became an English professor, and by the late 1970s was teaching at a small liberal arts college. One year my colleagues and I became unhappy with our salary and conditions, and I found myself on a committee organized to address the problems. The committee’s first task was to draft a statement defining a professor’s function–words like ‘educator’, ‘facilitator’ and ‘pedagogue’ were debated for hours. When I suggested that since we performed tasks for a salary, we really ought to consider ourselves ‘workers’. It was as though I’d farted.

The group that was finally formed to represent the professors called itself an ‘Association’. Because it refused to call itself a union, it could never really be a union. Such snobbery also drove away the non-teaching college staff–secretaries and plant workers mostly–who joined a Teamsters’ local.

My heart was never really in my ‘Association’, even though I was required to pay dues and have it represent me. And then one year, 1976, the Association agreed to work without a contract. I argued at one meeting that a strike, or at least the threat of one, was the only leverage an organized workforce had. (My father would have been proud of me.) I was outvoted and told that I didn’t understand the subtleties of negotiations in academia.