On the Columbia Strike
It’s always seemed to me that the situation of professors is more comparable to that of doctors or lawyers than to auto workers or service employees. Flexibility and merit are the hallmarks, in the ideal anyway, of the academy. Also, we have a direct, personal relationship with and obligation to our students, as doctors do to their patients or lawyers do to their clients. Just as it would be unethical for a doctor to go out on strike the day before a patient’s operation or a lawyer to go out on strike a day before a client’s case opened, so too would it be unethical for a professor to go out on strike in the middle of a term.
That the Columbia graduate students decided to strike shortly before finals is only one reason why I find their actions so unpalatable. The graduate-student unionization movement as a whole seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of graduate student teaching, which is far more comparable to being a medical intern than to being an auto worker. Graduate students who serve as teaching fellows are not hired because they are the most qualified employees for their positions: in some cases, especially for those who have not previously taught, they are not qualified at all. They are hired because, as part of their education, they need training in teaching, so they can eventually get a full-time teaching position—even candidates with wonderful dissertations will have a hard time getting tenure-track jobs with no teaching experience. A mutually beneficial relationship exists between the universities, which can staff courses for less pay than a full-time instructor would demand, and the graduate students, who can obtain the experience necessary for them to earn a full-time position.
If Columbia wanted to be vindictive in this instance, it would launch a fundraising campaign to increase the number of full-time faculty with the sole purpose of eliminating the need for any graduate teaching at all. Of course, this approach would harm the school’s graduate program, and would be impractical. But another alternative does exist: an anti-unionization movement has sprung up among graduate students, Graduate Students Against Unionization, whose members have had the courage to put the university’s students' welfare ahead of their own short-term needs. To the extent possible, the university should work with the leaders of the GSAU, since, if nothing else, one thing is clear: the graduate students who abandoned their students midway through the term have lost the moral high ground in this debate.