Well, as readers closer to the nest here have probably noticed, I have yet to remark on the Columbia TA strike that’s been happening on campus these past two weeks, for a number of reasons. For one, I’ve remained conflicted about the strike action for some time, as reported below. For another, I have friends on all sides of the issue here on campus and in the history department, and I didn’t much feel like “poisoning the well” any further by needlessly antagonizing one group or another. That being said, after reading Rick Perlstein’s open letter to Alan Brinkley that was being passed around yesterday, I finally felt compelled to respond to the whole imbroglio. As y’all know, I’ve hyped Perlstein’s excellent book on Goldwater here more than once, and indeed, I posted one of his Village Voice articles in my last update. And, given that we’ve shared some minor correspondence in the past and that I felt his letter encapsulated much of the us v. them wrongheadedness afflicting the strike movement at the moment, I wrote him back. (He has since replied in turn, and quite graciously.) My response, edited slightly for punctuation and clarity, below:
Hi Rick,
Because of my oft-professed admiration for your work, I’ll try to extend more courtesy to you than I think you gave Alan Brinkley in your recent open missive to him, and thus I won’t be drawing any lines in the sand here regarding my stance on your character or my enjoyment of your company. Given that we’ve only “met” online, I’d be hard-pressed to do so anyway. Nevertheless, in the spirit of friendly disagreement (something going at a premium in Morningside these days), I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that I found your recent letter to Brinkley a remarkably ill-conceived piece of “gotcha” that falls far below the usual quality and intuition I’ve come to expect from your writing.
I should first say that, until very recently, I have been a supporter of the graduate student unionization drive here on campus, although I suppose quite a tepid one by current standards. While I believe the argument most often heard by union supporters during this current strike (and in the pages of the Village Voice) — that we are an oppressed subaltern class because we are paid $17,000 a year, at least $12,000 in housing subsidies, basic health care, gym membership, etc., to do what amounts to basically ten hours of teaching a week — is patently ridiculous (and, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, is one more often voiced by graduate students who have nestled in the womb of academia ever since college, and never spent a year or two in the “real” world, where the work day begins at 8:30am in cubicles, service counters, and factory lines all across America), I do think there are other important reasons why a graduate student union may be beneficial to students, workers, and the university.
For one, I share your belief that collective bargaining is both the best means of negotiating a contract and a right hard-fought through the annals of American history. While I don’t necessarily believe that we as grad students constitute workers in any traditional sense, I respect the right of my fellow grad students to vote up or down on forming a union if they so desire, and believe the administration should count and abide by the votes, pending a ruling by the NLRB. Second, and more importantly, I believe a graduate student union could serve as a useful tool in organizing sympathy strikes and publicizing the plight of those often-invisible university workers who do in fact face real hardships and obstacles to fair and equitable job conditions, be they clerical workers, building maintenance staff, administrative assistants, or adjuncts.
All that being said, this current strike was simply a bad idea, and one’s that been getting worse as time goes along. It has been poorly conceived, poorly timed, poorly thought-out, and poorly executed to the detail. Garnering just over a third of the graduate student population (by union estimates) at its peak, the strike has suffered from an unfocused message and unclear goals from the very start. Worse, it has coasted along on a righteous, reactionary anger rather than by any force of logic, and, I believe, has had the unintended consequence of alienating and radicalizing the vast majority of faculty, undergraduates, and undecided graduate students from a cause they may have had great sympathy with, had this all been handled with any degree of aplomb.
