Why do universities bust unions? Because most of the potential beneficiaries of a union don't recognize the point of a union, so they let the administration have a free hand. The last university I was at (Temple U) does have a unionized faculty, and when a strike threatened, I was completely baffled about what to do. Do I get to go in to my lab and work for free? I have to do daily animal care, I don't have to let them starve, do I? I'm just now getting these great antibodies, I can still do my experiments, right?

Much of the problem is that many faculty love their work so much that they think they'd do it for half the pay, or for free, if they could. And so we stand aside and let the issues slide.

Meanwhile, the administration realizes that their work force is a mob of unworldly children, and they do everything they can to gouge them. Another of their strategies is to divide the workforce into fulltime, tenured and tenure track faculty vs. adjuncts. Tenured faculty are kept complacent with privileges, while the adjuncts, who do the same teaching work, are little more than wage-slaves.

Universities consider it their right to be the next best thing to slaveowners.

If someone with a grant wants to pay more than minimum wage, that person is strongly discourged from doing so because it might "wreck the market" for the slaveowners.

It's a real racket. But then, the "gypsy professor" phenomenon proves that even those who try to escape slavery with a Real Doctorate are often given the same treatment. For a batch of alleged liberals, they act like Republican Auxiliaries.

Scorpio

Eccentricity

William F. Buckley had an op-ed during the strike here at Yale gloating about the disparity between the Yale administration's liberal rhetoric and conservative policy. Unfortunately, he's absolutely right. Difference is just that he'd like to bring the former in line with the latter, and we'd like to bring the latter in line with the former. President Levin's decade at Yale has been marked by noble symbolic left stances (offering to compensate for federal financial aid denied due to drug offenses, et al) and short-sighted conservative stances (pushing for the most regressive NLRB possible) when the University's interests are seen to be affected. It's the conservative stances on which he spends the political capital accrued by, inter alia, agreeing to sit on the Commission to whitewash Bush's claims about weapons of mass destruction.

I have a BA from Harvard and was in grad school at Berkeley for 2 years. Although each may be managed on a day-to-day basis by a President (Harvard) or Chancellor (Berkeley), the real decisions of the institution are made by the corporate governors -- the Overseers, and I think another, smaller group at Harvard and the Regents at the UC system. Regents are appointed by the CA governor, and are almost always bosses from big companies or party hacks who are friends of the governor. Ward Connerly, who wrote Prop 209, ending afirmative action in CA, was a Wilson-appointed Regent. Harvard's Overseers are about 10% good people (like Sheila Kuehl, the liberal CA state senator) and 90% awful establishment corporate artistocrats -- CEOs of various companies, partners in big law firms.

Now, if Bob Berdahl or Larry Summers want to screw around with little symbolic gestures to liberalism, I'm sure it doesn't bother the real bosses at the universities much. In fact, it may even help build loyalty among the students to the institution, which means more money in the long run from future alums. But when a REAL decision is being made -- like whether to bust a union -- it's time for the day-to-day manager to step aside and let the real bosses make the decisions. The statements by the Adminstrators supporting this stuff are just par for the course -- if you're an administrator, you just need to be able to execute and defend policies you disagree with. If you can't do that, you don't have a job.

It's a little like newspapers that run okay Editorials, but then endorse right-wingers for elective office. The editorial board can fiddle around most of the time, but when it's endorsement time the publisher says, "Alright, children, out of the sand box!" and makes all the decisions.

It's amazing to me that someone like Alan Brinkley, a left-liberal historian who has written books and articles about how Democrats have to regain "the lost language of liberalism" and challenge concentrated corporate power the way FDR did back in the '30s, can, as provost of Columbia, engage in the very practices that he decries in his scholarly work.

For example, Professor Brinkley cites approvingly of the early New Dealer's class conciousness:

“. . . the New Dealers viewed . . . the world they were attempting to reshape . . . in terms of wealth, power and . . . class. The most progressive . . . considered taming the excesses of unbridled capitalism and empowering economically weaker groups at the expense of stronger ones their most important tasks. . . . They . . . ma[de] the distribution of wealth and power a subject worthy of discussion and the basis of a broad coalition that sustained the Democratic Party for more than a generation.”

And, regarding modern calls to downsize and devolve the federal government (the following statement is just as valid if you replace "federal government" with "labor unions"):

“Before liberals surrender to calls for disabling the federal government . . . they would do well to direct attention to the increasingly centralized institutions of private power that will survive that process. It was to counter the power of such institutions that “big government” emerged in the first place. To whom would they answer in a world of weak or nonexistent national authority?”

