The Blessed of the Earth

Not long after graduate students at the University of Kansas voted to unionize, affiliating themselves with the American Federation of Teachers, I was invited to speak at Kansas on the future of graduate study in the humanities. In the course of my talk, I not only endorsed the unionization of graduate students at KU and elsewhere, but also referred, in passing, to what I called the bad faith attempt of administrators and faculty at Yale University to claim that their graduate students were simply students and not also employees. As long as people are working as instructors or as teaching assistants and being paid for their work, I thought, it makes sense to consider them employed, to consider their work employment, and to admit, therefore, that they are in some sense employees. And if administrators and faculty at Yale or elsewhere want to claim that their graduate students' are not wages because their teaching (which is not strictly teaching) is merely part of their professional training as apprentice professors, then it makes sense to call the bluff: take graduate students out of the classrooms in which they work as graders, assistants, and instructors; maintain their stipend support at its current levels; and give them professional development and training that does not involve the direct supervision of undergraduates. Then we'll see how long Yale University can survive without the labor (which is not strictly labor) of its graduate student teaching assistants. At the time, I thought my support for graduate student unions-in a speech delivered to, among other people, unionized graduate studentsamounted to endorsing candidates after they'd won their elections. To my surprise, however, I learned later that the graduate students were very pleased with my speech, and that some even considered it courageous. It seems that I had denounced as ridiculous Yale administrators' claims