To begin with, the reasons for the timing and duration of the strike were never satisfactorily explained to the rank-and-file, myself included — Instead, the union organizing committee relied on extremely suspect voting methodology to procure the desired pro-strike margins from the membership: Rather than being conducted by an impartial third party (the Spec, for example), the ballot boxes were staffed with phalanxes of organizers at all times, who asked voters to vote Yes! and sign up for pickets WHILE they were voting. Despite the fact that this union, if recognized, will bargain for us all, only a significant minority of graduate students — those who signed union cards previously (including myself) — were allowed to cast a ballot on the strike. Those ambivalent students who had signed union cards in earlier years but had recently fallen from the One True Faith were forced to renounce their apostasy in order to vote, and then they were forced to sign their ballots(!) to be “checked against the roll of eligible voters.” (Needless to say, this same attention to possible voting irregularities was not extended to the other side, so we “No on Strike” voters have only to presume that the many pro-union TA’s who are no longer (or not yet) eligible to vote did not cast “Yes” ballots.) Over the nights between voting, the ballot boxes were kept in the safe and inviolate confines of the union office, rather than at an impartial location. And, when the votes were counted in this union office, we union members were only given a winning percentage — 80% — no tally of votes and no, I have since learned, opportunity for a recount or overview of the tally. (And yet, strangely enough, I can probably rattle off several dozen names of graduate student historians who voted No on this strike at this point…I guess I don’t get out much. Or perhaps it’s the radical scientists out there who accounted for the 80%.) Since your letter displayed such an eagerness to hoist Alan Brinkley on the petard of the Wagner Act, I am tempted to bring up the Mississippi Plan and all manner of Southern voting irregularities here — some of which are described in your book — but, while I’ll permit myself the aside, that’s exactly the type of shrill, ahistorical analogy that permeates campus right now and that has been so counter-productive in obtaining the union’s goals. I will say, however, that it is remarkable that a strike ostensibly geared towards “counting the votes” would rely on such dubious voting irregularities.
Nevertheless, the die was cast, so to speak, and thus we unhappy lot cast down our pencils and blue books, told our students of our miserable back-breaking plight, and took up the picket. Or, I should say, many did — I respected the strike action the first week but didn’t picket, pending further information from the union organizing committee on what the hell exactly was going on. Why did we pick this fight, only two weeks before the end of the term (thus making it almost a foregone conclusion that the administration would ride it out)? What’s the message the union is trying to get out with this strike? (The one you hear the most, on radio interviews, placards, and elsewhere, is that we are oppressed, but as I noted above, that’s a lousy peg to hang one’s hat on, and makes us seem all the more pie-in-the-sky privileged and self-absorbed.) If the strike’s the stick, what’s the carrot? Are we reaching out to the faculty and undergrads? Are we making common cause with other union groups? What’s the agenda? What’s the fallback position? What’s the exit strategy? For the first week, these answers were not forthcoming, and I could educe no rhyme or reason from the Pravda-like e-mail I was getting in my inbox every day (Comrades! We have closed down 4 of 18 classes today! We have stopped UPS from coming on campus!…Well, that’s good news for FedEx.)
So, by the time a number of pro-union students of the history department kindly sat down to address many of our concerns about the strike, after a full week into the action, I had a number of questions. Worse, given the aforementioned voting irregularities, the lack of structure or plan already evident by then, and the increasing shrillness of many of the strikers (Whatever you think of Columbia University or our situation, the Homestead Strike this is not), I went into that meeting with an awful creeping feeling I usually get when listening to officials in the George W. Bush administration: namely, either the union leadership is lying to me or they’re incompetent. But what I discovered at that meeting was a third possibility I hadn’t considered — there was in fact NO union leadership. The strike was (and is) being run as a completely ad hoc operation, guided day-to-day not by strategy or pragmatism or political calculation but by a free-floating vexation against Columbia and its “administrative traps” (A phrase that came up often in the meeting.)
When asking the most basic of questions (Why now? What’s going on?), I and other ambivalent students were confronted with the ugly sight of our colleages — whose intelligence and scholarship in other matters I respect enormously — responding with pro-union pablum and anti-administration indignation that had clearly gone stale in the echo chamber of long, shrill meetings. Basically, the message was this: You’re either with us or against us — There comes a time when the rubber hits the road, and that time is now. (Why that time was now was left unexplained.) This is our chance to stand up for what we believe is right, and we will do so until the heavens fall. We will fight against the increasingly corporate ideology of the University, who attempt to reduce us to squalor and turn academic inquiry into economic exploitation. This is all very inspiring stuff, to be sure, (as one of my friends at the meeting waggishly put it, “grab your little piece of the sixties while you still can”), but it doesn’t answer the basic questions: Why now? Why indefinitely? What’s the plan? Who’s running this outfit?
