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04/25/2005: "Grad Student Strikes"

Short article from the Nation on the student strike at Columbia and a memo written by Alan Brinkley threatening retribution for graduate students who struck.

Couple of great points:

True, college professors in the United States overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But it is hard to make the case that the governance of these institutions--most of whose trustees and regents have backgrounds in business, not education--can be classified as "liberal." In fact, in recent years, most major universities have adopted a corporate cost-cutting model--predicated on the elimination of full-time professorships and the downsizing of teaching--that is anathema to the academic culture.

and...

Columbia has consistently argued that graduate students are apprentices, not employees, making collective bargaining inappropriate. This position is shared by nearly every private university, including Brown, Tufts and Penn (student election ballots were impounded prior to being counted on these campuses, as well). Yet the private universities' argument flies in the face of reality. Graduate students no longer feel like apprentices who are being mentored to join a scholarly guild. A generation ago, when these students could look forward to full-time careers in academia, their years of training, heavy teaching loads and low pay were tolerable. Now they increasingly feel exploited: Most are acutely aware that their chances of finding a secure full-time position in academia are slim. Worse, they know that by allowing universities to exploit their cheap labor, they are helping to eliminate the very full-time positions for which they are purportedly being trained. Today, roughly 50 percent of the faculty in higher education teach on a part-time, contingent basis. A remarkable 60 percent of all new faculty appointments are "off the tenure track," meaning that professors are ineligible for tenure and have only short-term contracts.