A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.
In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.
Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.
The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.
What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”
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It’s certainly no secret that the labor movement shares the same liberal vision as many of these educational institutions. So it was no surprise to see the names of so many “Cry Wolf” project members who have long been associated with the labor movement themselves, as detailed in Big Journalism’s initial post. As key supporters of the labor movement, many university researchers and professors frequently team up with labor unions to help craft and circulate their studies, and then rely upon the unions to mobilize support for their shared liberal vision.
Conveniently, labor unions have a multitude of represented workers employed at many colleges and universities, especially in states like California. Unionized staff support employees, such as janitors, dormitory housekeepers, and food service workers, are prevalent on these campuses, as are clerical workers, information systems professionals and even the teaching assistants and college professors themselves. And it’s these employees whom labor unions, such as SEIU and UAW locals, will frequently leverage as key mobilizers at campus protests and rallies to draw attention to published research and the policies they support. Teachers at these schools often insert themselves into labor situations as well, frequently egging the students on, pawns in a fixed fight.
Viewers can witness a perfect example of the union – academia partnership in this National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, a coordinated nationwide event this past March 4, during which colleges and universities protested against state budget cuts and demanded tax hikes on the wealthy. Given that the very first policy area listed in the “Cry Wolf” RFP is taxes and public budgets, I’d expect to see plenty more of these protests scheduled in the near future, like this one at UCLA, another of the schools associated with a “Cry Wolf” project member.
If you search YouTube, you’ll find plenty of other videos at other of the members’ schools as well. Sadly, you’ll notice a clear theme in this and other protests on that same day, where protesters actually equate budget cuts with racism.
The result of such activities is all too often a spectacle of adult employees of these educational institutions attempting to bully and stifle the viewpoints of others, including any objecting students. In much the same way, the members of the “Cry Wolf” project actively discriminate against the viewpoints of those who believe in capitalism and the free market system as the most viable driver of public policies.
I don’t take issue with professors preaching a liberal viewpoint, but I do take issue with anyone who excludes the other viewpoints entirely, or intentionally frames those viewpoints in a negative light. With the massive amounts of public money now being poured into our educational system (never enough!), the practice of brainwashing students is reprehensible and inexcusable.
And just how much public funding are some of these schools receiving, exactly? While many colleges and universities receive donations from plenty of private donors (some of which may be addressed in a future post), they also get state and federal monies for a variety of programs and projects. Some of that funding includes student loan money to individuals, but the majority of the funding typically goes to the school itself for programs, projects and operations.
For example, let’s take a look at Peter Dreier’s employer, Occidental College in Califor10a:
Between 2000 and 2008, billions of dollars in federal aid has also gone to other schools associated with “Cry Wolf” project members, some of which include aid to Rutgers University, UCLA, the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Columbia University.
Just look at some of those totals! Is this how our taxpayer dollars are being spent in our educational institutions? How much of our public funding is going to things like the “Cry Wolf” project?
Citizens have every right to be concerned and outraged about the behavior of a few individuals associated with a handful of elite colleges and universities. After all, that’s a lot of taxpayer money supporting these schools. We also have every right to question the credibility of research that’s produced by some of these institutions after seeing the “Cry Wolf” RFP.
But most important, if you’re a parent with a child in any of the schools associated with a “Cry Wolf” project member, how do you reconcile this conflict? How do you decide whether this is nothing more than a few hard core ideologues teaching at the school your child attends, or a much larger issue that goes to the heart of academic honesty?
I wonder if any of the members of the “Cry Wolf” project took into consideration any of these consequences in their quest for the perfect counter-narrative to stifle conservative viewpoints.