1. In the fall of 1997, the University
of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC) opened a new building complex
designed to function as a gateway to the university. The gateway
included an
arch featuring the motto from the school's
seal: "Learning &
Labor." The seal itself, which shows
up on all manner of school
merchandise, features an illustration: a
book, open to pages
bearing the words "Agriculture" on the left,
and "Science & Art"
on the right, appears to be radiating light
illuminating three
images below the book--a hammer and anvil,
a plow and rake, and a
steam engine.
2. As a graduate of UIUC, I can report that
I have never plowed,
blacksmithed, or operated a steam engine
(though I have done my
share of non-degree raking over the years).
In the nine years I
worked as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA)
in the English
Department--that is, learned and labored--at
UIUC, I taught
approximately 1000 students, most of whom
were studying to be
accountants, engineers, or captains of industry,
and never once
did I hear them discussing the brutal midterm
for Ironworking
101, or the boring lectures in Intro to Pistons
and Cylinders.
3. The symbols on the school's seal speak
to the era in which the
university was founded. Chartered in
1867 and originally named
Illinois Industrial University, UIUC is a
land-grant institution,
whose purpose has always been to serve the
interests of the state
and its people. Insofar as those interests
often were and
continue to be quite practical, the link
between learning and
labor would seem similarly outcome-oriented.
Labor is applied
learning; one studies in order to do one's
job better. But in
laboring, one also learns--conducts, as it
were, a kind of
research. John M. Gregory, the school's
first regent,
acknowledged these connections in his 1868
inaugural address.
"We shall," he said,
effect the more formal and more perfect
union of labor and
learning. These two will be married
in indissoluble bonds at our altars. The skilled hand and the thinking
brain will be found compatible members of the same body. Science,
leaving its seat in the clouds and coming down to work with men in shop
and field, will find not only a new stimulus for its studies, but better
and clearer light for its investigations and surer tests for its truths.
And labor, grown scientific, will mount to richer products as well as easier
processes. Thus, these two, Thought and Work, which God designed
to go together, will no longer remain asunder.(1)
4. That kind of applied learning and research
endures at UIUC,
which in areas like agriculture and animal
husbandry remains one
of the top institutions in the world.
But I would like to think
that my own field of English can be as useful
and practical as
those symbolized on the school's seals.
And I would hope it is
possible for students to apply in their own
worlds ideas from the
literature they read, just as I would encourage
my students to
test those ideas against the felt experience
of their lives.
5. I say this because I believe it, and because
that belief
issues from my own experience as a student
and teacher at UIUC.
Like many of my GTA peers I learned and labored.
More
importantly, we learned to be labor,
learned what labor means
in an environment that would trade us education
for work, all the
while denying work was taking place.
That lie--the claim that
teachers, researchers, and administrators
are not true
employees--continues to underwrite the everyday
business of a
major research university like UIUC, where
some 5600
non-employees teach a third of all courses,
run its world-class
labs, and staff its many offices, all without
right of
representation. Such conditions bear
out a warning in Gregory's
1868 address: "Those whom labor perpetually
degrades, learning
can never successfully lift up."(2)
6. Consider this essay an alternative gateway.
In its
historically informed version of the University
of Illinois'
motto, which expresses the intent of the
school's founders,
learning and labor are recognized for their
inherent
reciprocity. They are understood to
be the necessary elements of
any education, whether it is the teaching
that makes learning
possible, the learning that makes research
meaningful, or the
sheer institutional support that gives learning
and labor a place
to be. What follows is the story of
our learning to be labor.
7. Hope is either a necessary or fatal quantity
for an English
grad student. Necessary, because given
the odds against ever
finding a tenure-line position, a student
needs something to
sustain himself while fulfilling the requirements
of a Ph.D., a
task many manage only by working a series
of assistantships, or
else going seriously into debt (or both).
8. But in the beginning, anyway, there is
hope, however naive
it might be. "I didn't know much when
I came to grad school," a
colleague told me,
so I wasn't really aware of the crisis
in the humanities. I
suppose I knew that there were some problems,
but I thought eventually if I worked hard enough and did certain things
right, or learned and then began doing certain things right, that I could
eventually end up with some sort of teaching position.(3)
"I wanted to be a professor," said another, explaining
her
decision to go to grad school. "I had
this idea about the
academy ... I thought, 'Wow.
