Flashback Post: Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

In honor of the anniversary of the 2018 strike of the Graduate Employees' Organization at UIUC, I'm reposting my piece on it from last year. In the past year, we've seen incredible numbers and incredible results from teachers' strikes, and I continue to believe that one of the best things we can do for education-- no matter what our connection to it-- is to support the labor rights of those who deliver it. Even Miss Othmar agrees. 

Graduate workers marching during strike, surrounded by bubbles. Photo by Jeff Putney.

As you may know, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently on strike (at eight days and counting, the longest in UIUC history). There have been a lot of beautiful letters and posts floating around about the strike, making articulate and reasonable arguments in favor of protecting tuition waivers, raising graduate wages, and making clear to the administration their dissatisfaction with their unwillingness to bargain with graduate employees. I myself did the opposite last week, canceling my usual weekly post both in solidarity with the strike and to give myself more time to participate in pickets and rallies. This week, I want to jot down just a few messy reflections on the possibilities for learning that the strike has presented (while encouraging you to also read some of the cogent arguments in favor of the GEO presented in a variety of places like the Undergraduate-Graduate Alliance and the fine folks on Twitter.)

Most obviously, the GEO strike has presented a lot of opportunities to reevaluate the value of graduate labor for people at all levels, even surprising graduate workers themselves. I know the value of my own labor, but did I know about the ESL courses that every international student is required to take under the guidance of graduate workers? Not before last week. Undergraduate allies of the GEO are reflecting on the role that TAs and GAs have played in their own coursework and highlighting these experiences in letters to the provost.

For me, the strike has also sparked thoughts about labor history and the way we teach it. US history courses often cover the labor movement, and for good reason-- as we are wont to say, their efforts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the landscape of work in this country (at least, I am wont to say so). An eight hour day, a weekend, restrictions on child labor, a living wage, workplace safety-- all things that the labor movement envisioned and made real. We do a lot of activities designed to highlight this contrast-- reading John Spargo's observations of child laborers and their dismal working conditions. We emphasize the differences in various union ideologies, bringing up a lot of unions with a lot of acronyms, like the IWW and the AFL and the WTUL and maybe even the ILGWU if we get really rowdy.

What most of us haven't explored so fruitfully-- what is hard to approximate in the classroom-- is the mixed emotional bag of labor activism. The strike has brought on for me an appreciation of how complex the decision to strike is-- both dreaded and celebrated. It has highlighted the spirit of joyfulness that the strike brings, and that as it goes on, you become closer to those around you. When teaching strikes and unions, I had been painting a picture of iron-jawed determination, but what I've seen in the past week has been more lighthearted-- a determination to win, yes, but also a celebration of community. I've heard this newfound appreciation of community from many people this week, and I've said it myself-- "This might sounds cheesy, but all that solidarity stuff-- I get it now."

It also takes you outside of yourself a bit. I saw a pretty apt sign last week that said something to the effect of, "Things are so bad even the introverts are out here!" The person that you are on the picket line, shouting chants and encouraging strangers, is not the person that you are every other time of your life, when you fear talking to other people or just wish you could go to your office without seeing anyone. Most weeks, I avoid campus when I don't have to be there-- last week, I was there every day.

I have never been able to get this sort of worldview-altering enthusiasm into my discussions of labor history, because I didn't really know it myself. The discussion is about that iron-jawed determination I mentioned above-- the ideals of Marxism, the rational reasons why one would want to work a manageable number of hours or have their children attend school instead of picking coal. I've never focused on the community building of unions and strikes, the human motivations of union leaders or members. Even the Greenwich Village game, which approximates so many lived experiences and ideas well, also fails to get across this experience of the labor faction-- its focus is on ideals among bohemians, not engagement in actual labor activism. How much more sense do the various enthusiasms of Leah Schwartz, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn make when you've actually seen a strike in action?

So, one of the nice things about this strike, in addition to the solidarity it has fostered, is the insight it can offer not only into our present but into labor history for teachers and students alike. I like to think that the next time I walk into a classroom on this campus to talk about unions and labor, there will be a great deal more familiarity with these concepts among my students, and more appreciation of who exactly it is who organizes, strikes, pickets, and makes change throughout history-- people very much like us.


Related Links:

Title Talk-- I Walk the Line
A few links on the GEO strike: News-Gazette, Socialist Worker, Chicago Tribune, Daily Illini.
For the monetarily inclined, a link to the GEO Strike Fund.

Enough About Me: The Power of Tangents

A winding road. We'll get back to the point eventually!

I found myself on a tangent while teaching last semester. Perhaps it was because the conversation was a little slow to start, but I was talking about something and it made me think of Martin Pernick's work on anesthesia and the debates surrounding its initial use. I mentioned this-- talking about how there were moral concerns about using anesthesia as well as practical safety questions. Was it right for people to avoid god-given pain? Would patients be subjected to immoral treatment from doctors if they were not awake to advocate for themselves?

As I talked about this, it was as if a light went on.  Although everyone hadn't exactly been ignoring me before, they were now attentive in a different way. They laughed a bit at the unfamiliarity of the idea, about its seeming irrationality. 

In that moment, I realized that I tried to rarely diverge from the point. I also realized that perhaps it was a mistake not to diverge a bit more often. With a rush I remembered one of my favorite undergraduate professors throwing out the phrase "if you want to know more" every now and then, when a book came to mind or a topic seemed too big to tackle at the moment. I didn't always follow up on those recommendations, but the moments represented something larger to me-- the excitement of a wider world that I knew of yet. Those divergences didn't just break up the rhythm of a typical class section, although sure, they did that too. They also represented the wealth of knowledge that one could be interested in. It showed my professor's passion for a grand variety of material I had never even begun to consider.

In the past I have avoided digression as much as possible because I have been afraid of totally losing the plot, or of droning on and boring everyone. And that's definitely a potential to worry about-- we only have so much time in a fifty-minute class. But this experience taught me that a well timed, well chosen digression can rejuvenate a class, and perhaps suggest that even if they are not currently consumed by the intellectual debates in front of them, there may be things out there they have never considered being interested by before. 

Do you take tangents? How do you know when to cut them off and when to let them grow? 

Related Links:

If you want to know more, a review of The Calculus of Suffering.

Some nitty gritty discussion about digressions in relation to English for Academic Purposes (EAP).