Rick Perlstein joins David Montgomery in sending a letter to Alan Brinkley



Remember a few years back when you were good to allow me to join you and several other Columbia professors and graduate students at a dinner for a visiting scholar, and the subject turned to the Columbia grad students’ organizing drive? One of your colleagues, another prominent scholar of liberalism--and, one would think, a liberal--made the by-then familiar point (call it the Eli Yale Shuffle) that unionization was a good thing for everyone except graduate students, who really are the blessed of the earth.



I told this professor he was saying the exact same things a benevolent but anti-union employer like Barry Goldwater used to say: that unions are hardly necessary where the workplace relationship is not just one of boss and bossed, but also one complexified by trust, familiarity, respect, even monitorship. I noted that since I was the only one present who had been a member of a graduate student union (during two years in the American culture program at the University of Michigan), I had some standing to personally confirm a general principle every fan of the Wagner Act would understand: that by formalizing a relationship that otherwise would have otherwise been grounded in the whim of the employer, the presence of a union seemed to increase, not decrease, the measure of trust between professors and graduate students at the University of Michigan.



I don’t know if you agreed with me that night or not. I thought then that you did. I do know, however, that you understood the argument in its every particular--because you helped explain it to your colleague when he chose to act obtuse.