The Madness of Perfectionism Needs to Stop, At Once

Perfectionism has been one of the hallmarks of all great Universities: Faculty may spend years perfectly proving a controversial hypothesis. College and graduate students at elite universities are noted for perfectionist ways, which help them organize their studying and, less profoundly, even avoid typographical errors. Even the administrative staffs at Universities can be noted for their perfectionism.

Generally this is looked at by society as a ‘good’ thing. However In many other parts of our society, perfectionism is a liability …for example in government and politics … in our US Congress and in our State Houses. Flexibility and the ability to attempt new things is the most important hallmark of great leaders and great groups.

The leaders of both sides of our University of Chicago dispute, need to throw away all of their perfectly held opinions about what are good and bad principles for our University; and what is good and bad about being a graduate student.

They need to start from an empty page and (it sounds odd perhaps) an empty mind.

Here are some things both sides can agree on:

"Loaded" words that neither side can agree on, need to be “deleted” from everyone's memory … at a minimum, those "loaded" words cannot be argued about ad infinitum and thereby prevent any possibility of any agreement.

Both side need to start as if they were starting the very first University, with a goal of opening up by ... Fall 2019.

For our graduate student teachers and teaching-assistants:

Their teaching and assisting needs to be overseen for quality. Failing to reach an appropriate quality should have consequences, even if it is just to have more guidance from the University on what is expected from them in their time with College students they are teaching or teaching-assisting.

For the University: Once upon a time, it was written that a University can exist without students. This may be true for a Rockefeller University of advanced research … but this University of Chicago cannot exist without students. The students are spending a number of years here ... and they cannot be expected to be here without having the most basic of human needs met: no student can be constantly worrying about where their next meal is coming from, or how they can pay a dentist for medically necessary dental work. If some independent arbitrator can verify that a certain annual salary is not sufficient for the time and effort being put in by our graduate student teachers and teaching-assistants … then a higher annual salary must be agreed upon at the bargaining table.

For the University President and Administration … what good does it do The University of Chicago for President Zimmer and his colleagues, to only continue to “negotiate” with each student individually, as appears to be the method from 1892 to now … at UChicago and at other universities. That will not work anymore. If it were working, there would not be the current GSU strike; nor the strike at Columbia University; nor the actions at several other distinguished universities.

Even without being a scholar of labor history, just following current events over the past number of years, one can see several examples of companies whose existence came to a complete end because of a labor dispute ... for which both sides held to a perfectionist view of what the business and workers were or needed to doing. I’ll list some examples in a later article.

The exact particulars of what needs to be included in a contract between the University of Chicago and its graduate-student teachers and teaching-assistants … is not for me to spell out. But the principle that it is time for each side to give up all of its long-ingrained concepts of what this or any University is about … is something which I can easily and confidently state, and which is the prerequisite for bringing this “failure to communicate” … to its complete and necessary end.