Strikes do little To the Editor: Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania's Bill Herman suggests ("A Year Later, NYU TAs Back in Class," DP, 9/12/06) that the reason his group hasn't repeated strike action since the two-day protest in spring 2004 is because "things are pretty stable here right now." It would be more honest to admit that the 2004 strike was an embarrassing flop - a vanity project with incoherent means and unclear goals. Goodness knows there are genuine reasons for complaint about some graduate-student policies at Penn; but, as the fizzling out of the NYU strike suggests, radical pantomime, while no doubt exciting to the pulse, rarely gets us anywhere.
Alan Allport History Ph.D. candidate
