Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're starting a union

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 10, 2017 at 12:40:32 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're starting a union
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're starting a union
> For all their trigger warnings and safe spaces, places like Yale and Columbia are not very democratic when it comes 
> to unions
> By Thomas Frank
> Sep 9 2017
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/09/elite-universities-safe-spaces-union>
>
> It’s back-to-school season in America, and that means it’s the time of year when the pundit class is moved to lament 
> the sad state of elite higher education. Over the next few weeks, our thought-leaders will scold this year’s class of 
> overly sensitive Ivy League students, what with their safe spaces and trigger warnings.
>
> Tough-minded columnists will sputter against fancy colleges that are covering up offensive sculptures and censoring 
> offensive speakers. Readers will be invited to gape at the latest perversity served up by our radicalized 
> professoriate and to mourn the decline of their dear old alma mater. What, oh what is this generation coming to, they 
> will cry.
>
> But while they weep, let us turn our attention to an entirely different aspect of life on the American campus that 
> doesn’t fit into the tidy narrative of fancy colleges coddling the snowflake generation. Let us look instead into the 
> actual conditions under which the work of higher education is done. Let us talk labor.
>
> In August 2016, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington decided that graduate students who teach 
> classes at private universities can be considered employees of those universities, eligible to form unions and 
> bargain collectively with their employers. It was the end point of a decades-long process in which the Board has 
> oscillated between ruling in favor of grad student unions and then against them. 
>
> In the aftermath of the NLRB decision, graduate student teachers at Columbia and Yale universities, both schools in 
> the Ivy League, held elections and voted to form unions. More organizing elections are scheduled for the next few 
> weeks at a number of other private universities, and as the school year gets under way grad students should 
> rightfully be negotiating new contracts throughout the United States. 
>
> But here’s the catch: thanks to the election of Donald Trump last November, the NLRB will soon be under the sway of 
> his extremely anti-union Republican party. 
>
> Once Trump’s members are seated on the Labor Board, there is every likelihood they will revisit the matter of 
> graduate student teachers and reverse themselves on the question, which would in turn permit university 
> administrations to refuse to negotiate and even to blow off the results of these elections. 
>
> A radicalized university that lives to coddle young people would sit down immediately at the bargaining table and 
> give those graduate students what they want. 
>
> A corporation that is determined to keep its employees from organizing, on the other hand, would stall and delay and 
> refuse to recognize the union until Trump’s new, right-wing NLRB can saddle up and ride to the rescue. And guess 
> what: that is exactly what these universities are doing – refusing to begin contract negotiations, filing challenges 
> to the elections, appealing this and that.
>
> *
>
> Americans sometimes find it difficult to feel sympathy for the problems of graduate students, who are on track to 
> earn prestigious degrees from prestigious universities. Why, they wonder, do such students need to resort to a 
> workplace strategy we associate with dockworkers and coal miners? 
>
> When I talked to them, members of the unions at Columbia and Yale gave all sorts of reasons for joining up, most of 
> which would be familiar to workers in nearly any quarter of the economy. They want to get paid better for their work, 
> to have a say in the conditions of their employment, to have a complaint procedure that actually works (this last 
> being particularly important in a workplace like academia that is well-known for sexual harassment). 
>
> The grander reason looming behind everything, however, is that the universitiesripped the old academic social 
> contract to shreds some decades ago. 
>
> The trade-off used to be that, after many years of hard and poorly compensated labor teaching college kids, graduate 
> students collected their PhDs and headed out into the world to become professors, an honored and well-compensated 
> occupation. 
>
> But perches in the professoriate have become rare, mainly because universities figured out that the more hard-working 
> graduate students they could bring in to teach classes, the fewer full professors they needed. Then they began 
> replacing those professors with poorly paid adjuncts, a different but closely related story.
>
> It is exploitation of the baldest sort. As I was writing this, a story came over the wire about an English teacher at 
> a university in California who lives in a car, grading her students’ papers in the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart.
>
> [snip]
>
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