Mark your calendar: April 4 is the nation-wide Student-Labor Action Day. In honor of A4, Graduate Employees Together -- UPenn (GET-UP), will be co-sponsoring a teach-in on the corporatization of the university. The event, which focuses on "issues facing students and faculty in the face of a national trend toward treating education as a commodity and the university as a business," crowns GET-UP's year-long push to unionize graduate students at Penn, a push that is itself taking place alongside many similar efforts at other private institutions across the country. (For a little history on this, as well as for a clear articulation of the pro-union platform, see Gordon Lafer's "Graduate Student Unions Fight the Corporate University" in a recent issues of Dissent Magazine.) On the surface, this all seems fairly innocuous and deliciously Marxian; on the surface it seems only right that the notoriously beknighted population of impoverished graduate students at an elite Ivy League institution would join together to resist exploitation at the hands of the massive corporation that is Penn. After all, they provide the cheap labor that lets the university turn its terrific profits; they are the anonymous workers of the academic world who have nothing to lose but their chains. Right? Wrong.

Grad student unions depend on a definition of the grad student as an employee of the university. And this is where the superficially unimpeachable logic of the pro-union argument breaks down. Certainly, most grad students spend some time teaching in classrooms or working in labs or simply doing the repetitive grunt work of grading. And yes, as part of their support package they are paid for the time they spend at these activities. Does this make them employees? Not necessarily. Consider, again, the case of English, which I discuss here because it is what I know best, and because it is what I discussed yesterday in terms relevant to today's blog. I noted yesterday, in my discussion of how Ph.D.-granting institutions typically staff freshman English courses, that grad students in English do the bulk of that teaching, and that they are assigned to do that teaching by virtue of their status (yes, status) as graduate students in the English department. In other words, they do not apply for the job. They do not interview for it. They do not demonstrate basic competence in the skills required to do the job (knowledge of grammar, understanding of the mechanics of argument, understanding of the goal of the composition classroom or the debates within the field of composition). They do not even have to have any prior experience dealing with students. Instead, they learn--or not--on the job. They are given groups of unsuspecting freshman on whom to practice--freshmen who, it is cynically imagined by the powers that be, will not realize that they are being practiced on, and will not thus report the fact to their tuition-paying parents.

Don't get me wrong--this is often a mutually beneficial arrangement in which grad students learn to teach while at the same time actually doing real teaching. When it works, both the student teacher and the student come away from freshman English with new knowledge and enhanced skills. But I would not call this arrangement one in which a university employee is exploited, in which s/he is overworked, underpaid, and inadequately insured in order to pad the pockets of the powerful. What would I call it? Apprenticeship. Which is exactly what administrations have been arguing in the face of grad student unions, who reject the term as a pejorative paternalistic cover for the true economic relations between graduate student teachers (labor) and their institutional employers (capital).

Most administrators have, to my mind, been remarkably tactful in the face of such arguments. At Penn, for example, Deputy Provost Peter Conn has painstakingly attempted to explain to GET-UP why he thinks graduate student unions are a bad idea--how it will create more problems than it will solve, and how it erodes the graduate student's identity as a student and, in many cases, as an apprentice to an academic career. Conn has gotten a lot of flak for his trouble, much of it from grad students in his own home department (which is--surprise, surprise--English!). But I back him fully on this. It wasn't so long ago that I was a graduate student myself. And it seemed to me then as it seems to me now, that the idea of a grad student union rests on a sadly misguided view of what it is to be a graduate student. At a place like Penn, where, for example, teaching two sections of freshman English a year (which comes to about 8-10 hours per week) gets you a livable stipend and a tuition waiver, it misdescribes the privilege--and, yes, honor--of studying full time toward an advanced degree at an elite institution as exploitation at the hands of the oppressor. But it's exploitation only if you see your graduate student years not as a rite of passage but as a way of life. It's exploitation only if you can somehow imagine that the university owes you when in reality you owe it. This is not to deny that the life of the graduate student is economically uncomfortable, or that grad students deserve better health care for less money, or that some schools pay students too little while demanding too much. But it is to say that the union route depletes the dignity of graduate students in the name of empowering them.

The place of the English department's graduate students in producing and sustaining the union mentality at Penn is material for another blog--but let me simply conclude here by observing that English grad students have plastered their offices and lounge with posters featuring the question, "Are You Being Conned?" -- an act of "consciousness raising" that mocks, and arguably libels, one of the most accomplished and honorable senior members of their own department.