Liberalism and the Columbia Strike

By Alan Brinkley, Jesse Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, David
Montgomery

History News Network

http://www.hnn.us/articles/4820.html

This week graduate students at Columbia staged a strike
to protest the university’s refusal to negotiate with
GSEU (Graduate Student Employees United). An election
was held two years ago to decide whether to join the
union. Columbia immediately referred the matter to the
National Labor Relations Board before the votes were
counted. Historian Alan Brinkley, now provost, has been
the public face of the university during the strike
(President Lee Bollinger has been a on a trip to Asia).

This page includes statements by Alan Brinkley, Jesse
Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, and David Montgomery.

===

Alan Brinkley (Interview with the Columbia Spectator,
April 21, 2004)

Ady Barkan:If we ignore the legal question about
whether graduate students are workers or students,
because clearly there’s disagreement within the legal
community on that, why should the Administration oppose
the unionization? If graduate students want
representation, what harm does it do the University if
graduate students have a union?

Alan Brinkley: All I can do is tell you the official
University position, which is that the relationship
between [professors] and teaching assistants is a
complex, intellectual, educational, collegial, and also
work-based relationship. And the position of the
University, from the beginning of this issue three
years ago, has been that the presences of a union
mediating this relationship—the union in this case the
UAW which has no previous experience, until NYU, within
the academic world other than representing clerical
workers—would somehow corrupt this relationship.

Ady Barkan: But how do we reconcile that with the
evidence that, for example, four years ago The
Chronicle of Higher Ed[ucation] cited that ninety
percent of faculty members at unionized schools saying
it didn’t inhibit their relationship, and at NYU there
having been no tension, or at least none that’s come to
the surface. I understand that that’s the
Administration line, but what evidence do we have for
that?

Alan Brinkley: Well we don’t have very good evidence
one way or the other, I think. And probably the most
relevant evidence is NYU, because that’s, first of all,
the only private university in the United States that
has a union that I know of, and it too has a UAW union.
And I have mixed reports about NYU. I can’t
characterize—I’m trying to find out more—how the
union has done at NYU or how the faculty feels about
it. I do concede that there are many unionized
campuses, mostly state universities, in which things
seem to have gone well.

Ady Barkan:. A year ago in class I asked you, perhaps
unfairly, for your opinion on student unionization, and
you said you wouldn’t oppose a graduate student union.
And I’m curious whether your experience as a champion
of liberalism, (or not, perhaps this is a separate
issue)...I mean, is your personal position at odds with
that of the Administration?

Alan Brinkley: Well, I can’t answer that. I’m a great
supporter of unionization. I think that the decline in
unions is one of the great catastrophes of our recent
economic life. I think there are many areas in economic
life in which unions can play a constructive role, do
play a constructive role, play an invaluable role. On
this campus, we have lots of unions—we don’t have
unions for students. I don’t know what else to say.

===

Jesse Lemisch (Speech read at a rally of students
picketing Columbia on April 21, 2004)

Columbia’s conduct is so low-down, sleazy,
hypocritical. I have two points to make: first, about
how grotesque it is that Columbia has a high-priced law
firm that specializes in union-busting; second: I want
to talk about liberals in the Columbia administration
who, on their own turf, forget their liberalism .

First point: Columbia’s lawyers against the union in
2002 and, I’m told, still today are Proskauer Rose.
Proskauer boasts on their website:

Proskauer’s 160-plus Labor and Employment lawyers
provide unmatched breadth of expertise capable of
addressing the most complex and challenging labor and
employment issues faced by employers.

Get that: 160 lawyers are after your TA’s.

Proskauer goes on to boast that their "160 lawyers are
based in New York, Boca Raton, Newark, Los Angeles,
Washington and Paris," and that they deal in such areas
as: "collective bargaining"; "reductions-in-force and
other corporate restructurings"; "employee discipline
and discharge"; "delicate employment situations, such
as allegations of sexual harassment...."

