---- A glance at the summer issue of "Social Policy": Leftist professors who oppose unions for teaching assistants
Robert D. Johnston wants to know where all the "tenured radicals" have gone. The assistant professor of history at Yale University looks back to 1996, his second year at the university, and analyzes the cool reaction of tenured faculty members when the Graduate Employees and Students Organization went on strike. Mr. Johnston writes that he came to Yale excited about the leftist views of many of the faculty members, and that he was surprised when he learned that "left-wing faculty sometimes had the most hostile reaction to the idea of graduate-student unions." He explains that "many professors seemed to take genuine glee in watching the administration crush the grade strike, and the anti-union rhetoric at the Yale College faculty meeting where the strike was discussed was venomous." He speculates on why this was the case, considering that graduate student unions "interfere with the sense that tenured faculty know what is best for the institution -- and can decide on what is best without the substantive input of those below them." He also writes of the perceived attitude that unions were for "factory operatives or coal miners; graduate students were privileged would-be members of the elite." In the end, Mr. Johnston finds irony in faculty members' bemoaning the replacement of full-time positions with part-time ones, and yet not engaging in "a dialogue with the one institution at the university that has brought this fundamental issue to the table." To those organizing graduate students and adjunct professors, he writes, "The radical impulses of the New Left generation survive, and it is certainly worth trying to bring them around during an organizing drive. But if, or rather when, they don't come around, it's time to cut bait." The article is available online at http://www.socialpolicy.org _________________________________________________________________
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