BY JEFFREY C. ISAAC

Over 1,700 of the roughly 2,400 graduate student workers at Indiana University have signed union cards affiliating with the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition with the United Electrical Workers union. The Indiana University administration has refused to recognize or even to meet with coalition leaders. And after years of seeking recognition, the coalition has called for a strike.

And so, there is now a strike taking place on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington, and well over a thousand graduate workers are now off their jobs and staffing picket lines across the campus.

Hundreds of faculty members are supporting the strikers, and hundreds more have signed neutrality pledges declaring that they will not collaborate in any efforts to penalize the striking graduate student workers. The campus Graduate Student Professional Association publicly supports the strikers. The IU Student Government Congress has endorsed the strike, and hundreds of undergraduate students have marched in support of the strike. Local labor unions have expressed support, and the IU chapter of the AAUP has been a major supporter of the workers’ right to strike.

And yet there are many on campus who are either indifferent to the strike or opposed to it, because they oppose disruptions of normal university routines or because they are simply cool towards unions in general and academic unions in particular.

A professional school professor exposed corruption surrounding the board of trustees’ selection of recently appointed President Whitten, advocates on behalf of academic freedom and university transparency . . .  and opposes the strike.

A social science professor has spent years railing against the university’s bloated administrative structure . . .  and opposes the strike.

A humanities professor has long decried the starving of liberal arts education by new professional schools and believes the civic mission of the university has been corrupted . . .  and opposes the strike.

Another professor has long lamented the “bread and circuses” approach of university leaders who prioritize “school spirit” and sporting events . . . and opposes the strike.

These colleagues have the right to their opinions, opinions no doubt shared by many.

At the same time, there is something naïve about the forms of opposition noted above.

For they all presume a model of academic integrity and collegiality that is an anachronistic myth given the kinds of people who now run most universities thanks to the business-oriented boards of trustees who hire and govern them.

Colleagues who plead for the liberal arts, expose corruption, and demand greater transparency  may complain at faculty meetings or publish exposés at online sites.  But their idea of standing up for what they believe more or less reduces itself to complaining, withdrawing, or anointing themselves as academic Don Quixotes holding fast while the world leaves them behind.

By contrast, the members of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition have done something that no faculty group on campus has ever done: organized for years; petitioned for the redress of grievances; affiliated with a union when their petitions were largely ignored; and taken collective action so that their voices will be heard and their rights recognized.

In doing so, they have publicly displayed a courage, and a commitment to principle, that far exceeds what their most of their professors have ever displayed.

Have the striking graduate workers done everything “right?” Who does everything right?

Are there limits to their demands? Yes.  Do they face great obstacles? Yes. Is their strike “disruptive?” Yes, though it is peaceful, civil, articulate, and as attentive to the concerns of undergraduate students and faculty colleagues as it is possible to be.

The bottom line is that the graduate workers are the only people on campus who have had the integrity and guts to join together on behalf of their concerns and to collectively refuse to simply submit to the dictates of a remote and unaccountable university administration.

They are thus educating everyone on campus about the value of democracy, and about a truth eloquently expressed long ago by Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle there is no progress . . . power concedes nothing without a demand.”

And the administration—the very same administration that so many faculty complain about on a daily basis—is saying this to them: “be quiet, you are not who you say you are, we know best, and you should trust us, and if you don’t be quiet, stop making demands, and do your job as we define it, we will punish you because we can. And because we are about ‘education,’ not about workers’ rights or democracy.”

And the patronizing sentiments currently being conveyed to the graduate student workers are simply versions of sentiments often conveyed to the faculty: “our job is to run things, and yours is to research, teach, and perform the service tasks we require of you.”

Every academic on the Indiana University, Bloomington, campus who cares about faculty governance, academic integrity, or the future of their departments and their jobs, should understand that the striking graduate workers are enacting the very values of intellectual responsibility and the right to be heard that we academics trumpet, and doing so at real risk to themselves.

The striking graduate students are acting for themselves—as they have every right to do.

But they are also pressing to the fore questions about university values, and university governance, that should matter to us all.

And their demand for recognition is a demand that university administrators need to hear, and to respect, in the name of labor justice but also in the name of the serious accountability and voice that we all deserve.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.