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

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: RJR.C <rjr () rjriley com>
Date: Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 6:21 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Are elite universities 'safe spaces'? Not if you're
starting a union
To: <dave () farber net>


My biggest concern with higher education is that the top dogs are making a
killing by straddling students with crushing debt, while at the same time
exploiting students who have graduated with dead end, zero perks, part time
employment.

My oldest daughter is within a year of receiving her PhD, with no debt.
That was my gift to her, that when she is done, she will be able to afford
to buy a house and actually start accumulating wealth.  Most young people
do not understand how crushing, and limiting student debt will be, or how
it will greatly limit their ability to start their adult life.  many of
them will be stuck in rentals for a decade or more, because they will not
be able to finance a home, or a business.

The only downside is that my retirement will be much less comfortable :)

As to safe spaces, college students need to be exposed to a broad spectrum
of ideas, regardless of rather or not their feelings might be hurt.  I do
not understand how they can learn to think without broad exposure.

Ronald J Riley


On 9/10/2017 12:59 PM, Dave Farber wrote:




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]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp


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