From a reader: graduate students who want to unionize "seem to be seduced by the 'nobility' of labor. Few of these people have probably really done any sweat 'labor,' but love the image. Work in a factory for a year before grad school and then see what you think. Unions aren't noble and grad students don't really qualify as laborers. Since when is part time work (how many hours a week are we talking here?) for 1-3 years considered a career of 'laboring'? This is an apprenticeship, kids. Isn't the university entitled to withdraw tuition waivers, health insurance, in addition to the mentoring, etc., if they are hiring 'union' help? If I were a dean, I would farm the teaching out to lecturers and make the graduate students pay their way. Couldn't this union game backfire bigtime? Would the university DO this?"

The perceived "nobility" of oppression--in this case oppressed labor--is indeed a large factor in graduate students' desire to unionize. They identify with labor, they feel for labor, and in defining themselves as labor, they feel for themselves. This in turn allows them to become absolutely ruthless in their campaigning against university administrations (which they simplistically see as "corporate management"). In Tenured Radicals, Roger Kimball argues that the phenomenon of "academics intoxicated by the coercive possibilities of untethered virtue" is a principle feature of the new, politicized academy. Grad student unions are a classic example of the mind-altering power of organized self-righteousness.

As for the question, "Couldn't this union game backfire bigtime?", that's what inquiring minds are dying to know. How far are university administrations willing to go to appease an angry, demanding group whose cause and claims they find illegitimate? As grad unions at private universities are beginning to win the support of the National Labor Relations Board, so the administrations at these schools are appealing the NLRB decisions, arguing that graduate students are not "workers" and do not perform "labor." This has happened at Columbia and Brown this year, and looks like it will happen at Penn, too, once the NLRB rules on GET-UP's request for union recognition. One of the foggier claims of grad student unions is that they will somehow benefit the truly exploited labor pool in academe--the legions of Ph.D.'s who are not employed in tenure-track or even full-time positions, but are instead forced to scrape together a miserable existence as adjuncts. They are paid by the class (often only a couple of thousand dollars apiece); as part-timers, they do not have health care; and they often have to teach an inordinate number of classes at several institutions just to get by. What are the odds that this labor pool will get screwed both ways by grad student unions: either closed out entirely, or, as the reader above suggests, exploited all the more by admins who find combative and short-sighted grad students just too costly and tiresome to deal with?

For one administrator's take on how time-consuming, frustrating, and endlessly off-base grad student unions can be, there is a fine, honest article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education by Marcellette Williams, acting chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The article is only available to paying subscribers, alas, but the gist is that on a heavily unionized campus, the one union that routinely causes problems and makes impossible demands is the graduate student union. Faculty, staff, and campus police are all unionized at UMass, and relations with these unions have been peaceable and productive all around, Williams notes. But things are different indeed when it comes to dealing with the United Auto Workers, which represents UMass graduate students and has filed a petition to represent undergraduate RAs as well. "Our interactions have been fraught with significant difficulties that we have not experienced with other unions," Williams writes. "Those difficulties have included contentious negotiations; the union's insistence on bargaining over nonemployment and social issues, such as regulations governing graduate-student behavior in dormitories, that are not proper subjects for bargaining; and a disproportionate number of grievances, particularly about issues clearly not encompassed within the collective-bargaining agreement." Noting that the pattern has been one of a small group of politicized grad students driving their agenda while the majority of grad students sit silently by, Williams observes that "we devote overwhelmingly more administrative time to dealing with this union -- much of it responding to confrontation -- than with any of our other bargaining units." Williams' essay is restrained and as tactful as it is possible for her to be. She never says as much, but it is clear that the graduate student union at UMass has been more trouble than it is worth (UMass voluntarily recognized the union in 1990).