OxBlog

# Posted 8:55 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

ARROGANT GRADUATE STUDENT: No, this is not an autobiography. ;) It's about the strike at Yale and Corey Robin, the former graduate student (now a professor in Brooklyn) whose rantings made the op-ed page in yesterday's NYT. Here's what he had to say: In 1991

graduate students went on strike. I did, too — reluctantly. But on the picket line, something happened to me. As we marched around the freshman quad, an undergraduate yelled out his dorm window, "Get back to work." For the first time in my life, I felt like a maid. And suddenly I realized that this was how other workers at Yale — in the dining halls, the labs, the offices — routinely felt. I kept marching, determined never to forget what it's like to work at a place like Yale.

The university's administrators like to claim Yale has changed. And it has — thanks in part to the unions, which do as much as any professor to teach students about the dignity of work. But old habits die hard. On Wednesday, an undergraduate columnist in Yale's student newspaper ended her essay with a message to Anita Seth, the leader of the graduate students' union: "Oh, and Anita? Go teach a section."

How do students so young exercise such breezy command? Where do they learn such imperial disregard, talking to teachers — and dishwashers and janitors — as if they were personal servants? I don't know, but I don't blame the students. They've just learned a lesson from Yale.

Typical. For whatever reason, pro-union grad students at Yale delude themselves into believing that Yale's undergraduates are the heartless scions of an American plutocracy, rather than the middle-of-the-road middle-class liberals that they actually are. (FYI Nader came within 20 or so votes of beating Dole at the Yale polling station when I was a sophomore in 1996. Clinton was far ahead of both of them.)

But I won't say any more, since a letter to the Times has said it best:

Mr. Robin does Yale students a disservice when he transplants the opinion of one conservative columnist onto the entire student body. As a Yale sophomore, I have noticed an attitude on campus that is quite distant from the "imperial disregard" of which he accuses undergraduates.

The vast majority of students have treated strikers with respect, whether or not they agree with union demands. In fact, most of the students I have talked with support Locals 34 and 35, and have become increasingly dissatisfied with the way Yale's administration treats its workers.

While I wouldn't say that students supported the strikers demands' all that strongly when I was there, respect for the members of Locals 34 and 35 and the tremendous amount they did for us was semething almost everyone could agree on.

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