Class struggle 101.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

On the evening of August 24, I had dinner with Randy Marcum, who works in the boiler room at Miami University of Ohio. Joining us were about ten other campus workers, plus some of their student supporters. It was a hefty meal--the best the Holiday Inn had to offer--complete with wine and dessert. Which was a good thing, because three weeks later, Marcum was on a hunger strike to dramatize the poverty of Miami University's food service and maintenance workers.

Welcome to higher education, twenty-first-century style, where the most important course offered is not listed in the college catalog. It's called Class Struggle, and it pits the men in suits--administrators and trustees --against the men and women who keep the school running: maintenance workers, groundspeople, clerical and technical workers, housekeepers, food service workers. Yale has gotten all the national attention, with its tumultuous three-week-long strike that just ended in a stunning victory for the university's clerical and maintenance workers. But similar clashes are going on in less illustrious places, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where housekeepers, who have been trying to win union recognition for years, led a lively rally and teach-in on September 23.

As for Miami University, 460 maintenance workers are now out on strike, as I write at the end of September. Randy has ended his fast in order to build up energy for the picket line. The students have erected a tent city in front of the administration building. And faculty members are planning their own night in the tent city. Union picketers humiliated the university by turning away the union camera crews who had come to televise a Miami RedHawks vs. Cincinnati Bearcats game.

College presidents, deans, provosts, chancellors--along with their deputies, assistants, and other members of the ever-proliferating educational administrative workforce--insist that their labor problems are a sorry distraction from their institutions' noble purpose of enlightening young minds. But administrators like to cloak themselves in the moral authority of Western Civilization, such as it is, which means that labor issues are hardly peripheral to the university's educational mission. On an increasing number of campuses, incoming students are greeted at a formal fall convocation in which the top administrators--suited up in full medieval mortarboard-and-gown attire--deliver platitudinous speeches about Character...