The vote to unionize—which was won by a narrow margin, contested by the university, and then overturned in court—probably wouldn’t have increased his pay or mine. We make too much already. The people it would have helped most are the teachers who are paid by the class, as adjuncts. Both he and I hold the highest rank available to the lowest-ranking faculty, meaning that we’re at the top of the bottom. Or the bottom of the top, if we consider the office staff and the computer technicians and the food-service workers and the unseen cleaners who vacuum the rugs and empty the trash cans in our offices at night. We’re the upper-middle class of the university. And so we can, in our minds, align ourselves with the tenured professors and the deans at the top. But that serves them, I think, more than it serves anyone else.