In honor of A4, or the nationwide Student-Labor Day of Action, I thought I would reflect on what it means for graduate students--particularly well-funded, lightly-worked graduate students at elite, private universities--to adopt the Union Mentality. By Union Mentality I mean the militant and alienated mindset that comes with unionization -- the mindset that, for example, enables graduate students to demonize their institutions as corporations and their administrators as conniving managers rather than engage them in reasonable, respectful discussion; the mindset that permits them to express themselves through mobilizing slogans rather than reasoned debates; the mindset that leads them to believe they are justified in using undergraduates as pawns in their struggles with administrators by stopping work or even refusing to turn in grades; the mindset that allows them to dismiss dissenting perspectives--whether voiced by administrators, faculty, or even fellow students--as the vile stuff of false and complicit consciousness; the mindset that, in short, turns students into soldiers for a wrongheaded and enormously self-destructive cause.

Strong words, I know, but they are warranted. The mindset I describe above is one that more and more grad students seem interested in adopting. More and more grad students are choosing to experience their years of graduate study as years of desperate resistance to a huge, mean, abusive institutional machine. More and more grad students are interpreting the time they spend in pursuit of their advanced degree as a period of oppression in which they are victimized and exploited by that faceless profiteering giant, the corporate university. I invoke "choice" and "interpretation" here because I want to emphasize that alienation of the sort I describe here is indeed chosen. It is one way graduate students can decide to feel about being graduate students. It is not the only way to feel about being a graduate student, and it is not the best way. But it is a way that is beginning to win out.

Why? This is a question that deserves more space than I can give it here. It is a question that has been eclipsed--quite strategically--by the marxian rhetoric of unionization itself, which holds that certain working conditions are inherently "alienated" and "alienating," and that as a result certain kinds of labor are inherently "alienated." Define your cushy apprenticeship as poorly compensated, underinsured "labor" and presto! You are automatically alienated. But back up a few steps, and remember that the definition of graduate student teaching as employee labor is itself highly controversial, and you have to think a little bit harder about what is motivating grad students to define themselves as labor, to agitate for unions, and to embrace a cruelly embittering mindset as the stuff of personal empowerment.

I have a theory about this, which is that it's much easier to demonize your administration than it is to take issue with the internal workings of your home department. After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that administrators are evil. A great deal of cultural energy has gone into establishing this idea as a feature of post-Weberian national lore. It's useful to see admins this way, and it's arguably part of the admin's job to accept being seen this way. They are also most often people you don't know, or at least don't know outside of their capacities as administrators. In short, administrators are easy to beat up on and they are paid to take punches. It's a lot harder to go after your professors or your advisor. But I would argue that a great deal of what is behind grad student union efforts, and the accompanying willingness on the part of grad students to infect themselves with the poisonous Union Mentality, is deep dissatisfaction with the shape of their own program.

Whether a graduate student is happy as a graduate student has everything to do with whether that student is getting a good, solid, marketable education. If that's in place--if the student feels she has enrolled in a graduate program she can trust, one that will train her as a scholar and teacher, one that will counsel her about her progress and her career options in a consistent and cogent way, one that will ensure that she gets the personal attention she needs to refine her analytical abilities and writing skills, and, crucially, one that will let her know when her work is not up to par--then my guess is that the student will have neither the time nor the inclination to get wrapped up in union activity. Graduate work is absorbing, all-consuming, and rewarding--or it should be.

But let's say a graduate student is enrolled in a program where things don't run all that well. The course offerings are consistently crappy, more the product of the faculty's idiosyncratic obsessions than the result of considered, systematic thought about what a rounded graduate curriculum ought to provide. Grades are uniformly high, not because everyone does great work but because faculty can't be bothered to take the time to evaluate each student's work carefully. Feedback, when it arrives at all, is often filled with platitudes rather than personalized comments, and often months late. Graduate teaching is not supervised or adequately mentored. Lip service may be paid to departmental community, and the appearance of collegiality may be rigorously maintained. But underneath it all the student knows in her bones that she is not getting the training she needs, that the department is asking her to collude in its incompetence by participating in its culture of self-congratulation, that the reality behind the smiling mask of departmental community is that she is studying in an environment that will neither enable her to excel nor allow her to fail. Students studying in environments like this--and there are many such environments, and many such students--are ripe for unionization.

Such students are being wronged--but not in the way they say they are. They are being used, but not in the way they say they are. Unionization is in this sense both an outlet for anger that can't safely show itself "at home" and a dangerously seductive mask for the real source of much graduate student "alienation," such as it is. Proof that there is something to what I am saying: the phenomenon of the faculty member who applauds the graduate student effort to unionize as a means of absolving himself of responsibility for the quality of graduate student education. Look around you and you will find him, a tenure-track, yuppified edition of Conrad's flabby devil. He supports unions, but he doesn't have time to read your dissertation chapter. He's all for rising up against the corporate university, but he'll die before he teaches a 3/3 or sets foot in a composition classroom. He's right there behind you all the way--except when you need to hear some hard truths about the quality of your coursework. He's totally against the exploitation of graduate labor--but he'll have you do all the grading for his undergraduate courses instead of splitting it with you, or simply doing the work himself. I could go on, but I think you know the guy I'm talking about. He's everywhere -- except in the administration.