I posted this on Facebook: Columbia University graduate students have gone on strike. They want better pay and access to third-party arbitration. They live in the most expensive city in the country, many have families, and they do a significant part of undergraduate educating. As anyone who has gone to graduate school knows, they are subservient to their lead professors, in what can best be described as a feudal work environment. Curiously, on the management side of the bargaining table is well-known political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson, who is now interim provost of the university. In a letter to the campus, he note his “longstanding connections to the labor movement, including a history of work with the United Auto Workers some years back on the side of political strategy.” He wrote a book titled "Marx and the City." Now, however, he asks the graduate students to be reasonable! What is needed, he says is "good will," "considered solutions," and "mutual realism." “This is especially so during the pandemic, which has placed Columbia, and higher education more generally, under great fiscal strain, with responses that have included wage and hiring freezes,” he wrote in his campus letter this week. “Regarding compensation, there are lines we are unable to cross. Current demands set forth as recently as Monday of last week for increases of 10 percent and subsequent 6-percent annual improvements, simply put, are neither reasonable nor responsible in present circumstances.” Now, here is a man who has the nerve to point out his commitment to the labor movement insisting that the graduate student workers be reasonable for demanding what appear to me to be quite reasonable amounts of money. And, in effect, he has suggested that the workers are exacerbating the impact of the pandemic on the Columbia community, when, if fact, they are suffering greatly from this. Katznelson is, I would bet, making well in the six figures as salary, in an extremely secure academic position with plenty of perks and excellent benefits. Columbia is a very rich university, with a large property portfolio in New York City and the 10th largest endowment of all universities in the country, now more than $11 billion dollars. But it is the workers who must be reasonable. When you claim to be on the left, a friend of labor, then you have no business joining the management team. None whatsoever. To charge hypocrisy against Katznelson would be putting in mildly. And by the way, the workers unionized four years ago and have yet to get a contract. They should collect copies of Katznelson's books and essays and publicly burn them. They are as worthless as is he.
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