My Debate At Yale: Taxpayers Scored An Ivy League Victory Against The Unions

Conservatives have spent years lamenting what happens to ideas on Ivy League campuses. Speakers get shouted down or disinvited. Students learn that some opinions are best kept to themselves.

Consequently, I wasn’t sure what to expect when the Yale Political Union invited me to argue the affirmative on a blunt resolution: “Ban Public-Sector Unions.”

After an hour of debate, the house voted, and the resolution passed 35-25.

That result surprised a lot of people, including some of the students in the room. But the vote wasn’t the most encouraging part of the evening.

The case against government unions is simple. A government union’s revenue comes from dues, and dues come from headcount. The bigger the public payroll, the more money and political power the union commands.

That gives it a structural incentive to grow government with taxpayers footing the bill.

Unlike private-sector unions, government unions help elect the officials who sit across the bargaining table from them. Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the danger in 1937, writing that collective bargaining “…cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

Again, that was FDR, not Ronald Reagan.

Look at Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson was a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, which helped bankroll his campaign. Now he sits on the other side of the bargaining table.

The students who rose to oppose the resolution were sharp and sincere. They argued that someone who teaches out of civic duty deserves the leverage to win fair pay, that individual bargaining with a government employer is unworkable, and that union political spending is no worse than corporate lobbying or members of Congress trading stocks.

But eight states already bar collective bargaining for at least some public employees, and their governments function just fine. And a corporation spends its own money on politics, while a government union spends money taken from public employees — many of whom don’t even know they have a First Amendment right to opt out.

No one argued that government unions improve public services or that teachers unions make students better off.

Last month, the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank, found that states with the most powerful teachers’ unions were the least likely to adopt proven early-literacy reforms. Eight of the 10 lowest-ranked states in its assessment had strong unions.

The most encouraging part was the debate itself. Students who disagreed stood up and said so, then listened to the answer. At least one acknowledged the evidence was hard to dispute — a concession that took intellectual honesty.

That is how a university is supposed to work, but too seldom does. On most elite campuses, the case against government unions is never made. Students absorb the assumption that organized labor and the public good are the same thing because no one ever asks them to test it.

The Yale Political Union did just that. Given both sides, a majority of students in the room sided with taxpayers and with kids still struggling to read.

Universities have spent years debating speech codes and safe spaces. The fix is simpler — more rooms like this one, where an unpopular argument gets a full hearing, and students decide.

Government unions have long counted on young people as a natural constituency. One night in New Haven doesn’t overturn that assumption, but it suggests the assumption is weaker than it looks.

That is reason for hope — for the country and for Ivy League campuses. Students are still willing to hear an argument, and even change their minds.

Somebody just has to show up and make it.

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Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a group dedicated to combating government unions. He is the author of the book “Freedom is the Foundation: How We Are Defeating Progressive Tyranny By Taking On The Government Unions.”