Should we be concerned, I asked, that the Columbia history faculty, natural allies whose pro-union bona fides are considerable, may be alienated by our actions? No, because we’ve instead received a great deal of support from “the community.” (Wow, David Montgomery is pro-union? Who knew?) Why did the union picket and/or boycott academic conferences, some of which carry a great deal more substantive and lefty weight than our cause to squeeze an extra grand out of Columbia? The answer? “Administrative Trap!” When I asked what we should do with our paychecks now that we weren’t working (and which, nevertheless, the administration has continued to pass out), people looked at me like I was from Mars. Apparently, it’s vote Yes on Strike, No on Sacrifice.
Needless to say, I left this meeting extremely dismayed, and it confirmed some of my more depressing suspicions about this strike from the very start. Most of the pro-union folks, all of whom I consider my friends and respect a great deal, had nevertheless begun speaking in platitudes, with very little sense of the situation on the ground or the political or pragmatic necessities involved in making a strike action work — in fact, they often seem not to have even considered them. Worse still, somewhere in this endless fight against the administration, they had lost perspective — The whole strike operation, while perhaps begun with the best of intentions, had devolved into some kind of bizarre pageant where we graduate students honored our progressive inclinations by dressing up as the Oppressed and railing against The Man, as portrayed in this case by the sinister agents of the University administration.
Which brings me full circle to why I found your recent letter to Alan Brinkley so appalling, given my strong sense from your writings that critical perspective is one of your long suits. Since you have met him and, until recently, seem to have enjoyed his company, I think you should have a sense of Brinkley as not the Machiavel he’s been made out to be of late, but rather as an impressive and discerning historian-turned-university-administrator thrust into an almost-impossible position. Fair enough, your letter begins by pointing that out, but it then proceeds to try to twist the knife by invoking personal recollections and dubious ultimatums to expose him as some kind of corporate stooge, and frankly, your remarks here reflect worse on you than they do on him.
Ok, so Brinkley’s personal views as an historian and commentator on public events and his current position as provost on the strike action have entered into some conflict…that much seems relatively clear. But is it really your contention that his stance on this ill-conceived strike by the graduate students should outweigh his opinion on every other issue facing the Future of the University, corporate or no? Is it possible that there may be other, and yes, even more fundamental issues on a provost’s palette — curricula, funding, expansion, public-private relationships, what-have-you — than whether the UAW should represent us during our 3-5 years of teaching here? Could it be that Provost Brinkley might be able to do more to avert the growing corporatization of the university that you lament than Professor Brinkley, and that perhaps by heeding the university mandate on this issue for now, he can free up capital for a more-important and more well-thought-out stance against corporatization later? And what, exactly, is gained by his resignation of the provost post in the name of the Workers’ Struggle that you propose, other than that he’ll more than likely be replaced by someone whose views are much less sympathetic to unionization and anti-corporatism than his?
I can’t speak for Professor Brinkley, and to be honest I have no idea what his thoughts are on this whole affair, although I suspect, like many people on campus, he’s probably less sympathetic to a union than he was before this all started. For all I — and you — know, he could be the voice of reason working back-channels to get this sorted out to the union’s advantage, despite their bad behavior over the past few weeks. It’s certainly more likely than him going out of his way to crush the incipient uprising, as the prevailing propaganda (and your letter, to some extent) would have us believe. And it’s even more likely that the folks calling the shots right now aren’t Brinkley or even President Bollinger (who, you probably know, both came into office after the policy was set), but David Stern and the Columbia Board of Trustees. Surely, if you want to rail against the rising corporate tide in academia, a better target for your wrath would be the Commissioner of the NBA, who has proven himself no friend to labor over these years. In fact, perhaps a better use of union resources would be to hit corporatism where it hurts and to picket the businesses of these Trustees, rather than soaking up the sun at the 116th St. gate and cursing the names of those enemies of the people Brinkley, Bollinger, and Pinkham.
