Understanding Contemporary Workers' Struggles: Remembering David Montgomery

Extract

I was not one of David's students, though I wanted to be. I had applied to Yale for graduate school and had gone up to New Haven to meet him beforehand. But I didn't get in. Apparently, the admissions committee (which he wasn't on that year) considered it too risky to admit someone who had worked in the labor movement, in light of the union organizing going on among Yale's graduate students and employees. I thought this was ironic because, although I was sympathetic to the Yale organizing, I was searching for the life of the mind. If I had wanted to organize workers, I would have continued what I was already doing. In any case, I ended up elsewhere, and I've had no complaints about my graduate education. David and I stayed in touch over the years, and I was honored by a kind review he wrote of my first book in the Journal of Social History.