The State : The Labor Unrest That Strikes at the Heart of UC Berkeley’s Image : Education: The school’s handling of the teaching assistants’ demand for recognition is latest example of its tendency to hurt itself.

The slogan printed on the signs read “UAW--On Strike!” But the men and women carrying the placards looked much too wan to be auto workers and they were not picket ing an auto plant. They were milling at the entrances to three University of California campuses--Berkeley, Santa Cruz and San Diego, where an “informational picket” had sprung up. It was the second such strike in three years.

The organizers--graduate students who serve as teaching assistants in undergraduate courses--claim that, if their union doesn’t win prompt recognition from the university’s Board of Regents, the strike will likely spread to other UC campuses later in the academic year.

But is a union really the kind of representation that graduate students need at the University of California--and if so, what does that indicate about the state of the public institution?

UC spokesmen keep insisting that their hands are tied--that the state’s labor-relations law, as the state Supreme Court recently interpreted it, makes it impossible for UC to recognize the union. But as David Feller, the Berkeley law professor who drafted the legislation, has pointed out in a letter to UC President Jack Peltason, although the law doesn’t require the Regents to acknowledge the teaching assistants’ union, neither does it prevent them from recognizing the union.

The strike, of course, has disrupted scholarship-as-usual. Undergraduates have struggled to balance their commitment to solidarity with the practical demands of end-of-semester papers and exams. Professors have moved their classes off campus so students don’t have to cross picket lines. At UC Santa Cruz, the administration had to charter buses to ferry students up the long hill from the gate to the campus, since the regular bus drivers were honoring the strike.

Teaching assistants--graduate student instructors, as they are now called--are vital to the education of undergraduates. They lead sections in big lecture classes, correct tests and papers. Sometimes, they run entire courses. This experience, at wages of $11 and more an hour, is supposed to provide training for future careers in academe, and usually it does. Professors and teaching assistants regularly discuss classroom strategies and review comments on students’ papers.

But sometimes, particularly in huge undergraduate courses, TAs really are treated like serfs, handed endless work for little pay and less acknowledgment. One Berkeley professor, who isn’t particularly sympathetic to the union, recalls being invited to a gripe session organized by another department’s TAs. “After sitting on the faculty side of the table for half an hour and listening to their complaints, I couldn’t stand it any more. I moved to the TAs’ side of the table.”

Some form of recognition by the university would halt these abuses and give grad students the voice they deserve in the councils of policy. But it’s not obvious that unionization is the right approach. Teaching assistants are professionals-to-be, learning a craft that knows no time-clock and few by-the-book rules.

The TAs realize this, which is why the strike they’ve organized has so many peculiar features. Picketing ends every day at 5 o’clock, enabling students to attend classes rescheduled for the evening hours without having to cross a picket line. Many TAs have encouraged undergraduates who are struggling with their course work to call them at home. And some TAs seek out their professors (middle-level management, in classic unionese) for moral counsel on the strike.

So far, the university has refused to respond, choosing instead to stick with its reading of the law. That’s too bad--not only because the graduate students have legitimate complaints, but also because, in terms of its public image, UC is flunking. Its position seems ungenerous and its spokesmen sound disingenuous.

In this respect, the university’s handling of the strike is just the latest example of its tendency to inflict wounds on itself. Not so long ago, the institution enjoyed enormous prestige, as the crown jewel in what was generally regarded as the best public system of higher education in the world. About the only thing needed to perfect the picture was a Rose Bowl championship.

But these days, most of the news coming out of UC is bad news. Legislators, parents and taxpayers don’t hear much about the quality of instruction, which is far better than it was a generation ago, or about the state-of-the-art research being carried out in every field of knowledge, or about the university’s success in making its student body more closely reflect the composition of the state.

While UC could publicize its good deeds, it generally hangs back in the mistaken belief that it shouldn’t stoop to public relations. If you build a great university, the administration apparently thinks, they will come. Consequently, what attracts media attention are the foibles and follies, the golden parachutes and high living enjoyed by top UC administrators, the date-rapes and fraternity hi-jinks. The Naked Guy at Berkeley makes all the news shows, not the Nobel Prize-winner at Berkeley.

The new UC president is from insiders’ accounts an estimable man--but it doesn’t help matters that he is an insider in the twilight of his career. No one at UC is attempting what Bill Honig so brilliantly accomplished for the state’s public schools a few years back: spelling out the educational mission of the institution, seeking widespread support for that mission and bringing the news to the public.

Honig’s efforts paid big dividends in dollars for public schools. But the last time anyone asked out loud “What should UC do?” or argued eloquently for its greatness, was 30-plus years ago, when California adopted its Master Plan for Higher Education. Now, with the state in sick financial shape, the two other systems of public higher education, the state colleges and the community colleges, have already taken devastating cuts. If the university hopes to avoid that fate, to claim the resources needed to maintain excellence, it must show that it deserves such support. The way UC has handled the teaching assistants’ strike is the latest, but hardly the only, example of the university being its own worst advocate.