Grinnell College administrators made headlines last year by attempting to invalidate efforts to expand the country’s only independent union of undergraduate student workers. These actions have risked undoing an Obama-era policy that allows students across the country to unionize.
Has the administration’s behavior been surprising, in light of Grinnell’s “proudly progressive” history? According to President Raynard Kington, the answer is no, because “we are not now and never have been a political institution.” But as alumni of Grinnell, we write to say that institutions of higher education are not so easily disentangled from politics, and to claim otherwise is not only false but also dangerous.
Paradoxically, the claim of being above politics is itself an old form of political rhetoric. In an article in Inside Higher Ed, Kington writes, “We exist for the preservation, transmission and creation of knowledge, and with this mission comes an obligation to provide room to freely explore ideas — even and perhaps especially unpopular ones … When we begin to take positions on matters unrelated to our mission and make decisions based on a political litmus test, we hurt the very core of our mission.”
From that perspective, Grinnell administrators are portrayed as heroic figures nobly rejecting the petty squabbling of politics, risking unpopularity in service of the free exploration of ideas. In fact, however, what actually happened was that college administrators appealed to the National Labor Relations Board to invalidate a student decision to organize; they used the machinery of government to assist them in a…
