NEW YORK: Professor on the picket line¡

“Professors,” observed Thorstein Veblen in 1918, “refuse to join unions or engage in collective bargaining because of a feeling among them that their salaries are not of the nature of wages and that there would be a species of moral obliquity implied in overtly so dealing with the matter.” The past few years in America have seen a drastic revision of such scruples of classification. From the end of December 1966, through January 1967, the largest strike of professors in probable history closed the Chicago junior college system, with nearly a thousand senior teachers abstaining from classes. This strike resulted in a $500 across‐the‐board settlement for every Chicago teacher, as well as many other benefits including the all‐important cut in class sizes. The strike was followed by an equally vociferous one in Newark, New Jersey, a militant vote in Denver for a collective bargaining agent for local teachers, and in all there have been 36 strikes, nearly all highly successful, by locals of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) in the past six years.