In a story @ Crooked Timber by Corey Robin (August 25, 2016) titled..
..Corey Robin captures one of those high brow moments perfectly, writing:
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 these particular links).
Unlike blue collar workers and unions, here are the elite universities Q&A information examples (read: warning about the evils of collective bargaining) to help “iron out those delicate and delightful idiosyncrasies that make each university what it is”:
One of the Q&A questions put out by the universities:
What if an individual student objected to a provision in the labor contract? Would he or she still be bound by it?
Here are the nearly identical answers provided by each university at the links:
Boilerplate from:
• Columbia
Yes. Collective bargaining is, by definition, collective in nature. This means that the union speaks and acts for all students in the bargaining unit, and the provisions in the labor contract it negotiates apply to all unit members, unless exceptions and differences are provided for explicitly in the contract.
• Yale:
• University of Chicago
• Princeton
Corey Robin ends with this:
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.
It’s very good to see students now with NLRB’s decision on their side going forward.
And..yeah.. I couldn’t help getting a kick out of Corey Robin having a little fun poking holes in those cookie-cutter.. yet.. “…ineffably individual...delicate and delightful idiosyncrasies that make each university what it is”