Hillman Award revoked
By From the Chronicle of Higher Education, vis TaxProfBlog:
Two Yale University professors, Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, expected to receive a 2006 Sidney Hillman Award on Tuesday at a ceremony in New York City. Instead, they got phone calls on Tuesday morning telling them that the judges had reversed the decision to honor the professors’ book on the repeal of the estate tax….
The telephone calls came from Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which sponsors the awards….
Mr. Raynor told the authors that the last-minute reversal had been based on information that came to light about Mr. Shapiro’s dealings with members of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, in its efforts to organize a graduate-student union at Yale in the 1990s….
Mr. Graetz and Mr. Shapiro pointed out that the book, which was published last year by Princeton University Press, does not address labor organizing. “There is no connection to GESO at all,” Mr. Graetz said. “This book has absolutely nothing to do with the graduate students.”…
The move toward rethinking the award began last week. On Thursday, May 18, the Hillman Foundation ran an advertisement in The New York Times listing the 2006 winners in several categories: book, magazine, broadcast, photojournalism, newspaper, and blog, a new category this year. Mr. Shapiro’s and Mr. Graetz’s book was listed as the winner in the book category. Although Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Graetz had written “an excellent book,” Mr. Raynor told The Chronicle, the decision came down to “more than just the words on the page.”
Fascinating.
I’m completely agnostic on the question of whether foundations handing out book awards ought to consider the political stances and activities of the authors when making a decision about the book award. If I were a member of such a foundation or organization with some decision-making power and therefore forced to come to some sort of conclusion on this issue, I’m not sure where I’d fall. I’d probably want to make a distinction between anti-union views and anti-union activity. Given the biography of the man this foundation named for, Furthermore, opposing graduate student unionization rarely has negative consequences of note for senior faculty, so it’s nice to see some consequences occasionally.
I’ve read the book in question and it’s excellent. If I’m ever called upon to teach an introductory course in American Politics, I would seriously consider assigning it as a companion to a more traditional textbook. I’ve also read Shapiro’s recent contributions to democratic theory, and they’re also very good. A largely positive discussion of his contributions can be found in chapter three of my dissertation. Here’s a snippet from The State of Democratic Theory, page 3:
I argue that both groups (deliberative and aggregative democratic theorists–ed) overestimate the importance of the idea of the common good for democracy. Instead, demcoracy isbetter thought of as a means of managing power relations so as to avoid domination.
He goes on to explain that domination isn’t inherent to all hierarchy, or course, and that hierarchies are crucial, necessary and good features of complex organizations and democratic societies. However, they should always be “presumed suspect and be structured so as to minimize the likelihood that they will atrophy into systems of domination” (SDT, 4).
I couldn’t agree more. Nor could I acticulate a conception of democracy that makes the case for graduate student employee unionization any more clear than this.
Update: Jacob Levy reprints more of the firewalled Chronicle story. Apparently, complaints were brought to the NLRB against Shapiro for unspecified threats against graduate students, but the complaints were never adjudicated. Google searches reveal Shapiro has been an outspoken opponent of graduate student unionization at Yale for quite some time.