At Columbia University, the games have begun. In March, graduate teaching assistants voted on whether to unionize. The Columbia administration promptly appealed the vote, claiming that graduate students are not employees, but students who teach as part of their training. The ballots were sealed, and graduate students are protesting the administration's appeal (still pending) in the good old-fashioned way: by walking out. On Monday, several hundred grad students and supporters picketed before the University's front gates while Columbia's clerical union struck in sympathy.

The stand-off is predictable. Graduate students are angry because they see the administration's appeal as an attempt to block the union. According to Kimberly Phillips-Fein, a history Ph.D. student and union leader, "The appeal is really an attempt to break our union and to put a stop to the movement." Meanwhile, the Columbia administration sees the one-day walkout as proof of the would-be union's bad faith. Jonathan R. Cole, Columbia's provost, notes that the walkout "should finally lay to rest UAW Local 2110's claims ... that the union would only use strikes as a weapon of last resort and that the unionization of graduate students would not adversely affect the academic environment of the university." Indeed. Walking out was the would-be union's way of trying to intimidate the administration into repealing its appeal. But all the pro-union grad students have shown is that they see confrontation and disruption not as methods of last resort, but as manipulative weapons that they are not at all reluctant to use. Walking out in the middle of the appeals process was a tremendous act of bad faith on the part of Columbia's grad students. Ironically, it could not have been better calculated to prove to the Columbia administration that the last thing it wants on its campus is organized graduate student "labor."

Though the strike itself was peaceful, it was timed to make a powerful impact. It's the end of the term, classes are ending and students are scrambling to complete term papers and prepare for final exams. Walking out on Monday allowed graduate teaching assistants to make their point about how much of Columbia's teaching they do by turning their backs on the undergraduates who take their classes--more than 3/4 of freshman composition classes were cancelled Monday, for example. Screwing over undergraduates is a tried and true technique of grad student unions, which have learned that disrupting the education of innocent--and paying--bystanders can be an effective means of pressuring recalcitrant administrations to meet their demands. Columbia's grad students have now joined the proud history of grad students who have exploited their students, and diminished their role as teachers, in order to further their own agenda.

Phillips-Fein argues that "What really threatens education at Columbia is having classes taught by teaching assistants who aren't paid a living wage." But it seems obvious enough that what threatens Columbia is graduate students who abuse their privilege and misrepresent themselves as laborers. Yes, many of Columbia's lower-level courses are taught, or assisted, by graduate students. But it does not follow that those students themselves are exploited. What follows is that undergraduates who have to sit through freshman comp with a second-year grad student who has never taught before are being exploited. What follows is that the parents who pay over $30,000 a year for their kids to be guinea pigs to beginning TA's are being exploited. Yes, Columbia profits from putting grad students in the classroom. But it isn't the grad students who are getting robbed. And if they want to hold on to the very great opportunity to do college teaching while they are still uncredentialed students, they would do well to behave themselves.

Read about Columbia's grad student union effort in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only), The New York Times, and Columbia's student paper, The Columbia Daily Spectator.