Oh, I'm sure there are some serious ruling-class kids at the most prestigious colleges, and it may be their attitudes that are reflected in the sort of contempt for workers -- including teachers -- expressed below, though it is also possible that the kind who yell insults in public or publish them in student newspapers are more likely to come from the strata just below the ruling class (as I have observed this type of attitude at OSU, too, which I assume is free of serious ruling-class kids):
***** NYT March 7, 2003 Nice Place to Study, but I Wouldn't Want to Work There By COREY ROBIN
...In 1990 I arrived at Yale as a graduate student. Some of my colleagues had begun to unionize, but I thought they were silly. We aren't workers, I said, and I didn't come to Yale to join a union. Yes, graduate students do a lot of teaching and grading - but that was an honor, not a burden. True, one dean had compared us to rats. Still, I resisted.
A year later, graduate students went on strike. I did, too - reluctantly. But on the picket line, something happened to me. As we marched around the freshman quad, an undergraduate yelled out his dorm window, "Get back to work." For the first time in my life, I felt like a maid. And suddenly I realized that this was how other workers at Yale - in the dining halls, the labs, the offices - routinely felt. I kept marching, determined never to forget what it's like to work at a place like Yale.
The university's administrators like to claim Yale has changed. And it has - thanks in part to the unions, which do as much as any professor to teach students about the dignity of work. But old habits die hard. On Wednesday, an undergraduate columnist in Yale's student newspaper ended her essay with a message to Anita Seth, the leader of the graduate students' union: "Oh, and Anita? Go teach a section."
How do students so young exercise such breezy command? Where do they learn such imperial disregard, talking to teachers - and dishwashers and janitors - as if they were personal servants?...
Corey Robin is assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/07/opinion/07ROBI.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>