Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) is calling for the university to recognize a graduate student union once and for all. GESO claims that finally--after ten years of organizing--it has the support of a majority of grad students. A rally is planned for tomorrow, and opinions are flying. On The Yale Daily News web site, you can read the reactions of an unusually vocal community of students--grad and undergrad--who oppose unionization. See the growing thread at the bottom of today's article, and look too at the threads beneath yesterday's coverage of GESO's push for recognition and this recent article on how GESO has polarized relations between grad students and the administration, between grad students and faculty, and among grad students themselves.

Finally, there is an outstanding editorial by J. Kenneth Wickiser, a third-year Yale doctoral student in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry: "If I were a member, I'd be the poster boy for GESO. I'm married, we have two kids with a third on the way, and my son requires special education. ... But I'm not a GESO member now and I will resist becoming assimilated. You see, I'm happy, my wife is happy, and my children are happy little kids. I get paid to do cutting-edge research, learn amazing science, and most importantly work when I want and study what I want. ... While I'm pretty sure that I will be offered some sort of academic job, the ones who need to worry are the folks who spend vastly more time recruiting for GESO than they do in either their lab or library. It is amazing to me that they cry oppression when they're getting paid by Yale to hang out, drink coffee and recruit." Wickiser is a former Army pilot, and he doesn't have a lot of sympathy for students who choose to embark on graduate study at an elite university and then spend their time there whining about how oppressed they are instead of getting everything they can out of the opportunity of a lifetime. Read this piece, and enjoy the fresh, clean air of reason. Don't miss the responses, either.

As grad students at private universities scramble to unionize, they should keep GESO in mind as an example of the long term divisiveness that grad student unions can--and do--create. In the articles and threads cited above, GESO's ethics and its honesty come into question repeatedly. Whether pressuring students to sign union cards, ostracizing students who don't, filing grievances against faculty who question GESO's tactics, or demanding that the Yale administration recognize a union without first having a secret ballot election, GESO reeks of manipulative tactics and a blatant disregard for the opinions and dignity of those who disagree with them. What GESO is organizing is not grad student labor but grad student disgruntlement. It gives it a name and a cause and a community. It cultivates the alienation of its members, and it perpetuates that alienation, giving it good reason to grow, through activity that amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy: GESO really is reviled and loathed at Yale, but not because the people there are a bunch of reactionary snobs who can't grasp the plight of grad student workers. GESO is reviled at Yale because it has worked hard to lose the respect, understanding, and potential support of an entire community.

Case in point: GESO's role in the reparations scam. I will comment more on this tomorrow. For now, read Sarah Maserati's National Review piece on how some GESO members have worked to advance the reparations case against Yale by issuing a false report on the racial attitudes of some of Yale's earliest leaders.