Amazing that the author of these quotes can make the statement that Nathan quoted.

Tom,

Great job finding those snippets from Brinkley's work.

On one level, I agree, it's amazing that he can write what he writes and do what he does, but on another level it's entirely understandable. Not to repeat my previous post too much, but (a) this probably wasn't his decision to make anyways, and if he's not willing to parrot the "party line" of those who really make decisions at the institution he's not gonna be the Provost of Columbia in the first place; (b) he can defend the rights of workers in the abstract, but when he's the boss it feels different to see the them organizing; (c) academia may be politically left, but its structure is incredibly conservative and hierarchical, and people in Brinkley's position are likely to be highly committed to maintaining order in a sort of Burkian way inside the academy: authority will be maintained, and the uppity grad students, who should be thankful for the time they get to spend with the prestigious faculty, need to learn their place.

Academia isn't the only place this happens. I'll bet a good many doctors at teaching hospitals believe in the union cause and liberalism, but if the Committee of Interns and Residents starts talking with "their" staff, all bets are off. Most disturbingly, union leaders themselves have busted staff unions being organized by their staffs. Like Douglass said, power concedes nothing without demand.

I too was shocked when I saw that Brinkley made that statement. I had to read a book or two of his for my qualifying exams, and I remember finding them quite inspiring.

As mentioned above, it's probably quite likely that Brinkley is in a position in which he must follow the university's line, though one would wonder whether he considered this possibility when he agreed to become Columbia's provost.

But this also speaks to something I've seen in academia that troubles me greatly, and that's the lack of engagement with the world outside academia. While I do think that the "ivory tower" stereotype is overstated, I've found in my years in graduate school that there's more truth to it than I originally thought. Many academics really do seem more content to write about social movements (of any sort) than be in them and prefer to write for their colleagues rather than a broader audience (though, to be fair, Brinkley's work is pretty accessible).

I wonder if there's also a class issue. A not unfrequent dodge used by academics with regard to such things as unionization is to say that they support unionization in principle, but that it's "not for us". They thus conveniently relieve themselves of actually having to find a way to put their beliefs into practice.

Here's something I've noticed in recent years: the most rabid opponents of unionization of graduate student workers and adjunct/part-time faculty have been the administrations of private universities. I've been involved with two successful unionization drives as a graduate student, both at public universities. As Nathan points out, public universities don't exactly embrace unionization warmly, but the recent victories have by and large been at public institutions.

I wonder if this is significant in any way.

Linnaeus,

As I mentioned above, I was a grad student for 2 years at Cal (before the university recognized the union) -- I've been doing union organizing for about 5 years, and I worked for the last few months of the successful graduate employee campaign at Temple Univ in Philly. On your points above: yes, I agree that the academy is very inward-looking. Before my personal grad school experience, I had grown up in an academic family -- both of my parents are retired professors, and my brother and my sister-in-law are professors, too. I think it's always navel-gazed, at least in the humanities, in which your job is essentially to impress your peers. A generation of tight job markets is having a secondary effect of making a university its own, isolated subculture within a community, as academics travel from job to job, maybe doing adjunct gigs, working anywhere they can. Its becoming like the military, with the campuses as bases. This wouldn't really be true at Columbia, but in general I think it's happening more and more.

The "class issue" is a common b.s. excuse bosses exploit in any context -- unions are for some other, more lumpen-proletariat workers, not for YOU. And there's always someone below you on the socio-economic ladder who REALLY needs a union. Any "professional" group is particularly susceptible to this.

On the public/private thing: as Nathan alluded to in his post, until a recent (2000, I think) NLRB ruling, private sector graduate employees weren't considered "employees" under the law, and thus had no legal right to form a union. Some states explicitly bar public sector unions, but most states outside the South allow public employee unions, and generally there's still a sense that the state shouldn't pay millions of dollars to union busters leading up to an election. The NLRB continues to hold, incidentally, that private sector regular faculty are in fact managers, and thus ineligible to join unions (decided in the Yeshiva Univ. case, in 1982 I think).

Now, as far as the labor movement itself is concerned, part of the problem in organizing the private universities is that the logical union to do this, the American Federation of Teachers, seems to have virtually no plan to address private education at any level. I mean, couldn't someone over there put together some kind of plan to organize private K-12 and universities? The law responds to facts on the ground, it doesn't create them. Private sector faculty will be redefined as "employees" when they start to organize and demand contracts in a major way, and some union has to make it a strategic priority to get that done.