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Lemisch: Liberalism in Collapse?

Mr. Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (1998). He is a contributing editor of HNN's blog, Cliopatria.

On the HNN homepage, CUNY professor emeritus Jesse Lemisch has penned what could charitably be termed an overheated attack on Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley, whose decision to look out for Columbia's overall interests rather than that of graduate student union activists Lemisch sees as explaining "liberalism in collapse." The issue: for the last two years a fraction of Columbia's graduate students have gone out on strike. Last year, they protested Columbia's decision to pursue its rights, under the Wagner Act, to appeal the legitimacy of a vote on graduate student unionization to the NLRB. This year, after the NLRB ruling went against the graduate student union movement, the strikers are protesting Columbia's decision to follow federal law.

Lemisch is an activist in CUNY's faculty union--whose leadership started its tenure by sending union dues to the legal defense fund of Lori Berenson, the American convicted of terrorism in Peru. The sins that Lemisch attributes to Brinkley and Columbia are, perhaps, more explicable through this unusual perspective. To handle its interests in the NLRB case, the university hired a New York law firm. (Apparently, only unions are entitled to legal representation.) This spring, after union activists announced a plan to go out on strike, Brinkley penned a memo to other Columbia administrators urging them to make "plans for the strike." (Apparently, the provost was supposed to sit idly in his office and ruminate on the horrors of the corporate university.) The contingency plan included exploring the possibility of not paying those grad students who went out on strike and/or requiring strikers to teach an extra term to compensate for the time that they missed in teaching. (Apparently, strikers are supposed to get paid even when they don't fulfill their teaching responsibilities--a pretty good deal!)

Lemisch breathlessly links to a Nation article that reads like a parody of political correctness. Columbia's measures, we are told, "would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act." But, of course, the graduate students are not covered under the act.

Columbia's response to the unionization movement, we are told, reflects a "new, corporate style of management." But, of course, it was the unionization movement itself that introduced the labor-management model to Morningside Heights.

Graduate students, we are told, "increasingly feel exploited," since "most are acutely aware that their chances of finding a secure full-time position in academia are slim." I'd challenge that argument strongly about Columbia Ph.D.'s. But if the claim is true, then perhaps these people should choose other careers--it seems foolish to spend several years getting a degree that the recipient knows going in will be valueless in securing employment.

Lemisch's call for Columbia's top administrators to resign over this issue is absurd.

Posted on Wednesday, April 27, 2005 at 1:51 AM | Comments (38) | Return

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