Tenured Radicals and Grad Student Unionization (fwd)

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at oregon.uoregon.edu
Sun Jul 23 17:22:33 PDT 2000


On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> all, I like & trust most of the left-wing professors at OSU. So,
> unlike at Yale, the problem here is less by-now-deradicalized
> left-wing "tenured radicals" than explicit & implicit pressures put
> upon all of us by President, Provost, & Deans (and sometimes Chairs &
> Vice Chairs too) to be politically quiet & focus on our "profession"
> and "service" to the university

Yes, this is also pretty much the case at the University of Oregon, there are a few radical folks who are totally cool, but the reality is most of the sympathetic non-tenured profs have hefty workloads and really are too busy to do much more than sign a petition now and then (they need a union, of course). Also, tenured profs often have real misunderstandings of what postmodern political commitment means (kind of like the sequel to Teddy Adorno's total incomprehension of the street activism of the New Left). I'll never forget one prof who belonged to the '68 generation, a decent guy, really, telling a group of us undergrads (we were occupying the President's office at Antioch back in 1990) to, "Like, make sure noone trashes the office." We kind of stared at the guy, totally not understanding what he was saying. He wasn't being rude, he was actually trying to help us out -- it's just that, for his generation, you blew things up, you know? It's that we regarded the office as *our office*, which meant respecting the secretaries, equipment, office space, etc.

-- Dennis



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