Well, as readers closer to the nest here have probably noticed, I have yet to remark on the Columbia TA strike that’s been happening on campus these past two weeks, for a number of reasons. For one, I’ve remained conflicted about the strike action for some time, as reported below. For another, I have friends on all sides of the issue here on campus and in the history department, and I didn’t much feel like “poisoning the well” any further by needlessly antagonizing one group or another. That being said, after reading Rick Perlstein’s open letter to Alan Brinkley that was being passed around yesterday, I finally felt compelled to respond to the whole imbroglio. As y’all know, I’ve hyped Perlstein’s excellent book on Goldwater here more than once, and indeed, I posted one of his Village Voice articles in my last update. And, given that we’ve shared some minor correspondence in the past and that I felt his letter encapsulated much of the us v. them wrongheadedness afflicting the strike movement at the moment, I wrote him back. (He has since replied in turn, and quite graciously.) My response, edited slightly for punctuation and clarity, below:
Hi Rick,
Because of my oft-professed admiration for your work, I’ll try to extend more courtesy to you than I think you gave Alan Brinkley in your recent open missive to him, and thus I won’t be drawing any lines in the sand here regarding my stance on your character or my enjoyment of your company. Given that we’ve only “met” online, I’d be hard-pressed to do so anyway. Nevertheless, in the spirit of friendly disagreement (something going at a premium in Morningside these days), I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that I found your recent letter to Brinkley a remarkably ill-conceived piece of “gotcha” that falls far below the usual quality and intuition I’ve come to expect from your writing.
I should first say that, until very recently, I have been a supporter of the graduate student unionization drive here on campus, although I suppose quite a tepid one by current standards. While I believe the argument most often heard by union supporters during this current strike (and in the pages of the Village Voice) — that we are an oppressed subaltern class because we are paid $17,000 a year, at least $12,000 in housing subsidies, basic health care, gym membership, etc., to do what amounts to basically ten hours of teaching a week — is patently ridiculous (and, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, is one more often voiced by graduate students who have nestled in the womb of academia ever since college, and never spent a year or two in the “real” world, where the work day begins at 8:30am in cubicles, service counters, and factory lines all across America), I do think there are other important reasons why a graduate student union may be beneficial to students, workers, and the university.
For one, I share your belief that collective bargaining is both the best means of negotiating a contract and a right hard-fought through the annals of American history. While I don’t necessarily believe that we as grad students constitute workers in any traditional sense, I respect the right of my fellow grad students to vote up or down on forming a union if they so desire, and believe the administration should count and abide by the votes, pending a ruling by the NLRB. Second, and more importantly, I believe a graduate student union could serve as a useful tool in organizing sympathy strikes and publicizing the plight of those often-invisible university workers who do in fact face real hardships and obstacles to fair and equitable job conditions, be they clerical workers, building maintenance staff, administrative assistants, or adjuncts.
All that being said, this current strike was simply a bad idea, and one’s that been getting worse as time goes along. It has been poorly conceived, poorly timed, poorly thought-out, and poorly executed to the detail. Garnering just over a third of the graduate student population (by union estimates) at its peak, the strike has suffered from an unfocused message and unclear goals from the very start. Worse, it has coasted along on a righteous, reactionary anger rather than by any force of logic, and, I believe, has had the unintended consequence of alienating and radicalizing the vast majority of faculty, undergraduates, and undecided graduate students from a cause they may have had great sympathy with, had this all been handled with any degree of aplomb.
