It’s back-to-school season in America, and that means it’s the time of year when the pundit class is moved to lament the sad state of elite higher education. Over the next few weeks, our thought-leaders will scold this year’s class of overly sensitive Ivy League students, what with their safe spaces and trigger warnings.



Tough-minded columnists will sputter against fancy colleges that are covering up offensive sculptures and censoring offensive speakers. Readers will be invited to gape at the latest perversity served up by our radicalized professoriate and to mourn the decline of their dear old alma mater. What, oh what is this generation coming to, they will cry.

But while they weep, let us turn our attention to an entirely different aspect of life on the American campus that doesn’t fit into the tidy narrative of fancy colleges coddling the snowflake generation. Let us look instead into the actual conditions under which the work of higher education is done. Let us talk labor.

In August 2016, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington decided that graduate students who teach classes at private universities can be considered employees of those universities, eligible to form unions and bargain collectively with their employers. It was the end point of a decades-long process in which the Board has oscillated between ruling in favor of grad student unions and then against them.

In the aftermath of the NLRB decision, graduate student teachers at Columbia and Yale universities, both schools in the Ivy League, held elections and voted to form unions. More organizing elections are scheduled for the next few weeks at a number of other private universities, and as the school year gets under way grad students should rightfully be negotiating new contracts throughout the United States.

But here’s the catch: thanks to the election of Donald Trump last November, the NLRB will soon be under the sway of his extremely anti-union Republican party.

Once Trump’s members are seated on the Labor Board, there is every likelihood they will revisit the matter of graduate student teachers and reverse themselves on the question, which would in turn permit university administrations to refuse to negotiate and even to blow off the results of these elections.

A radicalized university that lives to coddle young people would sit down immediately at the bargaining table and give those graduate students what they want.

A corporation that is determined to keep its employees from organizing, on the other hand, would stall and delay and refuse to recognize the union until Trump’s new, right-wing NLRB can saddle up and ride to the rescue. And guess what: that is exactly what these universities are doing – refusing to begin contract negotiations, filing challenges to the elections, appealing this and that.

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Americans sometimes find it difficult to feel sympathy for the problems of graduate students, who are on track to earn prestigious degrees from prestigious universities. Why, they wonder, do such students need to resort to a workplace strategy we associate with dockworkers and coal miners?

When I talked to them, members of the unions at Columbia and Yale gave all sorts of reasons for joining up, most of which would be familiar to workers in nearly any quarter of the economy. They want to get paid better for their work, to have a say in the conditions of their employment, to have a complaint procedure that actually works (this last being particularly important in a workplace like academia that is well-known for sexual harassment).

The grander reason looming behind everything, however, is that the universities ripped the old academic social contract to shreds some decades ago.

The trade-off used to be that, after many years of hard and poorly compensated labor teaching college kids, graduate students collected their PhDs and headed out into the world to become professors, an honored and well-compensated occupation.

But perches in the professoriate have become rare, mainly because universities figured out that the more hard-working graduate students they could bring in to teach classes, the fewer full professors they needed. Then they began replacing those professors with poorly paid adjuncts, a different but closely related story.

It is exploitation of the baldest sort. As I was writing this, a story came over the wire about an English teacher at a university in California who lives in a car, grading her students’ papers in the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart.

Lots of of equally lurid tales about impoverished university teachers seem to crop up every year, all of them attesting to the same thing: the destruction of the professoriate as a realistic career that promising young people might aspire to.

Members of the grad-student unions at Columbia and Yale that I talked to look forward to starting out on such careers with deep misgivings. Justin Steinfeld, a biomedical researcher at Columbia and a member of the grad union’s bargaining committee, sends me a startling info-graphic showing that the number of PhDs who get proper, well-paid faculty jobs is now so small that “a faculty job is an ‘alternative’ career.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way, they believe.

“As a leader in higher education, Yale could do something different,” writes Aaron Greenberg, a union activist who is studying for a PhD in political science at Yale, in an email to me. Instead, he continues, Yale could be a model for a “great, democratic institution that values the people who do the teaching and scholarship that define the academy’s core mission.”

Still, the fact remains: graduate students today are busting their asses training for awesome jobs that essentially no longer exist. It is cruel irony that college kids go deep in debt nowadays in order to be taught by people who earn less than a pet sitter, but for now let us put that story on the shelf. It is only the first of the ugly paradoxes we encounter here.

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The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, is “one of the country’s foremost First Amendment scholars,” according to the university’s website. He has written extensively about press freedoms in the Internet era. He stands tall for good causes in many fields. Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban, for example.

Last January, Bollinger described it as “contrary to our nation’s core values and founding principles.” Speaking immediately after the election last November, Bollinger even described Trump himself as a “challenge [to] the central idea of a university.”

