Cornell grad students are currently voting on whether or not to unionize. If the results are for unionization, Cornell will become the second private university in the country to form a graduate student union. NYU, which unionized last year, was the first. Unlike many of its peer institutions (among them Penn and Yale), Cornell has not tried to block the union movement. It's an interesting administrative move: in sanctioning the vote, Cornell has made it hard for grad students there to shore up the institutional hostility that seems to be so crucial to the success of this particular movement. At Yale and Penn, where administrators have opposed the unionization effort, the anger is palpable. And as such, the administrations at these schools have, ironically, played into the hands of the pro-union agitators in the very act of refusing to cooperate with them. A deep rift between students and administrators is exactly what pro-union activists want. They want their constituents to be angry and outraged, they need that energy to fuel their movement, and they use even the mildest administrative objections to unionization as evidence of an evil exploitative corporatism that must be fought by the oppressed intelligentsia commonly found in Ph.D. programs. Cornell has sidestepped all that. It will be interesting to watch events unfurl in Ithaca, where the opposition finds itself running unopposed.