-of resources, such as free legal expertise and a strike fund. It is also easy for the student organizers to abandon their own dissertations and imagine that they have become professional, full-time union leaders, latter-day equivalents of historical figures who manned the barricades for worker's rights. The former GESO lead organizer at Yale is now revealed to have received $22,500 from the Hotel Employees Union in 1997 for her services as a union "officer," which is more than twice the going rate for graduate stipends in the humanities. Were the National Labor Relations Board to compel Yale to recognize GESO as a negotiating body, there would doubtless develop a new career track for Ph.D.s who find all this campaigning much more exciting than their work on Milton or Freud.
One can debate elsewhere the pros and cons of using graduate students as teaching assistants at some stage during their Ph.D. years--is it chiefly to give them vital experience as future college professors, or to exploit them as graduate proles?
The important question raised here is why the leadership of national trade unions, especially those founded to protect the interests of blue-collar workers, are investing such resources in "bidding" to represent graduate students at universities across the U.S. It is well known that union membership has declined substantially over the past 20 or more years, so it could be argued that lateral recruitment is part of a strategy of survival. But does the term "lateral" mean anyone and everybody, regardless of incongruity?
Has it never occurred to the NLRB that orders to universities to permit graduates to be represented by an autoworkers union, or a restaurant employees union, look, well, silly? Will it not simply alienate the more moderate graduate students, who do not want their concerns represented by an ambitious and professionally distant electricians' union?
Moreover, has anyone in the union bureaucracies asked their own rank-and-file what they think of subsidizing graduate students at Yale and elsewhere, and explained how this boosts the national position of hotel employees? I have tried to imagine how my father and my uncles (all shipyard boilermakers) would have reacted a quarter-century ago had they been told that part of their union dues was going to pay the salaries of graduate organizers at, say, Oxford; but my mind boggles in the effort.
University life has its own idiosyncracies that often make the world outside shake its head, whether in admiration or disgust; but the insertion of Trojan Horses from the very different sphere of organized labor into the delicate negotiation processes with our own Ph.D. students looks both clumsy and absurd. It ought to stop, before both the unions and their graduate sympathizers lose even further respect.