Remembeing the Yale graduate student strike of 1995

Corey Robin at Crooked Timber offers his memory of the Yale graduate student strike of 1995 and the role of historian David Brion Davis in opposing the strike. Other than suspecting that Davis wasn't quite the ogre he's portrayed as, I don't have any quarrel with Robin's account because I don't know the specifics.

I do, however, have a memory of the strike. I was an undergraduate student at a state university in Cibolia. It was a good university and I got a good education there, but it had many of the faults and challenges that most mid-tier research universities with more than 20,000 students have. I was privileged to be in college, but it was clear that a large number of schools were much better, at least in terms of their reputation and in terms of how affluent their student body was. The ivies, including Yale, were among them.

So, I heard about the Yale strike while walking in the history department. Some professor had placed a newspaper account of the strike on his or her office door. I forget what the account actually said, other than that the students were striking, but I remember thinking, "these people already have their BA's and are now getting a GRADUATE DEGREE in one of the most prestigious schools in the country.....and they have their tuition and fees paid for while I have to work to pay for my own tuition."

In other words, I was less than sympathetic. I still am, although I realize it might very well be a closer call than I had thought when I was an undergrad. Having been to grad school, I realize how grad students are sometimes either mistreated or not as well compensated for the value they bring to their department. Sometimes there is abuse, either egregious abuse (like sexual harassment or racial discrimination) or everyday abuse, like one of my professors who every semester seemed to cancel two to three weeks of lectures and expected their grad student TA's to fill in, which was outside their job duties. I also realize that tuition and fee waivers are not always exactly what they're cracked up to be. And even if we take abuses and misleading promises out of the equation and even if "fairness" doesn't enter into the picture, it's not presumptively wrong for people to seek a larger piece of the pie.

Even so, "sometimes" and "not always" and "exactly" and "presumptively" are key words in that preceding paragraph.. Graduate student employment is still usually in most ways a good deal. That's a problem for graduate student workers when they try to unionize. No matter how justified their cause or how careful they are to make their case to the public, people are going to react. And the unionizers need to realize that and accept that theirs is a hard sell and not all will be onboard.