You can get paid to think about
stuff, and write about it, and publish it.
And you also get to
teach.' I thought ... it was the perfect
job."
9. I want here to record our idealism because
I believe it was
ultimately related to our decision to unionize.
By the fall of
2001, several of our union's earliest members
had landed academic
jobs, and many are still looking. At
least some of our
persistence and success can be attributed
to the hope we
generated when we first came together to
address our problems
collectively.
10. That coming together took place on September
17th, 1993.
Approximately ten of us in the English Department
met "to help
research and to start our University of Illinois
TA union drive,"
as the memo read. (4) It is safe to
say we had little sense of
what we were contemplating. Despite
having belonged, nominally,
to two unions--as a food service worker and
as a teacher in the
Chicago public schools--I had never participated
in either beyond
paying dues, and I certainly had never built
one from scratch.
And yet that is just what we proceeded to
do.
11. What prepared us to build a union?
When I was accepted into
the English program at UIUC, one of the first
letters I received
came from the English Graduate Student Association
(EGSA). It
made a point of saying how the teaching opportunities
for grads
at Illinois were superior to those of almost
any other school.
As a relative newcomer to the field, I read
that remark
uncritically, and with the same avidity with
which it seemed to
have been written. In fact, I accepted
Illinois' offer because
it was the best I received: seven years of
guaranteed funding,
assuming I fulfilled the academic requirements.
Most of this
funding would take the form of assistantships,
which, I had
learned from one of my undergraduate English
professors, mostly
meant teaching something called "Composition,"
a class I myself
had never taken. But I was eager to
teach Composition and, the
EGSA letter said, still other courses were
available to me. It
was as if I had already achieved that perfect
job which my
colleague imagined, and I did not even have
the degree.
12. It never occurred to me to ask why Illinois
appeared to be so
generous with its course assignments.
Only gradually did a
clearer picture emerge. The majority
of graduate students held
appointments equivalent to a professor's
(two classes each
semester), and grads overall taught two-thirds
of all courses.
These are staggering totals, and it was estimated
at the time it
would cost the department $4 million a year
to staff those
courses with full-time regular faculty.(5)
The point is not that
we were oppressed, especially relative to
the average part-time
faculty in our discipline. Rather,
what was sold to us initially
as funding was quite clearly work,
both in terms of how we
experienced it, and with regard to what it
meant to the
department, which simply could not have functioned
without our
labor.
13. Significantly, the inevitable disillusionment
we all
experienced was transformed into a process
that helped create our
identity as workers. The process occurred
in two stages. The
first involved recognizing the inherent trade-off
between our
roles as students and teachers. "[W]orkload,"
said a colleague,
describing how she became an active unionist,
was a big issue.... [I had]
forty-four papers to grade every
couple of weeks.... either I can be
a good student or I can be a good teacher. I can either blow off
my students and get my work done, or I can do a half-ass job in seminars
and get my grading done and be conscientious to my students, and I was
feeling really bad about that.
14. What we did in our classrooms felt
like work. Why were we
not treated like workers? That question
was answered in the
second step by which we developed a labor
identity. It soon
became clear that the same opportunities
that favored us as grads
worked against us when we finished our degrees
and looked for
work elsewhere. In effect, we were
always competing with other
versions of ourselves, winning the battle
when we were cheap
labor grad students, losing it when our Ph.D.s
made us
prohibitively expensive, relative to newer
cheap labor grads, or
adjuncts.
15. For future organizers that lesson was
brought home by the
experience of senior peers. Asked when
she first began thinking
about unions, one of our founders responded,
I think when we got to graduate school
... there was a certain
hysteria surrounding the market, and I think
that was a direct result of really good candidates ... not getting jobs:
people who had their books published by Oxford, I believe(6)....
I was in seminars where people's very personal stories were being told
and these people became sort of mythical figures.... I think these
issues very much informed many of the debates.