To begin with, the reasons for the timing and duration of the strike were never satisfactorily explained to the rank-and-file, myself included — Instead, the union organizing committee relied on extremely suspect voting methodology to procure the desired pro-strike margins from the membership: Rather than being conducted by an impartial third party (the Spec, for example), the ballot boxes were staffed with phalanxes of organizers at all times, who asked voters to vote Yes! and sign up for pickets WHILE they were voting. Despite the fact that this union, if recognized, will bargain for us all, only a significant minority of graduate students — those who signed union cards previously (including myself) — were allowed to cast a ballot on the strike. Those ambivalent students who had signed union cards in earlier years but had recently fallen from the One True Faith were forced to renounce their apostasy in order to vote, and then they were forced to sign their ballots(!) to be “checked against the roll of eligible voters.” (Needless to say, this same attention to possible voting irregularities was not extended to the other side, so we “No on Strike” voters have only to presume that the many pro-union TA’s who are no longer (or not yet) eligible to vote did not cast “Yes” ballots.) Over the nights between voting, the ballot boxes were kept in the safe and inviolate confines of the union office, rather than at an impartial location. And, when the votes were counted in this union office, we union members were only given a winning percentage — 80% — no tally of votes and no, I have since learned, opportunity for a recount or overview of the tally. (And yet, strangely enough, I can probably rattle off several dozen names of graduate student historians who voted No on this strike at this point…I guess I don’t get out much. Or perhaps it’s the radical scientists out there who accounted for the 80%.) Since your letter displayed such an eagerness to hoist Alan Brinkley on the petard of the Wagner Act, I am tempted to bring up the Mississippi Plan and all manner of Southern voting irregularities here — some of which are described in your book — but, while I’ll permit myself the aside, that’s exactly the type of shrill, ahistorical analogy that permeates campus right now and that has been so counter-productive in obtaining the union’s goals. I will say, however, that it is remarkable that a strike ostensibly geared towards “counting the votes” would rely on such dubious voting irregularities.
Nevertheless, the die was cast, so to speak, and thus we unhappy lot cast down our pencils and blue books, told our students of our miserable back-breaking plight, and took up the picket. Or, I should say, many did — I respected the strike action the first week but didn’t picket, pending further information from the union organizing committee on what the hell exactly was going on. Why did we pick this fight, only two weeks before the end of the term (thus making it almost a foregone conclusion that the administration would ride it out)? What’s the message the union is trying to get out with this strike? (The one you hear the most, on radio interviews, placards, and elsewhere, is that we are oppressed, but as I noted above, that’s a lousy peg to hang one’s hat on, and makes us seem all the more pie-in-the-sky privileged and self-absorbed.) If the strike’s the stick, what’s the carrot? Are we reaching out to the faculty and undergrads? Are we making common cause with other union groups? What’s the agenda? What’s the fallback position? What’s the exit strategy? For the first week, these answers were not forthcoming, and I could educe no rhyme or reason from the Pravda-like e-mail I was getting in my inbox every day (Comrades! We have closed down 4 of 18 classes today! We have stopped UPS from coming on campus!…Well, that’s good news for FedEx.)
So, by the time a number of pro-union students of the history department kindly sat down to address many of our concerns about the strike, after a full week into the action, I had a number of questions. Worse, given the aforementioned voting irregularities, the lack of structure or plan already evident by then, and the increasing shrillness of many of the strikers (Whatever you think of Columbia University or our situation, the Homestead Strike this is not), I went into that meeting with an awful creeping feeling I usually get when listening to officials in the George W. Bush administration: namely, either the union leadership is lying to me or they’re incompetent. But what I discovered at that meeting was a third possibility I hadn’t considered — there was in fact NO union leadership. The strike was (and is) being run as a completely ad hoc operation, guided day-to-day not by strategy or pragmatism or political calculation but by a free-floating vexation against Columbia and its “administrative traps” (A phrase that came up often in the meeting.)
When asking the most basic of questions (Why now? What’s going on?), I and other ambivalent students were confronted with the ugly sight of our colleages — whose intelligence and scholarship in other matters I respect enormously — responding with pro-union pablum and anti-administration indignation that had clearly gone stale in the echo chamber of long, shrill meetings. Basically, the message was this: You’re either with us or against us — There comes a time when the rubber hits the road, and that time is now. (Why that time was now was left unexplained.) This is our chance to stand up for what we believe is right, and we will do so until the heavens fall. We will fight against the increasingly corporate ideology of the University, who attempt to reduce us to squalor and turn academic inquiry into economic exploitation. This is all very inspiring stuff, to be sure, (as one of my friends at the meeting waggishly put it, “grab your little piece of the sixties while you still can”), but it doesn’t answer the basic questions: Why now? Why indefinitely? What’s the plan? Who’s running this outfit?
Should we be concerned, I asked, that the Columbia history faculty, natural allies whose pro-union bona fides are considerable, may be alienated by our actions? No, because we’ve instead received a great deal of support from “the community.” (Wow, David Montgomery is pro-union? Who knew?) Why did the union picket and/or boycott academic conferences, some of which carry a great deal more substantive and lefty weight than our cause to squeeze an extra grand out of Columbia? The answer? “Administrative Trap!” When I asked what we should do with our paychecks now that we weren’t working (and which, nevertheless, the administration has continued to pass out), people looked at me like I was from Mars. Apparently, it’s vote Yes on Strike, No on Sacrifice.