It wouldn’t be surprising if Proskauer charged 400-600
dollars per hour. This seems to me an egregiously
immoral use of your tuition money. I hope that you will
demand that Columbia act more like a university and
less like a corporation, and sever this sleazy
connection.

Second point, about liberalism here: Columbia President
Lee Bollinger and Provost Alan Brinkley are known as
liberals — but certainly not when it comes to GSEU.
This kind of disconnect often happens in universities,
and it’s worth your thinking about as you read your way
through your courses: What does it mean when abstract
doctrines are ignored at home? Bollinger and Brinkley
are liberals until they find themselves challenged on
their own turf.

Another example: In 1968, after Columbia called in the
police to bloody the heads of so many Columbia
students, Richard Hofstadter, perhaps the leading
liberal historian of his day, spoke against the
students in a classic case of blaming the victim. That
year, while honorable people were attending a counter-
commencement, Hofstadter spoke, at Grayson Kirk’s
shambles of an official commencement, about the threat
to liberalism that he saw as coming from the bloodied
students — get that, not from the cops, not from Kirk,
but from the students. If Bollinger and Brinkley are
liberals, then let them act like liberals — unless
liberalism means hypocrisy.

Maybe liberalism does mean hypocrisy: when Columbia
appealed the 2002 union election here to Bush’s
National Labor Relations Board, they knew quite well
that the NLRB would impound the ballots, and two years
later the ballots would still be locked up. Is this
democracy? It sound like Florida to me. Columbia is in
symbiosis with the retrograde labor policies of the
Bush administration. Is this liberalism?

In conclusion: I know the people in GSEU, particularly
those in my field, history. They are some of the best
young people around: bright, devoted to their teaching
and doing spectacular work under difficult conditions.
I agree with the chant on the picket line: Columbia’s
stalling is appalling, and it must stop: let’s stop it!

===

Staughton Lynd (Message he asked Jesse Lemisch to read
to protesting students on the picket line)

As May Day approaches, I express my solidarity with
striking graduate students at Columbia University. My
father Robert S. Lynd was a professor of sociology at
Columbia for approximately thirty years. I was briefly
an undergraduate at Columbia, and then in 1959-61
studied there and received Master’s and Doctor’s
degrees in American History.

Columbia has a checkered record in dealing with
dissent. The great American historian Charles Beard was
forced out of his position at Columbia during World War
I because of his opposition to the war. During the
occupation of Columbia buildings in the late 1960s,
faculty and administration failed to condemn the savage
use of police in quelling the rebellion.

It is especially unfortunate that Columbia faculty —
including distinguished historians — have failed to
join you on the picket line. Yours is hardly a violent
disruption; on the contrary, you seek to uphold and
enforce rulings of the National Labor Relations Board
to the effect that under federal labor law graduate
students are ’employees,’ with a consequent right to
engage in concerted activity for mutual aid and
protection — like picketing — and to form and join
unions. I applaud my longtime friend and colleague
Jesse Lemisch for picketing with you. Were I in New
York City I would be at his side.

===

David Montgomery (Letter to Alan Brinkley, April 20,
2004)

Dear Alan:

It is high time for the administration at Columbia to
obey the law of the land and sit down to negotiate with
the union formed by its teaching assistants and
research assistants. Two years ago a clear majority of
graduate students made their choice for a union in an
NLRB election.

They followed the procedure created by the New Deal in
its finest hour to determine a bargaining agent chosen
by employees with which the employer is legally obliged
to negotiate terms of employment. Columbia’s
administration has taken refuge behind the myth that
those who teach sections and carry out research for the
university are not employees and counted on a federal
government determined to do all it can to create a
"union free America" to let Columbia, and the Bush
administration, evade the intent and the letter of the
law. By forcing the graduate employees to strike for
recognition, you have done precisely what Senator
Wagner sought to avoid: resorted to the law of the
jungle. Columbia today can be a better citizen than
this.

Sincerely,
David Montgomery
Farnam Professor of History Emeritus Yale University