Which makes it a little bit awkward that Columbia is now apparently counting on this same Donald Trump to be a savior of the university – or, at least, to preserve the university’s preferred relationship with the people who do its teaching.

But wait, there’s more: Lee Bollinger also happens to be the co-chairman of something called the Committee on the Future of Voting, an organization charged with ensuring that the American people’s will is accurately reflected in future elections. But at the same time his university is ignoring the will of its own employees as it was clearly and overwhelmingly expressed at the ballot box last December.

This is understandably frustrating to members of the union at Columbia. When I talk to Justin Steinfeld, he describes Bollinger as a man who “witnesses a democratic vote on his campus that goes against what he wants [and] is willing to ignore it and fight democracy at all costs. And then simultaneously go on a committee and apply different standards when it comes to a presidential or congressional election in the US.”

Yale, too, has raised numerous objections to the union election in what seems an obvious bid to delay the process until Trump can come to the rescue. Let us recall that this is the same Yale University that just rechristened a building named for John C Calhoun and that made headlines a few years ago in a controversy over insensitive Halloween costumes.

Its alumni have come together to denounce Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who graduated from Yale in 1985, and the university’s officers have leveled harsh rhetoric at Trump’s immigration orders. A key word in this latter protest, according to an item in the administration’s Yale News: “solidarity” with the immigrants Trump has targeted.



Solidarity, however, with the movement for whom “solidarity” is the philosophy –solidarity with the movement that actually sings “Solidarity Forever” at their protests and conventions – solidarity of that sort is out of the question. The day when that kind of solidarity gets cracked by the tiny fist of Donald Trump is one that Yale’s executives seem eagerly to anticipate.

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It is an easy thing to pile up examples of hypocrisy in a case like this one. These universities are ultra-liberal institutions, famous for the kind of politically correct antics that keep the pundit class busy. And yet here they are, basically counting on a right-wing administration in Washington to come and save them from their own workers.

(Let us acknowledge, in passing, Columbia University’s position that they oppose graduate student unionization regardless of whether it is Donald Trump or Barack Obama in the Oval Office.)

But this is more than a tale of hypocrisy in the groves of academe. This is a story about modern liberalism and what’s wrong with it. This is a story about the academy, the institution liberalism treasures most; about meritocracy, the doctrine to which liberalism pledges its troth; and about the long-term migration of liberalism’s concerns away from matters of economics and class.

So let us skip by the lead-pipe fact that the modern academy can simultaneously be so incredibly sensitive on matters of offensive speech and so utterly callous on matters of basic economics—or that modern liberalism is essentially the same, removing Confederate monuments with one hand while doing fine favors for Big Pharma with the other.

Let us proceed instead to the larger issue at hand: what does it mean when elite universities have become central institutions of liberalism? I mean this not merely in the sense that education is the factor that is supposed to separate blue voters from red, but that respect for academic credentials and professional achievement is what defines much of liberalism today.

Academia is the source of the science that we are supposed to treasure and respect, the legal reasoning that overturns the blundering of right-wing state legislatures, the political science that wins so many elections for our side.

If government is in the hands of a crew of Harvard-trained professionals, we liberals feel good about it. When it’s a Reagan or a Bush or a Trump in the White House, we share endless laughs at their ignorance and stupidity.

But what is the elite American university, this institution upon which we have built our modern version of progressivism? For all its trigger warnings and its safe spaces, as the story of the grad teachers at Yale and Columbia reminds us, it isn’t a particularly democratic place.

Rather, it is a site of class formation, where young people go to be separated from their less able peers and come out the other end as polished members of the upper-middle class.

American commentators of every political shading acknowledge this, speculating endlessly about how much college grads earn, talking about the need to go to a “good” school, about the economic dead-end facing those who don’t go to college.

This is what we have put at the core of progressivism: the machine that shapes and defines our society’s affluent cohort. Not only is it hostile to organized labor as a matter of course (as the graduate student teachers are discovering), but it is opposed to many forms of social solidarity.

The purpose of higher ed, after all, is the exact opposite of solidarity: it is to define hierarchy and prestige. To separate the talented from the ordinary. To accept only the kids with good SAT scores and reject the others.

It is not by coincidence that the towns that host universities and colleges have prospered so enormously in this age of inequality: they are playgrounds for the elite – and everyone knows it.

Their princely tuition price-tags; their luxurious gyms and dining halls; their ever-expanding administrative staffs and facilities all bespeak the merit-based entitlement of America’s winners.

Nor is it a coincidence that American liberalism has increasingly become a doctrine of the affluent. There are, of course, advantages to a form of progressivism that appeals so effectively to the wealthy: it allows Democratic fundraising to rival that of the Republican part and permits the rich to show themselves off in a cloak of righteousness we haven’t seen for many a decade.

But for the rest of us, it offers precious little. As a different group of higher-ed labor activists once put it, “We can’t eat prestige.”