Needless to say, I left this meeting extremely dismayed, and it confirmed some of my more depressing suspicions about this strike from the very start. Most of the pro-union folks, all of whom I consider my friends and respect a great deal, had nevertheless begun speaking in platitudes, with very little sense of the situation on the ground or the political or pragmatic necessities involved in making a strike action work — in fact, they often seem not to have even considered them. Worse still, somewhere in this endless fight against the administration, they had lost perspective — The whole strike operation, while perhaps begun with the best of intentions, had devolved into some kind of bizarre pageant where we graduate students honored our progressive inclinations by dressing up as the Oppressed and railing against The Man, as portrayed in this case by the sinister agents of the University administration.
Which brings me full circle to why I found your recent letter to Alan Brinkley so appalling, given my strong sense from your writings that critical perspective is one of your long suits. Since you have met him and, until recently, seem to have enjoyed his company, I think you should have a sense of Brinkley as not the Machiavel he’s been made out to be of late, but rather as an impressive and discerning historian-turned-university-administrator thrust into an almost-impossible position. Fair enough, your letter begins by pointing that out, but it then proceeds to try to twist the knife by invoking personal recollections and dubious ultimatums to expose him as some kind of corporate stooge, and frankly, your remarks here reflect worse on you than they do on him.
Ok, so Brinkley’s personal views as an historian and commentator on public events and his current position as provost on the strike action have entered into some conflict…that much seems relatively clear. But is it really your contention that his stance on this ill-conceived strike by the graduate students should outweigh his opinion on every other issue facing the Future of the University, corporate or no? Is it possible that there may be other, and yes, even more fundamental issues on a provost’s palette — curricula, funding, expansion, public-private relationships, what-have-you — than whether the UAW should represent us during our 3-5 years of teaching here? Could it be that Provost Brinkley might be able to do more to avert the growing corporatization of the university that you lament than Professor Brinkley, and that perhaps by heeding the university mandate on this issue for now, he can free up capital for a more-important and more well-thought-out stance against corporatization later? And what, exactly, is gained by his resignation of the provost post in the name of the Workers’ Struggle that you propose, other than that he’ll more than likely be replaced by someone whose views are much less sympathetic to unionization and anti-corporatism than his?
I can’t speak for Professor Brinkley, and to be honest I have no idea what his thoughts are on this whole affair, although I suspect, like many people on campus, he’s probably less sympathetic to a union than he was before this all started. For all I — and you — know, he could be the voice of reason working back-channels to get this sorted out to the union’s advantage, despite their bad behavior over the past few weeks. It’s certainly more likely than him going out of his way to crush the incipient uprising, as the prevailing propaganda (and your letter, to some extent) would have us believe. And it’s even more likely that the folks calling the shots right now aren’t Brinkley or even President Bollinger (who, you probably know, both came into office after the policy was set), but David Stern and the Columbia Board of Trustees. Surely, if you want to rail against the rising corporate tide in academia, a better target for your wrath would be the Commissioner of the NBA, who has proven himself no friend to labor over these years. In fact, perhaps a better use of union resources would be to hit corporatism where it hurts and to picket the businesses of these Trustees, rather than soaking up the sun at the 116th St. gate and cursing the names of those enemies of the people Brinkley, Bollinger, and Pinkham.
Well, as the increasing flippancy indicates, this letter has already gone on far too long, so I’ll wrap it up here. As I’ve said many times before, I think very much of your work on Goldwater and in the Village Voice, and I don’t plan to make this recent letter of yours any test of either your scholarship or your company. So I’ll leave it at this: With various malfeasances and outright lies within the Bush administration emerging EVERY week now, with the images of atrocity now emanating from Iraqi prison camps and the situation on the ground seeming ever more precarious, with all the people in this country who are really having a hell of a time trying to make it day-to-day and who are deluged in right-wing agit-prop telling them it’s their own fault, I am extraordinarily dismayed that a significant minority of my fellow graduate students have keyed in on “no dental care for Ivy Leaguers” as the evilest-of-evils to combat. And I am equally disturbed that you, who have proven such a penetrating and incisive critic of the Right and its wedge-issue divisiveness in this past, would abet this collective act of self-absorbed delusion by calling out one of our more valuable historians on the floor like this.
-KcM
