SHAWN CHENG/YH

GESO should look to the past for inspiration

My father wasn't one of the organizers, but he remained involved in the strike. "Here I am carrying a picket sign, shouting slogans, and marching in front of Bascom Hall," he recalls. It was the day of his weekly appointment with his major professor, the adviser for his dissertation, who was one of five faculty members to sign a "vituperative" anti-TAA letter published in the school paper. "I was keenly aware that at 2 [p.m.] I would have to make a decision," he says. "When the time came, I broke rank, walked the 25 steps to the math building, and went up the stairs to my professor's office."

A heated debate over labor politics did not then ensue. Whether my father was primarily a student or an employee was not then debated. "I leaned my picket sign against the wall, we talked about mathematics for an hour or so, and then I picked up the sign and left," he says. "The situation was fraught with irony. Both of us knew exactly what was going on, but we also knew that there was something we had that would not be ruined by politics." The TAs struck and picketed for about a month, until the university agreed to a contract. My dad is now a math professor at the University of Denver.

Clearly, TAs' status as "students first, employees second" has never needed careful protection, as Yale claims it does. What is Yale really afraid of? Wisconsin-Madison is still a functioning university, and the TAA still exists (although UW withdrew its recognition in 1979, and the TAA now negotiates its contracts with the state of Wisconsin). True, recognizing GESO would mean some degree of bureaucratic hassle and expense. True, it would mean admitting graduate students are adult human beings capable of making rational decisions. But it would not mean giving TAs their cake and watching them eat it: in any negotiation process, both sides make concessions.

On the other hand, what does GESO want? The TAs do have a cause, but it's buried under so many carefully engineered statistics and labor law rhetoric that you'd hardly know they were fighting for anything but fighting's sake. Five years of languid struggle after GESO's abortive grade strike, the organization is having a hard time making its arguments urgent and exciting.

The Madison TAA came out of "the fervent anti-Vietnam War years," in my dad's words—a time when "the campus was seething with causes of every kind." My father had marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1961 and participated in innumerable other civil rights and anti-war demonstrations. These days, there's no Vietnam War to propel the protest spirit through the veins of the student body. Times have changed to be sure, but GESO wasn't just born too late. If it wants what the UW TAs got, it needs to change its focus and its methods. "The TAA succeeded because it didn't originally set out to become a union," says Matt Brin, a friend of my dad's who is now a math professor in New York. "It began as an organization fighting for individuals."

Little grievances drove the TAA, such as the graduate student who writes 90 percent of his professor's book but gets no credit or royalties. Public sympathy makes or breaks a union, and unions don't get sympathy through abstract, technical arguments, like what exactly "recognition" is all about. And according to Brin, a TA union will get neither members nor popular support through bread-and-butter issues like wages, because grad students are only in school for a few years. No, to rally support for TAs, "You have to show that people are getting screwed," Brin says. "Graduate students are unhappy people for the most part, but usually they just mutter into their coffee or their beer. But if that discontent is focused and turned into a concrete set of individual grievances, it gets in the university's face, and they can't ignore it." Idealism is endearing; suffering pulls heart-strings. Why fight if there's no hardship?

When the 1970 strike ended, my father administered final exams. "It was clear from the results that the students just never got some of the calculus," he says. The entire university went to a pass-fail grading system for that semester. To this day, those UW alums may not be able to double-integrate. On the other hand, to this day Wisconsin TAs have four years of job security and the same health plan as the UW faculty. Rick Ball thinks it was worth it, even though double integrals are very important to him.

"I was so amazed when it was resolved," he remembers. "I was sure my academic career was over. So many people I talked to during the protests didn't seem to have any idea what was at stake. But I knew I was risking everything when I walked out of that class." Now that's a cause.

Molly Ball is a junior in Pierson.

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