16. Thus, in a climate where we were compelled
to think of
ourselves as workers, we were also confronted
with the prospect
of a jobless future. We had been given
an identity, only to see
that identity jeopardized. In attempting
to resolve the problem
individually, even the most seemingly qualified
of our peers met
failure after failure. The only solution,
both for our current
circumstances and our future prospects, seemed
to be collective.
The solution meant organizing a union.
17. Traditionally, workers unionize for immediate
benefits: to
raise their pay, better their conditions,
redress the power
imbalance on the job. UIUC implicitly
regarded graduate students
as management trainees. But we had
no future for which to be
trained. In addition, in the university's
eyes we were
proto-professionals, rather than cheap labor.
Thus many who
gravitated quickly to unionizing may have
felt as though they
were at least partially repudiating the ethos
of their
profession. Never mind that it was
our employer that first
abrogated the implicit contract sustaining
the myth of grad
school as apprenticeship. For it was
not just new graduate
students who possessed an idealized vision
of the academy. This
remains the way the academy would like to
think about itself.
One associate dean for graduate affairs was
fond of referring to
us as "junior colleagues," a description
that would better
capture our status were it preceded by the
qualifier "highly
expendable." Just how expendable became
clear as the result of
another early development that helped stimulate
our campaign.
18. In the late 1980s, the Graduate College
chartered a body
known as the Graduate Student Advisory Council
(GSAC). Its
members were appointed by the Associate Dean
for Graduate
Affairs, and it would meet regularly during
the academic year and
offer input on the needs of their peers.
GSAC channeled
students' concerns to the College and disseminated
the College's
news among grads. News dissemination
became prominent once there
was an organizing drive on campus and GSAC
began to function as a
sort of company union. Because GSAC's
members had to be approved
by the Grad College and could be removed
at any time for any
reason, and because its mission was no more
than advisory, it was
and is a basically toothless organization.
19. Its toothlessness would become even clearer
in the spring of
1996, when, toward the end of our union's
authorization drive,
GSAC announced that grad employees would
receive, for the first
time, dental insurance. Dental insurance
had been an organizing
issue from the start. Indeed, one of
my first responsibilities
coming out of that September `93 meeting
had been to learn about
campus groups such as GSAC, to see what they
did and whether they
would support us. When I informed the
council members of our
interest in obtaining dental insurance, they
laughed and told me
I would get nowhere: they had recommended
such a plan years ago
to no effect. GSAC's proposal from
the late `80s never made it
out of the Grad College, because the administrators
there were
only motivated to respond when they felt
compelled to.
20. Besides addressing grad employee needs
by creating feckless
bodies such as GSAC, UIUC commissioned reports
about the status
of the school's graduate programs.
In 1993, the university
released a survey of the school's science
and humanities programs
entitled LAS Resources, 1993-2000,
popularly known as "the LAS
Resources report." To their credit,
the report's authors
recognized more needed to be done for grad
students, specifically
in terms of salary and benefits. But
consonant with the
corporatist mentality that has come to govern
how universities
think about themselves, many of the report's
recommendations
seemed to conceive of graduate students as
a product whose
success shaped the image of the university.
If, under this way
of thinking, not enough Ph.D.s got jobs,
the school's (read: the
company's) reputation might suffer.
Although the report never
specified cuts in enrollment, it was widely
perceived to be doing
just that. "[O]ne thing they were really
stressing," as a
colleague put it, "given the job market conditions,
[was] that
departments across LAS would admit fewer
graduate students; that
what departments should be concerned with
was ensuring that their
graduates got jobs and this would ensure
in fact the quality and
reputation of the departments at the university."
21. Significantly, the report made these recommendations
while
acknowledging that departments like English
knowingly admitted a
glut of graduate students because they needed
them to (cheaply)
staff the courses they had to teach.
In this instance, the
connection between learning and labor could
not have been more
obvious. As one union founder expressed
it, "[W]hat ... English
needs to be concerned with doing is not narrowing
the access to
higher education, but expanding it, and expanding
its own
conception of the relevance of our work."
