Prior to the reunion, they discovered that the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW) was on strike, and the issue upon which many alums focused before arriving in Cambridge was whether our class should cross the picket line. Fortunately, the issue never presented itself. One suspects that the union shared the university’s opinion of our relevance and deemed our geriatric gathering unworthy of protest. Certainly, no pickets greeted our arrival at any activity I attended. The only protest I saw was at the registration of incoming reunions the day we were leaving, which I passed on the way to breakfast. There was no picket line, just a sad- looking graduate student holding up a sign. As he ignored my wife and me, we ignored him.
However, that does not mean that I ignored the strike entirely. One of its more striking elements (no pun intended) was that the graduate students were represented by the United Auto Workers. While this may, at first, seem an odd coupling, the UAW has been involved in student politics for some time. In fact, as recounted by Amity Shlaes in her book, Great Society, the UAW was heavily involved in the formative years of that radical student organization, Students for a Democratic Society.
Walter Reuther
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Somewhat Related: Act 10. And: Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer.