The latest enemy of higher education comes from within the ivy walls — disgruntled graduate students who want to unionize for more pay, better benefits, and empowerment. At Yale University, the Graduate Employee and Student Organization has been at it for nearly six years — trying to call themselves “workers,” thereby deserving of a union. But they’re not; they’re students. And with tuition waivers worth nearly $19,000 in addition to their teaching stipends of $9,940, they’re not exactly oppressed either.
Their most recent job action, withholding fall semester grades, ended when the organization voted 36 to 35 to end its strike against the administration. The usually weak and tractable Yale administration held firm to its original position: Graduate students are students first, not workers. Yale has been driven to financial crisis and chaos several times over the past two decades by ruinously generous union contracts, and just as “compassion fatigue” soured liberals on the homeless, so “strike fatigue” may now be afflicting the Yale community. The Yale Daily News has repeatedly run editorials opposed to the action. Even Peter Brooks, chairman of the comparative literature department and notorious for his opposition to the Bass Grant for the study of Western civilization, called Yale grad students the “blessed of the earth” and confessed to sometimes feeling “annoyed” at them for seeing themselves as exploited.
Indeed, the exploited have lost this battle, but AFL-CIO Locals 34 and 35 are standing by the students. With Big Labor dollars and manpower, GESO promises to rise again. And higher education will continue to sink.
