Members of the Duke community were shocked and saddened this year when the administration outlawed peanuts and tree nuts on campus, a saga which culminated in a violent clash at Café between an overzealous administrator and a student desperately trying to gobble down the last Nutella crêpe before the iron curtain fell.
With those dangerous culinary seeds now gone, the administration has turned its authoritarian gaze toward union busting. Top Duke officials have recently vocalized opposition to graduate student efforts to unionize, arguing that those crucial university workers are “exceptional scholars,” and not technically employees.
“Being an employee does not necessarily make you an employee,” said interim provost Jenny Paris in an interview with The Chronicle, pointing out that she is not necessarily a provost just because she gets paid to show up and be one.
The alleged provost continued to argue that everything is not what it seems.
“Nugget, the beloved canine who was arguably golden and sometimes appeared to retrieve things, was not necessarily legally a golden retriever,” she said.
“Pizza Hut is a corporation that serves pizza, but they also offer other snacks and beverages, notably in establishments that are often shaped more like traditional stores than ‘huts’ as one may expect. The administration remains committed to understanding this nuance.”
Graduate students in favor of unionization have posted online arguing that they “teach classes, conduct groundbreaking research for the university, mentor undergraduates, lead research trips, and support many university functions with their time and effort.” The students argue that this work is not adequately compensated, and have pushed for radical leftist changes like “inflation-responsive living wage, affordable childcare and increased support for international students.”
The university claims that those students technically receive “education benefits” rather than “wages,” which proves they are not actual employees. The university makes this distinction between student and employee by sending its students paychecks for their services and having them use the same Duke@Work portal that its actual employees use.
Paris disputed the definition of “work,” arguing that teaching and researching do not fall under the physics definition of “the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a displacement,” and are therefore “not technically work.”
Duke spokesperson Sis Crimmons told The Chronicle that graduate students should reconsider their plans “if they know what’s good for them.”
“I would really hate for something bad to happen to anyone,” he told The Chronicle as he ground a shockingly large Cuban cigar between his teeth. “The administration urges doctoral candidates to think twice before they make a mistake they may regret,” Crimmons said with a menacing smile as he rolled up the sleeves of his suit and slowly tapped a lead pipe against his desk.
Paris pointed out that Duke, with one of the largest endowments of any school in the world, cannot simply hand that money out to graduate students like Halloween candy.
“It’s crucial that we uphold our values by keeping that money invested in fossil fuels,” she said. “This ensures a large enough return on investment that we can continue to produce high quality videos about our new Climate Commitment while still providing the essential funding for our many researchers and lecturers who are not not employees, but are definitely just students with paychecks.”
She also argued that Duke was doing its best to prepare doctoral candidates for the reality of life in academia.
“We are doing our solemn duty to lower the expectations of these students, most of whom will finish their decade of higher education with crippling debt only to enter a shrinking job market in highly competitive fields with shockingly low wages. It would be a disservice to these employees — I mean, students — to coddle them.”
Crimmons was later spotted walking his bloodthirsty pet pitbulls on the quad near a Graduate Student Union rally. When pressed for comment, he just winked and said that his dogs have only been known to maul people who identify as real employees, and anyone who identified as a student would be safe.
Monday Monday spent last week trying and failing to satirize conflict in the Middle East. Having undergone hours of editor-mandated sensitivity training, the author has grown as a human being and now submits this column with the humble hope that unions are less controversial than Naftali Bennett and Palestine.
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