Great Minds Think Alike
In a pathbreaking ruling, the National Labor Relations Board announced yesterday that graduate student workers at private universities are employees with the right to organize unions.
For three decades, private universities have bitterly resisted this claim. Unions, these universities have argued, would impose a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach on the ineffably individual and heterogenous nature of graduate education. Unions might be appropriate for a factory, where all the work’s the same, but they would destroy the diversity of the academy, ironing out those delicate and delightful idiosyncrasies that make each university what it is. As virtually every elite university now facing an organizing drive of its graduate students is making clear (h/t David Marcus for discovering and pointing me to these specific links).
Here, for example, is Columbia:
Here’s Yale:
Here’s the University of Chicago:
And here’s Princeton:
Casual readers might conclude that the only thing standardized and cookie-cutter about unions in elite universities is the argument against them.
Or perhaps it’s just that great minds sometimes really do think alike.