The strike this past April by the Columbia University Graduate Teachers’ Union naturally received attention and its occurrence on the 50th Anniversary of student uprising at Columbia University in April and May of 1968 was a happy coincidence and provided an admirable historico-political resonance.  And this action by the Graduate Teachers Union was greeted with support in articles in several different venues and among them I cite as representative examples those of Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, in Dissent Magazine, and R.D. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in History at UCLA, in The New Inquiry.[1]  

Both Robbins and Kelley are politically on the left, albeit in different ways and it is laudable that they took this public stance and what they each say has its importance and pertinence.  However, when it comes to the question of graduate student teachers unions and their struggles which are now several decades into their history, given that this movement began with unions in public universities and colleges and now has been extended, necessarily and happily, to private universities and colleges, it is not noted often enough that the question of university teaching of which graduate student teachers make up a very significant portion is but one of two teaching currents that enables tenured professors, and especially tenured professors at research universities, to have relatively light teaching loads, the other current being scholars who have already earned their Ph.D.s but occupy positions as adjunct faculty, positions of low pay and no benefits at all.  Indeed, the question of adjuncts is continually shunted to the sideline.

It is not my intention in this article, which has another aim, to make central the discussion of adjuncts but if I bring it up it is in order to give more emphasis to an important notion that I rarely if ever see broached. And this is where Kelley and Robbins and other tenured faculty who support the struggle of graduate student teachers unions come into direct focus.  In the years since the struggle began to establish such unions and to win collective bargaining and proper remuneration and benefits, and in the years since adjunct faculty became a population without which university and college teaching would resoundingly collapse, I have never noted any collective action on the part of tenured faculty on behalf of either the struggles of graduate student teachers or the struggles of adjuncts. Individual support, yes.  Individual, yes. Collective, no.

Now, we should all understand that in the labor force there is many respects no sector better protected and better provided for then tenured professors, and certainly at research universities where the teaching loads are considerably smaller and less time consuming than are the teaching loads of professors at state universities and colleges and smaller colleges. Moreover professors at research universities have in general higher salary scales, better funding for research and travel and so on and so forth.  Financially full professors at these universities are easily in the top ten or even in instances five percent of humanity when it comes to salary income wealth and more importantly the quality of life enjoyed by tenured faculty surely exists in the highest reaches of the labor force.  And it is one of the reasons why tenured faculty now in increasing numbers do not take retirement at 65 or even 70 or even 75.  It is a charmed life.  And a charmed life is a good thing. A very good thing. And it is what we should strive to make possible for everyone!  Labor aristocracy? Tenured faculty at research universities certainly continue to occupy this aristocratic position in the labor force, no matter the vicious assaults on universities by the increasing and now decades-long depredations of the ruling economic and political elites beholden to the most savage of Capital’s and neo-liberalism’s trajectories and forms. This is of course to say among so many other things that tenure is a vital and important institution.  I don’t begrudge tenured faculty their tenure, no, rather I would like to see tenure for adjuncts and many more in other fields!  The opponents of tenure in all and every instance are simply the proponents of authoritarian, neo-fascist, and obscurantist politics who would like to destroy all the enlightenment and admirable aspects of the university at once institutional, intellectual, scientific, and pedagogical–and who would thereby like to silence and even more remove significant portions of the professoriate.      

So, given the very strong protection held by the tenured professoriate there would be very little danger at all for tenured faculty to collectively come to the support of graduate students and adjuncts. I should note that it is extremely rare in recent decades to find an example of a faculty member losing a position for her or his politics and political actions alone (I am not speaking of appointments that have been offered to a faculty member who wished to transfer from one university or college to another being cancelled by extra-departmental or even in instances departmental actions due to external reactionary and authoritarian pressures being brought to bear upon the university and/or college’s administration, etc. etc.).  So if there is little danger of penalty what then explains the absence of collective action other than….?

Alas, it is obvious. With adjuncts and graduate students fulfilling so much of the course loads tenured faculty can teach less and have more time for their own research and writing, etc.  Doubtless, this equation is only a portion of the story and again there are all sorts of questions related to the social, political, financial, and class war carried out by corporate capital and the corporate and political class against the very bases of all portions of socio-economic and socio-existential life (and indeed now planetary life tout court) and thereby against all public institutions and would be commons institutions, but, nonetheless, tenured faculty have been better insulated than most other portions of the labor force from this forty year assault and depredation.  But it should be added, that this circumstance of teaching loads does not apply at all in relation to the struggles of all the service workers  and other university employees who in their struggles with university administrations, etc.  have also not received any collective action support on the part of tenured faculty.  I do not think it is to the credit of tenured faculty as a class that there has not been some kind of collective action on their part on behalf of graduate student unions and on behalf of adjunct faculty and all the more in relation to university service employees and unions of all kinds.  Two, three, many more efforts?

Let us start with one and then we can go to two, three, four, etc! And as a 19th Century philosopher who was not able to obtain a faculty position once wrote: Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta.

1.  See Bruce Robbins, “A Strike Against Trumpism at Columbia”

Dissent Magazine, April 26, 2018 and Robin D.G. Kelley, “Solidarity with Grad Workers,” The New Inquiry, April 27, 2018.

Nina Vaughan is a social and political theorist

---