What motivated some of
our earliest activists was a genuine sense
that their relevance,
their livelihood, was at stake. And
the level of that threat,
which for English meant at most shrinking
the program, was more
severe elsewhere on campus. Certain
units, like Comparative
Literature and Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution
(Triple E), were
targeted for possible elimination because
deemed potentially
irrelevant.(7)
22. But as my own department was to learn,
after partially
implementing the proposals from the report,
if you shrink the
number of instructors in your department
by reducing admissions,
you still have to find people to staff your
courses, either grad
students from other departments or adjuncts
of one flavor or
another. At best you reduce your own
culpability in the problem,
but you also fail to address the real issue,
which is not that
there are too many Ph.D.s competing for too
few jobs, but that
there are not enough good jobs.
23. Similarly, if the arguments for eliminating
or otherwise
radically modifying certain academic units
are entirely driven by
fiscal imperatives, one approaches a slippery
slope that could
mean the death of even that limited notion
of the liberal arts
preserved at a school like Illinois.
If profitability or, to a
lesser extent, public/institutional profile
are the only indices
of merit in higher education, many of us,
not just in the
humanities, are in trouble. For all
that the LAS Resources,
1993-2000 report claimed to assume
responsibility over the
health of various programs and the well-being
of their graduates,
it could not address the basic, structural
dynamic whereby
research institutions like UIUC balance their
budgets on the
backs of grad employees and then send those
employee/students
into a world where they are now too expensive
to hire. Reducing
faculty FTE to better fund the remaining
faculty and graduate
students cannot solve that problem, and in
the short term, only
exacerbates it. To the extent that
the report repeatedly calls
for steps to "improve graduate student recruitment"
and "attract
first-rate graduate students,"(8) the authors'
opinion of
existing UIUC grads would appear to
be less than enthusiastic.
Again and again, one encounters the clash
between learning and
labor: between wanting "first-rate graduate
students" who will
make the university look better, and settling
for the ones you
can actually attract, on whose labor you
can at least turn a
profit. Needless to say, those of us
who came to the university
with an idealized vision of it did not appreciate
learning that
we really were not good enough to be there,
except
as
teachers. But then, we were
not so valuable as teachers that we
were worth paying anything, either.
24. So it was in the context of our experience
as workers, our
recognition of a dismal employment future,
and our reaction to a
report that inadequately addressed these
circumstances, that the
first English grad students began thinking
about unionizing. Out
of our multiple concerns momentum built.
One of the founders
remembered, "[I]t was something in the air--other
schools were
unionizing, there seemed to be sort of a
national trend."
Another remembered the origin of our campaign
this way:
I think maybe the first conversation
that we had about
forming--... we hoped it would be a union,
but we weren't calling it that, I don't think, at that point--... was the
spring of 1993.... [We ran] ... for the English Graduate Student
Association executive council, and ... put
out flyers saying
[t]hat we wanted EGSA ... to start thinking
about forming a
union.... we won the election, which
we worked on all summer long, and indeed the whole school year, `93-'94...
the English Department had to recognize its relation to the university
administration, to other departments, to broader institutional structures
that the EGSA up to this point [hadn't done].... And I think all
three of us agreed that what we wanted to do as EGSA was to make connections
between EGSA and these other constituencies.... continually trying
to make it more interdepartmental.... [W]e also wanted ... to have
a connection to the community, so we worked on a literacy project ...
We wanted ... to connect with other national issues that were affecting
education, particularly the move among the conservative Right to challenge
what they were calling political correctness, so we helped organize a conference
of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, which is a national progressive group
of academics trying to counter the Right's criticism of things like multicultural
education. And then we also wanted ... [to] address the job market
conditions for people in English at that time. So what EGSA was doing,
which I think very much tied into why we were wanting to get a union started,...
[was] to redefine English as a discipline, to expand the definition of
what it meant to do academic work in English, and to constantly be making
connections to other departments, to the conditions that shaped our work
and our research. And I think that was a sympathetic environment
for the union movement to begin.
25. Coming out of our first meeting we emphasized
connections.
But what we learned from other campus groups
was discouraging.
