Back in the 1990s as the situation in academia became increasingly dire for young scholars, some graduate students who were teaching assistants at Yale were so angry at their poor job prospects and the indifference of their professors that they joined a union and then went on strike by withholding grades in the classes they were helping to teach. The tenured leftists reacted with anger to what their students were doing, even though they had supported marginalized people, including those in unions, in the past. Here is how one leftist, who disapproved of their actions, described the situation:
Sara Suleri, a brilliant postcolonial critic whose work I have taught in my own classes, urged disciplinary action against one of her teaching assistants who joined [the grad student union’s] 1995 decision to withhold undergraduate grades until Yale’s administration agreed to negotiate. Nancy Cott, a widely admired labor historian, spoke out against the union, and David Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of slavery, sought college guards to bar his union-identified teaching assistant from entering the room where undergraduate final exams would be given.
This is from Cary Nelson’s Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, p. 143. Things did not go well for these TAs. As for the professors, I assume they did fine. Other than this passage in Nelson’s book, who else was going to go after them? A few years later, I showed this passage to a young professor to whom I was trying to explain why I had abandoned the left. She read it and shrieked, “Nancy Cott?!” However, I doubt that reading about someone she looked up to acting badly changed much of anything for her. It would take a lot more incidents like that to shake her out of her views. But my point is that this Nancy Cott’s reputation was still intact.
I mention all this because while I’ve enjoyed the audacity of the truckers, I never expected things to end well. The powers-that-be have way too much power, and they can excuse their despicable behavior because they imagine that their opponents are white supremacists, and no one in the bubble (like the media that they follow) will tell them otherwise, of course.
A nice memory of how the left is vocally for all the grand ideas, at least until they are expected to pay some cost, or it affects their individual privilege.
Lord Acton must be smiling down on Justin right about now.
Posted by: John T | 02/21/2022 at 05:21 AM
Yes, Lord Acton. Thanks for reminding me about him.
Posted by: John Pepple | 02/21/2022 at 06:44 PM