Columbia on Strike
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The strike yesterday by hundreds of Columbia graduate students protesting the university’s apparent reluctance to allow teaching and research assistants to unionize under the umbrella of the United Auto Workers demonstrates nothing so much as the strange view from within the ivory tower. The students claim unionization would not negatively impact the classrooms, but this strike suggests otherwise.
The teaching assistants have demonstrated their willingness to place their own demands above the university’s academic life, of which they are ostensibly members. There’s an issue here that doesn’t exist in a normal labor confrontation. Who among those undergraduates is eager to cross a picket line — complete with a giant inflatable rat — manned by a person who will later determine their grade?
A recent National Labor Relations Board case involving teaching assistants at New York University established the “right” of teaching assistants to organize. The counter-argument is that they are apprentices, not professionals. No one is required to attend graduate school, which is an honor that should be reserved for the most capable and ambitious. Columbia’s teaching assistants not only attend, but are paid handsomely for the privilege. Next year the minimum stipend will exceed $16,000, tax-free, in addition to free access to the highest level of higher education. This stipend is well above the national average. These are hardly wage slaves.
In America, however, the right to decide whether to form a union resides with the workers, not with the management nor with the government. And it extends to workers regardless of how well, or poorly, they are paid. So the best move for Columbia might be to drop its legal challenge and let the votes in this election be counted. These things have a way of sorting themselves out. If the United Auto Workers continue to strike at the drop of a hat and to show such little respect for the culture of the university, Columbia’s local will likely fade away of its own accord. If it doesn’t, the Columbia leaders might ponder how they got themselves in this predicament to begin with.