The LAS Council, for example, turned out
to be an undergrad
group, designed "to further interest and
support for Liberal Arts
and Sciences" and "to promote communications
between students,
faculty, and alumni."(9) Although we
shared some of their goals,
and would even come to offer our own membership
similar
"benefits," e.g. "attain[ing] leadership
experience,"
"discuss[ing] and gain[ing] insight into
campus issues," and
"work[ing] with" (and sometimes against)
"faculty and
administration,"(10) the LAS Council was
essentially a localized
and undergraduate version of GSAC.
Similarly, and
unsurprisingly, it focused only on academic
issues, insofar as it
was also chartered by the university itself,
which preferred to
mystify its role as employer.
26. Our efforts to link up with other grad
employee unions proved
more profitable. Early on we received
encouragement from an
organizer who had been active in the campaign
at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "[M]ore and
more Unions are interested
in setting up TA locals," he told us.
"Use this to your
advantage--get funding!" He also described
what it would be like
to conduct a campaign, which "meant hunting
down students in
chemistry, architecture, business, etc.
Of course, forcing us to
talk to other students was one of the best
things the Union did
for us, and helped us resist the division
of academic labor,
always worth doing. We found we had
more in common than we
expected."(11)
27. It would be two years before we affiliated
and began our
authorization drive, and almost four before
we won our election,
but this advice proved prescient. So,
too, did what we learned
from the then ongoing drive at Iowa.
One of us visited the
campus, and found that the issues there--with
the exception of
tuition waivers, which UIUC grads enjoyed--could
have comprised
our own platform: low salaries, poor health
insurance coverage,
no childcare, no formal grievance procedure.
Similarly, Iowa's
union structure anticipated one of the earliest
organizational
models we would adopt. Finally, the
Iowa organizers advised us
to affiliate, because "unionization is a
very complex legal issue
and [we would] need a lawyer."(12)
In fact, our GTA union has
been engaged in a legal fight with the university's
Board of
Trustees from the moment we filed for an
election with the
Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.
28. What seemed striking was the growing sense
of solidarity we
experienced with fellow unionists, at campuses
such as Milwaukee,
Iowa, and UW-Madison, who also offered much
crucial, early advice
and support. In fact, we had stronger
links with other unions
than we did with colleagues in different
departments on our
campus. By mid-semester in the fall
of `93, we were still just a
small band of English grad students, trying
to use their
professional association to politicize their
discipline. This
was to change when EGSA began contacting
other departmental
associations about our efforts.
29. Out of these contacts came the first interdepartmental
meeting of our proto-union. One early
activist, Randi Storch,
remembered the event in the following manner:
[W]e were sponsoring a Labor History
conference for graduate students ... and people were coming here from Iowa,
where a graduate employee campaign had been going on, and actually had
failed(13).... I remember very clearly [someone] ... announcing that
there were some graduate students in the English department who were getting
together here to talk about graduate employee unions, and maybe unionizing.
I was very interested in this because [a friend] and I had talked about
this before.... but neither [of us] had the resources, the time,
the energy, and the connections to ... make it happen, and we were too
new as graduate students here. It wasn't until this conference, where
it seemed like it was happening at Iowa [and] ... the English department
was interested, that we got really excited [and] immediately, of course,
jumped on board, and met over in the English Building, where [EGSA] led
this meeting.... Maybe twenty-five, thirty people sat in a circle,
and talked about why we all thought we needed a union here, and what we
were going to do about it.
30. Another early activist from the same department
came to that
meeting with considerably less enthusiasm.
Having already tried
and failed to address a workload-related
labor problem in his own
discipline, he construed the experience as
a lesson that we can't really do
anything about this stuff inside your department. And shortly after
that, word came around that there was going to be a meeting of people who
wanted to unionize TAs.... we were all sitting in my office, talking
about some exam ... I remember that I was so frustrated with ...
having to write these exam questions, because this meeting of the G.E.O.
[Graduate Employees' Organization] was happening at the same time.
Finally I [said], "You guys decide this by yourselves, I'm going to go
to this meeting." So I came over ... and they all showed up shortly
after.... And then we sat through this meeting ... you know, we're
talkin' about having a union, this is what a union would mean, there's
unions at other schools, you know, let's have some committees, and start
working on it.
