More Curious Behavior
Meanwhile,
graduate students at Yale and Columbia are on strike to pressure those universities to grant them union status. As a former grad student, I have some sympathy: being a graduate student is a miserable existence, filled with loneliness, isolation and poverty just as your peers from college are starting to pull down the big bucks. Universities need to improve this situation as best they can, because people do have other choices, and there are lots of careers that are just as fulfilling as becoming a professor, with better quality of life.
At the same time, I'm not convinced that unionizing is the way to go. Unions, of course, have their own issues that grad students—many of whom, shall we say, haven't had a lot of experience with union work—may not wish to acknowledge, or even know about. But more than that, it suggests a way of thinking about graduate school as a semi-permanent state of existence. (I knew plenty of grad students who seemed quite content to whittle away a decade or so working on their doctorates.) That's a mistake. Graduate school is something to finish as quickly as possible. It's like a dentist appointment. No matter how comfortable the surroundings, or how potent the anaesthesia, it's still best done with as soon as possible. Wouldn't forming a union only create an incentive to stay in that life limbo for longer than one ought?
