> Wall Street Journal - March 25, 1999
> Commentary
> The International Brotherhood Of Eggheads
> By Paul Kennedy, a professor of history at Yale University.
Ho ho -- this is too good to pass up. Forgive the length of this little excursus, fellow LBOsters, but I gotta haul out the flamethrower on this one.
> 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.
As the professional, full-time union leader of the GTFF grad union at the U of O (http://www.efn.org/~gtff), I feel qualified to state that this article is one of the most dire pieces of shit I've read in my life. Nowhere in this tract does he mention a single fact relating to grad workers' wages or working conditions. The fact is, we bust our ass for peanuts, are dreadfully underpaid compared to faculty despite teaching the same classes, receive miniscule benefits. He does admit, covertly, that Yale's stipends run a measly $12000 a year -- chickenfeed compared to the average US professor, who makes around $55,000 a year, let alone the six-figure compensation packages of Yale professors. We're not talking about Podunkus U., we're talking about a university with an endowment worth more than six *billion* dollars.
> 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?
It's to teach shitloads of undergrads while avoiding hiring full-time professors. Yale doesn't need to do this, but does anyway; for most universities in the US, though, grad workers are indispensable. If we didn't exist, half the schools in this country would've gone bankrupt already. Grads teach a third of the credit hours here at the U of O, for example. If Kennedy thinks we're not exploited, I'd gladly trade my salary and teaching responsibilities for his for a year -- he'd turn into a union radical faster than Clark Kent busting out of his zoot suit.
> 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.
This is a fine example of what Bourdieu termed the reactionary ressentiment of the intellectual parvenu (not the newly rich, but the newly educated). Note how he displaces the personal anxieties of his own ambition and drive to succeed (he's the son of manual laborers, and so was handicapped from the start compared to the wealthy offspring of the bourgeoisie) onto the uncouth attempt by blue-collar union bureaucracies to politicize the supposedly non-political space of the university. Hell, said Sartre, is other people; the postmodern version of this is that hell is other people's success. As anyone who knows anything about grad unions knows, grads primarily organized themselves, and didn't rely upon outside organizers. If anything, the traditional unions held up the works, by refusing to take grad unions seriously for years and years; here in Oregon, we had to pressure our state-level AFT people to get on the ball and put the necessary resources into an organizing drive up at OSU, in Corvallis.
It's interesting that he mentions union dues, though; on some level, deep down, he knows he owes his class-conscious forebears some sort of debt, and he can't quite figure out what it might be. The thought worries him: there's more than a little repressed envy in the way he demonizes paid organizers as overpaid agents of giant bureaucracies, just as he himself is a vastly overpaid agent of the Yale academic bureaucracy, in a time and era when multinational capital is beginning to automate even the highest-paid professors out of their jobs.
> clumsy and absurd. It ought to stop, before both the unions and their
> graduate sympathizers lose even further respect.
We're just getting started, my friend. Today grads, tomorrow adjuncts! But I'm afraid history will judge Kennedy harshly: the Professor's essay gets an "F" in the most important class of all, the class struggle.
-- Dennis (President of the GTFF 1999-2000)