How'd they do that?

A recent controversy at Yale is illustrative of the lack of influence among IU's graduate student organizations -- although, in this case, we're glad that our local groups aren't taking on similar causes.\nYale recently divested itself of all of its holdings in the Corrections Corporation of America -- a private company that manages prisons all over the United States, and which has been accused of abusing inmates. Yale claims that the decision was strictly financial, but the Graduate Employees and Students Organization had been waging a campaign demanding divestiture. They felt that the university shouldn't appear to support a company accused of prisoner abuse.\nCampaigns for divestiture are not new. A global campaign against companies that invested or worked in apartheid-era South Africa is often credited with putting pressure on the South African regime. Today students across the U.S. are pushing for divestiture of stocks of companies that do business in Sudan, in protest of the killing in Darfur. \nWe have no problem with divestiture campaigns, per se; the anti-apartheid campaign showed they can be a tool for positive change. However, it seems inappropriate that an organization whose primary purpose is representing graduate students as employees would take up such an issue. Yale's GESO is most famous for waging a long-running, acrimonious labor dispute over the unionization of graduate students, their pay and stipends -- including six strikes since 1990. \nWe don't think that a labor union should stray so far beyond representing the interests of its members -- so far, perhaps, as to take a political stance that some of its members may not agree with. We know that labor unions are famously political -- giving staunch support to Democrats, even if not all of their members vote Democratic. But it's a shame that a graduate student organization would politicize itself in the same way. If students wanted to force Yale to divest they should have formed an organization dedicated to this goal -- as IU students did, for example, with No Sweat!'s campaign to force the administration to stop using sweatshop workers in the manufacture of IU athletic apparel.\nBut, while we may not agree with the stance taken by the Yale graduate student organization, it does highlight the weak hand of graduate student groups here at IU. Although we may not want the IU Graduate and Professional Students Organization to push for divestiture, it's hard to imagine them succeeding if they chose \nto do so. \nThirty members of the Graduate Employees Organization held a demonstration at the Sample Gates more than two months ago -- not that most graduate students, let alone undergrads, knew it was taking place or what it was protesting. If our graduate groups can't mobilize people regarding important issues like dental care for graduate students, it's hard to see them successfully pressuring the administration about peripheral issues.\nSo while we might not support the action taken by the Yale Graduate Employees and Students Organization, we salute the fact that they could successfully take it.