Slaves to the Man.

The New York Times > Education > The National Labor Relations Board says that graduate students at private universities have no right to unionize.

I have no idea when a union should, or should not, exist --- as a theoretical ethical question. However, as an economic and political question, unions seem to exist when:

a) there is significant threat that an individual laborer can be singled out for mistreatment by management, in a way in which all laborers of the same class can be mistreated (so the mistreatment of one threatens mistreatment of all);

b) or, the entire class of laborers are treated equally poorly, and can be replaced singly (if they object) but not as a whole (i.e. laborers are a commodity with a definable marginal cost of replacement).

In other words, unions are simply a method of power politics -- like armies and political parties.

If graduate students seek power politics to improve their position, it says nothing bad about the graduate students, but it says something important about higher education. Colleges have largely -- over the last 50 years -- become homogenized and commodified. The benefits of taking statistical mechanics at Harvard are not so great over taking statistical mechanics at, say, University of Vermont. It's like high school -- same text books everywhere, same education everywhere.

What should alarm administrators is not that the graudate students have almost succeeded in unionizing (and I predict they will finally succeed, on short order; say, <10 years), but that they are asking for it at all. As Marx said, this occurs when workers recoginze their commonality. The universities where this happens are those where there is little differentiation between what they have to offer and others have to offer. Graduate students -- very reasonably -- have perceived and expressed that they are no longer the unique and annointed successor generation of academics, they are hired like cannon fodder to deal with the massive teaching load inexpensively. This teaching is not central to their own education -- it is just cheap, available labor for hire.

There used to be "Harvard men" (and women) as they used to be called. Having attended a specific university used to single one out as a specific type of person. That kind of branding still exists in diminished form, and in some places, it is enormously diminished.

That is usually a step which occurs just prior to industry consolidation. So, is graduate student unionization a harbinger for university consolidation? I argue it would be, if there were economic benefits to scaling operations and obtaining geographic diversity (i.e. consolidating University of Virginia with USC would benefit both only if one could centralize administration; but I don't think that's possible).