Well, as the increasing flippancy indicates, this letter has already gone on far too long, so I’ll wrap it up here. As I’ve said many times before, I think very much of your work on Goldwater and in the Village Voice, and I don’t plan to make this recent letter of yours any test of either your scholarship or your company. So I’ll leave it at this: With various malfeasances and outright lies within the Bush administration emerging EVERY week now, with the images of atrocity now emanating from Iraqi prison camps and the situation on the ground seeming ever more precarious, with all the people in this country who are really having a hell of a time trying to make it day-to-day and who are deluged in right-wing agit-prop telling them it’s their own fault, I am extraordinarily dismayed that a significant minority of my fellow graduate students have keyed in on “no dental care for Ivy Leaguers” as the evilest-of-evils to combat. And I am equally disturbed that you, who have proven such a penetrating and incisive critic of the Right and its wedge-issue divisiveness in this past, would abet this collective act of self-absorbed delusion by calling out one of our more valuable historians on the floor like this.
-KcM
Nice letter. I remain vexed by the question in general and had left graduate school by the time it came up at my university, but if you’re interested in other experiences, check in with Amanda of Screenshot who was very involved in the Cornell effort and trying to get answers to some of the same sorts of questions you raise.
nice letter. one of your better works i’ve seen in recent years, i think.
I’m impressed. You’ve captured the essence of chaos in the GSEU leadership structure that’s existed since day one.
And Murph, the last thing we want is to be used as a tool for the already incompetent clerical staff to negotiate a more impressive contract with even less responsibility than they have now. One trip to Low 107, our dept office, or the bursar’s office is enough to demonstrate Columbia’s philosophy of “why pay one person to do a job poorly, when you can have five doing the same job five times as poorly.”
Dear Kevin:
Glad to have this discussion. Circulate this as widely as you like. I recommend we take this to the comments thread on History News Network, in fact, to make it as public as possible.
First things first: I have no regrets about having written the letter I wrote to Alan Brinkley, nor having made it public.
Second things second: you make a mistake in projecting your frustrations about the strike and the people running it onto me. I’m not responding to any image I have of Alan Brinkley as a Machiavel. I’m just responding to the
sentiments he put on the record in the Columbia Spectator. I have only the most casual contact with GESU, whose name I only learned on HNN. Two of the organizers are friends of mine, yes, but then, one graduate student who has also expressed anger at my letter is also a friend of mine, one of longer standing and greater intimacy. You obviously have a lot of rage at how GESU handled this matter. I’m not GESU’s stalking horse. Rage aimed at me is rage misspent. You do a lot of projecting here, and seem to think by doing so you can land some blows at people in Morning Side Heights. You can’t.
Let me explain both these points further, and why they are important.
I have no regrets over what I have done because, first, I told the truth. I don’t feel like hanging out with a guy part of whose job it is to keep a union from being recognized, whether he’s a vice-president of human capital at Consolidated Widget or a distinguished historian. Argue with them, yes; but hang out with them, no. Alan Brinkley needs to know this-it’s why the letter is addressed to him-because, well, next time I see him (assuming the situation is at the same place politically) he should know explicitly why I’m scuttling to the
other side of the room from him: that it’s not his tie, his last article in AHR, whatever. I’d probably rather argue with him, but in a public place, that would be rude.
