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Fifty years ago this April the administration of Columbia University deployed the New York City Police Department to clear hundreds of student protesters from five campus buildings they had occupied for nearly a week, during which the police ran riot, indiscriminately beating students and faculty members, protesting or not, while \u201cclearing\u201d the campus.\u00a0 The protesters \u2014 I was one of them \u2014 were demanding an end to the construction of a gymnasium being built by the university on public parkland that served neighboring Harlem and an end to Columbia\u2019s participation in the Institute for Defense Analysis, which conducted secret war research for the Pentagon, demands ultimately won.\u00a0 (My own brief look back at these events and their impact on my life is one of over 60 short memoirs from participants in this key rebellion in a year of global student unrest collected in\u00a0A Time to Stir: Columbia, 1968<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>published last month by Columbia University Press).<\/p>\n Fifty years earlier, during World War I, Columbia\u2019s infamously autocratic president Nicholas Murray Butler suspended academic freedom for the duration of the conflict.\u00a0 As the late Columbia historian and long-serving AAUP Committee A member\u00a0Walter Metzger put it<\/a>, Butler demanded of his faculty a level of loyal patriotism \u201cdefined in effect as the particular degree of indignation and bellicosity displayed by President Butler.\u201d\u00a0 Soon Butler successfully fired\u00a0James McKeen Cattell<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the country\u2019s leading psychologist at the time and a perennial thorn in Butler\u2019s side \u2014\u00a0for his opposition to wartime conscription<\/a>.\u00a0 Cattell was, according to AAUP associate secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede, \u201cperhaps the most prominent academic gadfly of his time.\u201d\u00a0 In 1912 he publicly called for the creation of the AAUP and helped organize its founding, but never played a role in its leadership.<\/p>\n It seems that every half-century Columbia\u2019s administration must do something despicable and, true to form and right on schedule, the other day they did.\u00a0 This time it is the university that is engaging in a perverse sort of \u201ccivil disobedience\u201d by refusing to observe the law.\u00a0 On Tuesday Columbia Provost John Coatsworth announced in\u00a0an email to the university community<\/a>\u00a0that Columbia will not bargain with the Graduate Workers of Columbia (the UAW-affiliated union for teaching and research assistants) despite the ruling of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Columbia graduate workers are entitled to collective bargaining through their chosen representative and the overwhelming victory of the union in a representation election.<\/p>\n On August 23, 2016 the NLRB overturned a 2004 decision to rule in\u00a0Trustees of Columbia University in the City of<\/em>\u00a0New York and Graduate Workers of Columbia\u2013GWC, UAW<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that student employees at private universities have the right to organize unions to bargain collectively over the terms of their employment.\u00a0 The issue decided was not whether student employees, primarily graduate student teaching and research assistants, are \u201cprimarily students\u201d but that \u201c[s]tatutory coverage is permitted by virtue of an employment relationship; it is not foreclosed by the existence of some other, additional relationship that the [National Labor Relations] Act does not reach.\u201d\u00a0 In response Coatsworth, an historian of Latin America and a radical activist during his own graduate school days at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a message all but urging Columbia student employees to reject collective bargaining in favor of \u201cproductive dialogue\u201d with the university administration.\u00a0 In response, I wrote\u00a0this open letter<\/a>, which was widely circulated on campus.\u00a0 In December 2016 graduate and undergraduate students\u00a0voted 1602 to 623<\/a>\u00a0in favor of joining the UAW.\u00a0 The election results were subsequently confirmed by the NLRB.<\/p>\n On the\u00a0Remaking the University blog<\/a>\u00a0UCLA history professor Michael Meranze explains the meaning of Columbia\u2019s decision not to bargain with the union:<\/p>\n Although the University characterizes this decision as simply acting on its \u201cright to have the status of graduate student assistants reviewed by a United States Court of Appeals\u201d\u00a0in reality it is choosing to engage in an unfair labor practice and daring the union to sue it<\/a>.\u00a0 As with the longer history of the University\u2019s employment of labor-busting law firms to stretch out the certification process, Columbia appears determined\u00a0to take advantage of President Trump\u2019s election in order to find a legal venue hostile to labor<\/a>.<\/p>\n The hypocrisy of Columbia is overwhelming.\u00a0 Columbia\u2019s President Lee Bollinger is a renowned scholar of the First Amendment and Columbia trumpets its commitments to the notions of free debate and the force of reasoned argument.\u00a0 But apparently they are only committed to these principles when it will not cost them control over their graduate student laborers.\u00a0 Both the University and the Union have debated these issues for years and the graduate students have voted that they want representation.\u00a0 Columbia has refused to accept that it\u00a0lost the argument when graduate students overwhelmingly voted in favor of unionizing<\/a>.\u00a0 Columbia\u2013like so many of its peers\u2013claims that a union would constitute a \u201cthird party between student and teacher.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 But it has not hesitated in seeking out external law firms to fight the unionization.<\/p>\n More importantly, the issue of unionization is not concerned with the relationship between teachers and graduate students as students.\u00a0 It is concerned with the relationship between university management and graduate student workers as\u00a0employees<\/u>.\u00a0 By implying that the issue is about relationships of teaching Columbia\u2019s management has misrepresented the situation\u2013what the graduate students are demanding is the right to bargain over employment conditions not over their activities as students.<\/p>\n Since Columbia\u2019s intellectual and academic arguments are very weak it appears that ultimately this is about power.\u00a0 The Columbia administration\u2019s decision to hoard theirs in clear contradiction to both the NLRB and the expressed will of their graduate student workers.\u00a0 Like their fellows at the University of Chicago and Yale, to name only two, they are behaving much like feudal aristocrats have always done when faced with a challenge to their authority\u2013by claiming that they are only concerned with maintaining personal relationships.\u00a0 But what that really means are paternalistic relationships in which subordination is key.<\/p>\n It is important to recognize that the threat to academic freedom and learning does not come from graduate student unions but from overweening managerial authority.\u00a0 I have taught in universities with unionized graduate students for nearly three decades and have not once had the union interfere with a genuinely pedagogical question.\u00a0 I have, however, seen unions support graduate student employees in preventing their employment by the university overwhelm their capacity to fulfill their jobs on the one hand and pursue their studies on the other.\u00a0 But as we can see more generally with the consistent decision by university managers to impose precarious working conditions on more and more of their labor force, management is not in fact thinking about either academic freedom or the relationship between teachers and students.\u00a0 Its concerns lie elsewhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Meranze concludes, \u201cColumbia\u2019s administration should be ashamed of itself.\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019s right.\u00a0 Columbia is, of course, a great university with brilliant and often iconoclastic scholars and the most diverse student body in the highly competitive Ivy League.\u00a0 And some things have changed since the dark days of \u201968.\u00a0 Bollinger surely represents a marked improvement over the aloof, arrogant, and bumbling Grayson Kirk, who was far more at home in the corporate board room than the university classroom.\u00a0 Ten years ago Columbia welcomed back the protesters for a\u00a0remarkable conference<\/a>\u00a0on the \u201968 rebellion.\u00a0 My classmate\u00a0Jonathan Schiller<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a member of Columbia\u2019s 1968 Ivy League champion basketball team, an avowed strike supporter, and a prominent liberal attorney \u2014 is now chair of the board of trustees.\u00a0 He too should be ashamed.\u00a0 And I, despite how much I continue to value the fine education I received on Morningside Heights, am simply embarrassed once again to be an alum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"