Grad school not the only corporation….

What I like best about this NYTimes Magazine article on the unionization of UPenn graduate students is the part where union organizers say they solicited support at a funeral. Given the advance press time on the magazine section, the article is able to allude to the Yale organizing strategy of holding a non-NLRB vote to demonstrate the desire for a grad union, but couldn’t include the fact that it turned out Yale grad students didn’t want a union. (Of course, their only mention of Cornell was as the recipient of advice on how to resist a union which the university didn’t even take…) The Times article focuses on the corporatization of the university as the force necessitating grad student unionization, but it would have been nice to see some of the detailed descriptions of UPenn adminstrative facilities interspersed with descriptions of national labor organizations’ facilities. Corporatization is happening on both sides of the equation. I suspect the corporate union is a necessity for handling industrial and large-scale labor disputes, but many graduate students question whether they want to introduce that influence into their doctoral program.