The Union That Never Made It

After weeks of intensive organization and proselytizing, a small core of graduate students successfully engineered a one-day strike in the spring of 1972. One year later their union struck again. But by March 1973, the strike effort of the Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow's Union had fizzled, dragging down with it the union itself.

With closer parallels to an employees' union than to the radical student organizations of the late sixties, the graduate students coalesced in 1972 around an issue that affected them personally--a proposed change in financial arrangements for teaching fellows.

They were somewhat successful, so in 1973 the union reorganized, this time to initiate an academic boycott to protest the graduate school's new financial aid policy.

After four days, the 700-member union had dwindled to 200 and the strike was called off.

William Lazonick, assistant professor of Economics, who was actively involved in the union as a graduate student here, said recently that many graduate students now think twice before taking part in any activity "other than getting through and getting out, while piling up debts--the immediate environment is more a means to an end."

While there has been little if any talk of resurrecting the union, grad students in the Economics and History Departments have formed and nurtured their own "clubs." These serve both to lessen the social alienation many graduate students suffered and to represent graduate students as a united group to their departments and the University.

Both groups refused to send representatives to a graduate student-Faculty committee, which they viewed as a University attempt to undercut the potential for a reorganized union.

The Henry Adams Club was successful last year in fighting the History Department on the number of teaching fellow openings. But that was no sign of a return to mass organization. With the new political ambience, only some momentous precipitating event could reunite graduate students across departmental lines.