31. Although this individual would come to be
a major participant
in the union, he was initially skeptical
about its prospects.
"[H]aving studied labor history," he related,
... I actually felt it was probably
ridiculous to try to unionize grad assistants, because it was going to
be really hard.... And I thought probably most people didn't realize
how hard it was going to be to do this. And so I wanted to give my
opinion that this is ... too hard to do, and we shouldn't do it....
this is ridiculous, it's never going to happen. I don't remember
totally what I was thinking: you know, we're not really oppressed enough
to have a union, or to merit this sort of activity. Or if I was just
thinking, it's too much work and we have to do all this other stuff, too.
So, whatever, that is what I was going to say when I went into that meeting.
But ... there were so many other people there, and at that time, I had
never really met anyone from outside the History Department. I didn't
know anybody else. So my whole world was the History Department,
and seeing people in other departments basically saying the same things
that we were saying, or even worse, actually, was quite a revelation. And
that totally changed my mind in terms of the possibilities of doing it,
or starting to, anyway.(14)
At another point, he spoke of that "revelation"
in even stronger
terms. "I was," he said, "immediately
won over."
32. That process of conversion has continued
now for eight
years. Indeed, the union renews itself
every time a new member
is recruited. In that interval the
GEO affiliated with the
Illinois Federation of Teachers, conducted
an authorization card
drive and filed for a union election, fought
an ongoing legal
battle with the administration to have graduate
students in
Illinois qualify as employees, won an independently
sponsored
union election in spring 1997, secured additional
medical and
professional benefits for Illinois grad employees,
lobbied the
legislature, and conducted a series of organizing
drives and
events intended to escalate the campaign
for recognition.
33. Looking back on our origin, I am most
struck by the gap
between what we knew and were qualified to
do and the magnitude
of what faced us. That the union at
Illinois has yet to achieve
formal recognition, despite an array of interim
victories in
expanding benefits for grads, testifies to
the continuing
difficulty of their project. Nonetheless,
I continue to find
hope in a campaign to which I gave seven
years of my life,
because I continue to believe in the potential
of academics to
learn from their labor, to learn to be labor,
and to work toward
a time when these two practices shall seem
quite natural
complements. I saw it happen once.
I trust it will in the
future.
(1) John M. Gregory. "Inaugural Address."
First Annual Report
of the Board of Trustess of the Illinois
Industrial University,
from their Organization, March 12, 1867,
to the Close of the
Academic Year, June 13, 1868 (Springfield,
IL: Baker, Bailhache
& Co. Printers, 1868), p. 181.
(2) Ibid., p. 182.
(3) Between 4 September 1997 and 29 June 1998
I conducted 19
interviews with UIUC grad student activists
who were early
members of the union. Their distribution
by fields was:
History--6, English--5, Physics--3, Kinesiology--2,
Communications--2, Anthropology--one.
(4) Memo from Vivian Wagner, 13 September
1993.
(5) Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured
Radical (NY: NYU P,
1997), p. 168.
(6) That individual finally got a position
after four years on
the market. And his book really was
published by Oxford.
(7) LAS Resources, 1993-2000: Priorities
and Principles for
Allocations in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, 16
April 1993, p. 18.
(8) LAS Resources, 1993-2000: Priorities
and Principles for
Allocations in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, Area
Committee III, 4 January 1993, p.
13.
(9) LAS Council brochure.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Letter from Art Redding to Vivian Wagner,
31 August 1993.
(12) Report of meeting with Dan Swinarski,
Chair of the Research
Committee of the Campaign to Organize Graduate
Students (COGS) at University of Iowa, nd.
(13) Ultimately, however, that effort would
succeed.
(14) I discuss this phenomenon in my essay,
"From Sociality to
Responsibility: Graduate Employee Unions
and the Meaning of the
University," Perspectives, 37.8 (November
1999): 41-43.
William Vaughn (wvaughn@cmsu1.cmsu.edu)
is Director of
Composition at Central Missouri State University
in Warrensburg,
and was an activist in the Graduate Employees
Organization at
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. |
|