Speaking of public. I made this letter public-I took the leap into incivility, if only within the realm of the republic of letters–because I’ve taken a side in a much broader struggle than anything having to do with seminar rooms in
the United States: the struggle for the principle that a unionized work force is better in all kinds of workplaces (whether performed by miserable subalterns or not, is irrelevant). For the workers, for the workplace, for our society, and, yes, oftentimes for management as well (a disciplined union leadership can save a company a hell of a lot of money when it comes to managing disorderly personnel; that’s why a lot of radicals can’t stand the way unions work in
the U.S.). Obviously this is a much longer argument than what I’m prepared to make here. But understand that I think the issue is an omelette worth breaking eggs over. Universities should set standards for the rest of society. The rest of society shouldn’t fight unionization like it’s the plague. And by shaming Professor Brinkley, by taking advantage of the special capital I have as someone I have reason to believe he respects, I’m trying to advance my side in a political cause: a political cause that’s more important to me than maintaining
pleasant but casual relations with any one individual.
Now, the political cause is instantiated, of course, in a very local conflict. I don’t gainsay that. But the tactics of the strike, the wisdom of the organizers, the matter of timing? It doesn’t matter in the context of my letter. I
don’t care if it’s the stupidest strike in the world, led by the stupidest people, or the most unimpeachably noble. My bottom line is no different. It was expressed by David Montgomery: “It is high time for the administration at Columbia to obey the law of the land and sit down to negotiate with the union formed by its teaching assistants and research assistants. Two years ago a clear
majority of graduate students made their choice for a union in an NLRB election.” I would make the same argument whether there was a strike going on or not.
Now that there is a strike, the best thing that could happen would be for the union to win it. Historically, even the bitterest battles for union recognition, when won, tend to culminate in something very drab and anticlimactic: boring old collective bargaining. That’s what the law is for. The world doesn’t end. The world, generally, gets better, in a very utilitarian way, greatest good for the greatest number (management has to deal with some new hassles, sure, some competitive disadvantage sometimes-but in the case of a great university, I can’t see but that a union negotiating a better deal for the graduate students would enhance the cultural capital of the university at a rather low marginal cost, by making it a much more desirable place to be vis a vis ununionized
“shops”).
And, as long as Brinkley maintains this position –
“All I can do is tell you the official University position, which is that the relationship between [professors] and teaching assistants is a complex, intellectual, educational, collegial, and also work-based relationship. And the position of the University, from the beginning of this issue three years ago, has been that the presences of a union mediating this relationship–the union in this case the UAW which has no previous experience, until NYU, within the academic world other than representing clerical workers–would somehow corrupt this relationship.”
–he’s violating the spirit of the Wagner Act, and he’s standing in the way of something you yourself admit is in the best interests of the university, and I’m convinced he’s empirically and ethically wrong.
Let’s assume you’re right, that GESU’s (non?)leadership is doing an awful job. Very well. All the more reason that I try to do my best to put whatever pressure on whomever I can to get the administration to do the right thing. You, Kevin Murphy, still deserve the chance to join a union, even if the people who are fighting for that right are idiots (not saying they are; I’m not following this closely enough to make a judgment).
Is GESU corrupt, was the vote-counting irregular? Again, I don’t know. Either way, there’s a very simple solution. The university, in good faith, can agree to a “card check”: agree to recognize the union if a majority of graduate students sign union cards. Then there doesn’t even have to be an election. That would set an example all employers should follow: if a majority of their workers want to form a union, they should get to form a union, and the employer shouldn’t cavil.
You imply I wander out of bounds by taking a stance on Brinkley’s character. I take none. If I had to comment on his character, I would have to say it’s sterling: he’s sticking to his guns, doing his job, honoring a commitment he made, making the best, as you say, of a bad situation. But his character is irrelevant. I was very careful to frame my criticism in terms of his structural position. He can hold to his conviction that unionization is a necessary and
honorable thing in the abstract; or he can hold to his bureaucratic position that requires him to represent the view of the Columbia administration that it’s unnecessary and dishonorable in this special case; but the tension between the two is unacceptable.
