Graduate Students Hold Most Important U of C Protest in 50 Years

OPINION BY HYDE PARK PATCH MAYOR SID COLTON
For a university that has stood for independent thinking and new ideas for all 126 years of its existence, since classes began on Saturday October 1st, 1892 ... The University of Chicago has revealed recently its new era of woefully insipid "thinking", that helped inspire 1103 votes by its graduate students to form a union a year ago. The University thereby revealed a lack of understanding of what currently makes it a great institution: its students and teachers, its alumni and its staff ... but not its current President, Deans, Vice Presidents, and Board of Trustees.

Today Thursday, those 1103 votes metamorphosed into an 11:03am one-hour rally and march. The rally and march are almost without precedent in the 126-year history of this University. Not since the 1968/69 year, with a student sit-in at (but mainly inside!) the same administration building, has such a large group, the 1103 voters for a union, and the enormously energized and passionate rally group of 350 to 500 graduate students and supporters, protested the actions of a University Administration.

President Edward Levi is connected to both events: He began his UChicago presidency in November 1968 ... and two months later, in January 1969, he was in charge of making decisions for the two-week sit-in by 400 students, in the then-"Administration Building" that now bears his name, "Edward H. Levi Hall", the site of today's one hour protest rally that began shortly after 11:03am

In some ways, President Levi (who was enlisted in 1975 by President Gerald Ford to become Attorney General of the United States, for the purpose of prosecuting the federal crimes that occurred within the Nixon administration's Watergate scandal), had the more complex choice to make, in a country where many college students had the prospect of being sent to Vietnam upon dropping out or graduating. Levi chose to do nothing, and tolet the 400 students tire out and leave ... which they did in two weeks; and most importantly, not ask the police to remove the students ... which would have caused an explosion of bad feelings, the likelihood of injuries, and would have created a more substantive issue for students to grab on to:

“With all due respect to Marlene Dixon,” says Jeff Blum, X’68, one of the leaders of the sit-in, “she was just an excuse.” Student protesters were angry about the Vietnam War, the University’s treatment of the surrounding community, and racism and sexism. “As Mark Rudd put it so well,” Blum said (Rudd had led the takeover of buildings at Columbia and later joined the terrorist group the Weather Underground), “‘the issue is not the issue.’” -- http://thecore.uchicago.edu/winter2010/which-side.shtml

President Levi had the UChicago trait of thinking clearly and acting appropriately. The current President, Robert Zimmer, is in no way a leader of men, of students, or of anyone else. His job has become that of a bank president who spends most of his time following the suggestions of the University's Trustees and their investment advisors and the rule of the Almighty Dollar over the rule of ... leadership of people and of an institution. He is focused on the size of the Endowment, as if it were ... you get the idea.

In today's era, I am 99.9% certain that President Levi would have "thought outside the box", and would have been the first of the top U.S. university presidents to agree to bargain with his university's graduate student "teaching assistants". It has been said elsewhere that many of the top universities and their presidents did not want to be the first to bargain with their doctoral students who are trying to form a union. President Zimmer has fallen into that category, and the University of Chicago is not at all being the national leader it needs to be, on this issue. Along the spectrum of leadership action, Robert J. Zimmer is acting much too much as Donald J. Trump would act, in this union-forming issue ... and not at all like Edward H. Levi would have been.