<\/p>\n
After years of successfully stymying grad students’ efforts to unionize, the administration was dealt a shocking defeat. Graduate students at the University of Chicago voted 1103 to 479 to unionize, and while GSU is celebrating a big win, administrators are wisely admonishing them for \u201ctaking this whole free speech thing too far.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an email sent to graduate students following Thursday\u2019s vote tally, President Robert Zimmar and Provost Daniel Diermeier condemned grad students for their \u201cgross over-application of the school\u2019s steadfast and unassailable commitment to free speech.\u201d \u201cIt verges on perversion,\u201d the email continues, \u201cOur free speech policy is supposed to atomize the student body and show students that the worst thing they can do is agree with each other and disagree with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
An unnamed source within Levi Hall confirmed that other administrators are also pointing fingers at the school\u2019s free speech doctrine for fostering an environment where this vote could take place. They told the Dealer, \u201cIf we had realized the implications of granting free speech to grad students, we would have never endorsed it. In fact, it really doesn\u2019t make sense, allowing your underpaid and dissatisfied workers to just meet in groups and talk about their employers, whoops, educators and mentors.”<\/i><\/p>\n
There are also whisperings around the university\u2019s ivory break rooms that Dean Jay Ellison has been ostracized by other deans who felt that his 2016 letter was too equivocal in granting free speech rights to those outside the administration. Ellison, to his credit, had planned for this possibility in an early draft of the letter. \u201cThe first draft of the famous safe space letter stipulated that its edicts extended only to those working salaried positions in Levi Hall, which is, to be clear, a secure<\/i> space.\u201d However, Ellison failed to save the word doc in question. As a result, the entirely rewritten and unedited final letter that was released did not advocate for the kind of authoritarian discourse structures that might have prevented this debacle in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Breck Radulovic and Dan Lastres Oct. 20, 2017 After years of successfully stymying grad students’ efforts to unionize, the administration was dealt a shocking defeat. Graduate students at the University of Chicago voted 1103 to 479 to unionize, and while GSU is celebrating a big win, administrators are wisely admonishing them for \u201ctaking this whole free speech thing too far.\u201d In an email sent to graduate students following Thursday\u2019s vote tally, President Robert Zimmar and Provost Daniel Diermeier condemned grad students for their \u201cgross over-application of the school\u2019s steadfast and unassailable commitment to free speech.\u201d \u201cIt verges on perversion,\u201d the email continues, \u201cOur free speech policy is supposed to atomize the student body and show students that the worst thing they can do is agree with each other and disagree with us.\u201d An unnamed source within Levi Hall confirmed that other administrators are also pointing fingers at the school\u2019s free speech doctrine for fostering an environment where this vote could take place. They told the Dealer, \u201cIf we had realized the implications of granting free speech to grad students, we would have never endorsed it. In fact, it really doesn\u2019t make sense, allowing your underpaid and dissatisfied workers to just meet in groups and talk about their employers, whoops, educators and mentors.” There are also whisperings around the university\u2019s ivory break rooms that Dean Jay Ellison has been ostracized by other deans who felt that his 2016 letter was too equivocal in granting free speech rights to those outside the administration. Ellison, to his credit, had planned for this possibility in an early draft of the letter. \u201cThe first draft of the famous safe space letter stipulated that its edicts extended only to those working salaried positions in Levi Hall, which is, to be clear, a secure space.\u201d However, Ellison failed to save the word doc in question. As a result, the entirely rewritten and unedited final letter that was released did not advocate for the kind of authoritarian discourse structures that might have prevented this debacle in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2567,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions\/2567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}