You raise the notion of what would happen if he resolved the tension in favor of resignation. You suggest that he might better be able to fight the good fight to preserve the integrity of the university (and, more abstractly, The
University) if he saves his energy for the big ones. I have one practical objective to that: a strong graduate student union seems like a pretty stout ally in maintaining the integrity of a university against corporate encroachments,
because it’s in the interest of graduate students to maintain that integrity, but it’s not always in the interests of administrators (that’s why they make deals with Novartis). All the more reason the administration be forced to reckon with a good-old-fashioned countervailing power in this regard. And if fighting
corporate encroachment is Brinkley’s own goal, he best do so with so stalwart an ally as the United Auto Workers, because they have a lot more experience in this regard than he.
Then there is my theoretical object to the idea of skipping this particular anti-corporate fight. I just guess this just is where our interpretation of the political situation in the U.S., and the university, differs. I think
unionization is a cynosure for the state of the nation. It’s all in there in my book: it starts, in 1958, with manufacturers’ attempt to break the back of the union movement. That wasn’t an accident; it’s my interpretation of the structural foundation of the conservative movement, and by implication, the structural foundation for any genuine future progress away from the depredations brought on by the success of that movement. If the country had 10 percent greater union density, the social state of the country would be healthier by far, far greater than 10 percent: many times greater. That’s why I’ll support organizing movements wherever they pop up.
But for graduate students? Of course graduate students-which are of course workers in the traditional sense: if they stop working, so does the organization. And, in a way, especially for graduate students. Universities are beacons
for the rest of society. They have to be. Or else what are they for, except for inputting 18-year-olds at one end and outputting 21-year-olds with economic value added on the other? And why not graduate students, even if they made twice
as much as they did? Why shouldn’t they be able to bargain collectively? Everyone should.
You complain I play “gotcha.” I’ll own up to that. The pro-union graduate students are involved in a struggle-a political fight. I’m unabashedly on one side of the fight. I wrote this letter, and expressed the sentiments I expressed in it, because it is a strategic opportunity to help get what I want done,
done. No apologies. Another provost comes in? I have enough faith in Columbia University to predict any provost they bring in would honor its highest institutional values. And I would still need to see evidence-other than pie-in-the-sky speculation as to what this one might be doing “behind the scenes”–as to how any other provost would be worse on this particular issue.
I also don’t care how discerning and impressive Brinkley’s academic work is. It’s irrelevant to the discussion.
One more point about my own intellectual work, since you bring it up. My paradigm, I have come to realize, is rooted in the idea that Americans have a hard time owning up to the necessity and desirability of conflict in social processes (thus my book’s subtitle and my abiding obsession, on the traumas attending the 1960s’ “Unmaking of the American Consensus”). Strikes-any fight-causes bitterness on both sides, to be sure. So it’s easy to conclude that it’s better off not to fight. I have come to an almost childishly simple way of debunking that instinct. What’s a better marriage? One in which there are no fights, and the inevitable tensions and differences bubble beneath the surface forever? Or one that has it out in a healthy way once in a way, that puts the conflict on the table?
It’s a misreading of my work to call me a “critic of the Right and its wedge-issue divisivess.” I’m not against wedge-issue divisiveness. Understanding that there must be limits that the Republicans too often and habitually cross, creating a coalition by creating wedges in your opponents’ coalition is the soul of politics. It’s ineluctable. Why not, say, wedge the Republicans by asking George Bush if he still believes, like he said in 1994, that you can’t go to heaven if you’re not a Christian, thus forcing him to chose between the
portion of his coalition that thinks that, and the portion who thinks that’s just offensive? That’s divisive. Parties should divide. That’s what they’re for. You fight for the side of the divide you agree with, and whichever side fights
better, wins.
But that’s a discussion for another time.
I’ll leave you with this conclusion. I don’t care about the issue of “no dental care for Ivy Leaguers.” I care about everyone’s right to join a union. If negotiating about dental care is what they want to do with their bargaining unit, that’s their business. But hey, if you need some bridgework done, would pressuring your employer to spread the cost among an insurance risk-pool be such a bad thing?
