While the distinguished faculty at the Harvard Law School busied itself
discouraging free speech and spreading the gospel of political
rectitude, another farce was unfolding a little to the south, at Yale
University. As The New York Times has reported at tedious length,
graduate students at Yale have organized and were petitioning the
university with their grievances. In a “job action” designed to
coerce more money from the university, some disgruntled graduate
teaching assistants even refused to turn in grades for their classes.
These students recently voted to end their job action when the
university threatened not to renew their teaching appointments.
In our view, university officials were
right to dismiss demands by the graduate students and to discipline
those who reneged on their responsibilities to their students.
As one spokesman put it, they are “students, not employees.”

But this is a situation in which a pox belongs upon both houses. There
can be little doubt that graduate students at Yale, like graduate
students almost everywhere, are exploited as cheap labor. Teaching
assistantships are notoriously poorly paid, and the rationale that
they should provide a welcome “apprenticeship” for future college
professors looks more and more shabby as universities increasingly
rely on these cadres of relatively untrained teachers to supplement
their regular professorial ranks at discount prices. In fact, Yale
has been better than most institutions at requiring its “big name”
professors actually to teach undergraduates. But even at Yale, the
habit of fobbing off the ever more expensive education of
undergraduates on teaching assistants is a pedagogical scandal
waiting to be exploded. For graduate students, teaching has more and
more become simply a form of financial aid instead of a genuine
apprenticeship; for universities, graduate
students have become more and more like a pool of migrant workers.
The result is that everyone suffers—not least the undergraduates, who
must be content with teachers who often command only slightly more
mastery of a subject than their students.

That said, however, the behavior of the graduate students at Yale is
unconscionable. The idea that students of any description should seek
to organize themselves into a labor union is preposterous. The
spectacle of graduate students doing so is only marginally less
ridiculous than the prospect of undergraduates or high-school
students doing so would be. The real business of a student is to
study. That is the purpose of any education worthy of the name, all
the more so in the specialized realms of graduate education. Indeed,
in our opinion labor unions in general are inappropriate at
colleges and universities. They are especially inappropriate among
those who constitute the intellectual raison d’être of the
institution, the faculty and the students. That we are confronted at
even our elite educational institutions today not only with unionized
clerical and custodial workers but also with unionized faculties
and, now, unionized graduate students is no doubt yet another “sign
of the times.” Yet here, too, it is a sign that bodes ill for
everyone concerned.