Twelve years ago, at just about this time of year, I had to make up my mind about where I was going to go to graduate school. I had my rejection letters in hand (a form letter with perforated edges from spare-no-expense Yale, a personalized letter addressed to "Mr. O'Connor" from ethnically-challenged Brown). And I had some acceptances, too. I could go to Michigan on a Regent's Fellowship, have guaranteed funding for five years, have guaranteed teaching, and health care. Or I could go to Berkeley, my adored alma mater, and study at what was then ranked among the top two or three English departments in the country -- with no funding at all, and no guarantee of teaching. So confident was Berkeley that I would jump at this offer that their acceptance form letter only gave me one box to check: "I accept." I was sorely tempted to do just that, more so when I polled my professors. They seemed to think that going to Michigan would be like signing a professional death warrant. "Sit out a year and reapply," one said to me. "Well," said another, looking on the bright side, "I guess Michigan isn't too far out in left field." The decision was very complex, and very fraught with layers of snobbery (I had to study with the Best!), insularity (Berkeley was home), and homesickness (the midwest was home, too, plus it had seasons). The issue was finally settled one day when I was talking with one of the faculty's older, wiser, less starstruck professors. "Never pay for a Ph.D," he said to me, and I knew that at last I was hearing the voice of wisdom. I went to Michigan, had a great time, got a great education and a great job, and graduated with no debt. I am grateful to this day that Michigan decided to pay for my Ph.D. I know I could not have gotten one otherwise.

Ph.D. programs in the humanities have cleaned up their acts a bit since then. Berkeley, for example, has a smaller program, funds its students, and has eliminated its terminal MA program (these came under heavy fire in the 90's, not just at Berkeley, but all across the country, for the way they lured paying students in with the false prospect of heightening their chances for getting into the Ph.D. program). The recognition behind such reforms is the recognition inherent in my professor's statment: that you should never have to pay for a Ph.D. Why? Because unlike medical school, law school, dental school, or business school, doctoral education does not promise terrific financial payback. Students who will go on to be physicians and lawyers and CEOs can afford to incur debt because they will be able to pay it off. Students working toward Ph.D.s in English or art history or comparative literature, on the other hand, might never get out from under the cost of their education if they had to pay for it out of pocket. Their job prospects just aren't good enough, and their earning potential will in most cases never be all that high. So increasingly universities are responding to that reality. They are making it possible for students to get a Ph.D. without paying for it. They are doing so because they recognize that it is important to have Ph.D.s around. The future of the university depends on it. And so does the future of society.

This is an admittedly sketchy, quick and dirty history. But I sketch it here because I think it captures some things that are getting hopelessly garbled--or even lost--in the movement for graduate student unionization. The first is that universities do pay for people to get their Ph.Ds. The second is that they do so because it is in their best interests to do so--they have to, if they want to compete (this is not a cynical statement about corporatization, but a pragmatic statement about the security Ph.D. students have within a corporatized university system). The third is that graduate student unionization--and the attendant push to describe graduate students as employees--poses a serious threat to a very, very good deal. It may look on the surface like a union will solve all a grad student's woes. It may look like a union can coordinate the scattered voices and needs of individual, isolated students into the forceful, focussed power of collective bargaining. It may look like that bargaining can be used to pressure administrations to respond to the economic hardship of grad student life with higher stipends and better health care. I know that for many it may look as easy and simple as that. And in the short term, it may even seem to work.

But ... the longterm cost of unionization is bound to be an erosion of the very financial privilege that many grad students today enjoy -- a privilege they take so for granted that they cannot see it for what it is, a privilege they redescribe as exploitation and abuse. If Aldous Huxley were scripting the grad student union effort, he might imagine a world in the not too distant future where grad students really do enjoy the full, dystopian privileges of employee status. In this world, universities have so thoroughly subdivided student from employee that graduate students live two separate lives. In their student lives, they pay tuition just like all other students. They take out loans to cover those tuition costs, which annually run to more than the student can expect to make in a year's salary once she has graduated. No special waivers and subsidies for grad students under the union regime! All students are created equal. Students may, however, work to cover some of their living expenses. In this work, they are unionized, and enjoy whatever benefits their bargaining unit has been able to accrue for them. But union protection only covers the terms when the student is teaching, and the student has a hard time getting teaching appointments because there are so very many older, more experienced teachers around who are more qualified for the job. Some of these are adjuncts with degrees, some are senior grad students. As a rule, this means that many grad students graduate without having acquired enough teaching experience to make them attractive job candidates (though they may have acquired great skill at making cappucinos and ringing up book sales). This means in turn that these unionized students of the future are even less able than today's grad students to find good, solid academic work. Overall, the situation has become so unattractive and intractable that fewer and fewer people decide to embark on graduate study. So the quality of graduate education plummets as the best and brightest go elsewhere while the anti-intellectualism of American culture grows and grows. Meanwhile, unions themselves thrive. The dues they get from grad students are doing great things for America's workers.

An exaggerated picture, perhaps. But perhaps not. The point is that grad students can't have it both ways, and that how things go for them once they unionize will depend on how indulgent administrations are willing to be in the face of ever greater and more absurd demands. While those who are agitating for unions will fight me on this point, I think administrations have already been very indulgent. I for one won't be surprised to see them draw a hard, firm line somewhere in the not too distant future. Whatever happens, though, it isn't likely to be good for graduate students or for graduate education. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.