Regards,
Rick Perlstein
Hi Rick,
Thanks for taking the time to publish such a detailed response (which I reposted to the comments at GitM.) I don’t want to get into the “line-editing” mode of rebuttal, and I think we actually agree on quite a bit here, so I’ll just make a few points.
First, I take the crux of your argument to be this: It doesn’t matter whether this current strike is well-executed or a terrible idea, whether GSEU undermined its own case by lousy voting methodology or not, or, most importantly, whether the strike helps or hinders the broader cause of graduate student unionization. Your letter has bigger fish to fry — it argues that Columbia should have recognized the union regardless, and the strike is irrelevant. But given that the occasion of your letter is a strike action, and it is being spread across campus to support that strike action, I’m not sure your line of argument completely works, particularly if — as I tried to explain in my first missive — the haphazard qualities and angry sense of entitlement afflicting the current strike may well be harming the larger cause of unionization.
You then go on to say that, now that a strike has begun, it must be won. This is exactly the type of self-legitimizing fait accompli that was pitched to us, the rank-and-file, as an answer to all our questions a week into the action. While it is true that certain questions — such as voting methodology — became moot once the strike began, the legitimate concerns of many regarding tone, agenda, goals, efficiency, outreach, exit strategy, and — again — the strike’s relationship to the larger objective. are not made illegitimate by the fact that the strike is currently underway. (This holds true for other, larger, and vastly more important battles currently in progress too, although I promised to refrain from historical analogies this time around.)
Similarly, according to your line of argument, it does not matter what role Brinkley may be playing in the internal administrative debates on the union issue, whether he is working for or against the union behind the scenes, what his positions are on other crucial issues facing the university (be they scientific research, Harlem expansion, the class-disparity in enrollment, etc.), what views he’s advocated as an historian or public intellectual in the past, or whether the decision on the union is even at his “pay grade” — He’s a union-buster now, and thus merits contempt. Well, I disagree. It’s not my business to question who you decide to spend time with a social event, of course, but I still think it is a misreading of the man and the situation to make this the grounds for scuttling across the room from him. This is why the discernment and intelligence of Brinkley’s work, which I mentioned as an aside, is NOT off the table here — I don’t believe the man is reducible to his administrative position on the union, just as I don’t believe the questions of unionization and strike action you address here in the abstract can be divorced from the context of recent events.
Context and perspective are the keys here. As I tried to explain in my first message, they are exactly what so many of the more passionate strikers are currently missing, to the detriment of the larger goals at stake. And I feel that your letter, with its message of “Union up, Brinkley down, the rest is irrelevant!” exacerbates rather than mitigates this problem.
Finally, I’ll own up to being frustrated by the poor planning and events on campus…that much is obvious. But I hope you don’t think I harbor any “rage” toward you — While I don’t agree with the line you’ve taken here, I never thought of you as a stalking horse of some kind (even if the rapid dispersement of your letter to all corners of campus suggests that GSEU wishes otherwise.) Rather, your letter provided me a chance to crystallize my thoughts on the strike episode in a semi-public forum, GitM. I never expected you to answer for the sins of Local 2110, nor was I trying to “score points” off anybody here on campus. (What would be the point? One of the arguments I’ve been trying to make is that much of GSEU is already heavily inured to anything that doesn’t accord with their sense of Manichean struggle, and there’s very little point in debating with such folk, even by proxy.)
To explain why I think this strike was a terrible idea (and thus why I think your letter to Brinkley, timed as it is, was particularly ill-conceived), despite my own inclination toward collective bargaining and stated preference for a vote-count by the university, I needed to go into some detail about my feelings for the unreality of the situation here, and how I felt that your letter was feeding that unreality like chum in the water. If said description wallowed in undue levels of snark, rest assured that it’s a deficiency in my writing and was not directed at you. In this case, the political isn’t personal, and there’ll be no room-scuttling on this end, should we ever actually meet in person.
By the way, as a point of fact I got wrong in my first letter, it has since come to my attention that we already have dental coverage…viva la revolucion.
All the best,
-KcM