Since universities are all about students who go there to live and learn, the obvious casualties are the students. Some of them will find, according to Yale's postings, that their classes will take place in City Hall. They will eat wherever they can. Professors teaching Latin literature can make do in improvised quarters, not so physicists and engineers who require great blackboards and perhaps computer projections. So those classes are a problem.

Now add this complication. Some professors have announced that they will not teach if in order to do so it is required that they cross a picket line. That does put one in mind of New Deal rhetoric. Thou shalt not cross a picket line. That is a concept derived from the very idea of collective bargaining.

Some sanctions used in the past by striking unions were illegalized by the Taft-Hartley Act (dubbed the "slave-labor act" by the labor movement), which forbade secondary boycotts (if your trucks bring food to Yale, we will strike all your trucks coast to coast). But the old pull of class antagonism is active still, and Jacksonian rhetoric is full-blown.

Jesse Jackson several times stressed that Yale has an endowment of $11 billion, which makes it sound as though, with an endowment that large, why not double employee wages? The educational world learned several days ago that the headmaster of St. Paul's School is paid $524,000 annually, relieving that cleric (he is an Episcopal bishop) of any of the privations of the poverty associated with the Christian ministry. If St. Paul's can swing it, why not Yale?

There is the other point, of course. It is that Yale walks a fiduciary fine line. The $11 billion was donated in the cause of education. The endowment and the students more or less share the burden of maintaining the place. The endowment, and student fees, aren't to be taken as an ATM for the two locals.

What is engrossing is the whole scene. Yale's political prejudices are exuberantly liberal (to unearth a professor in the social sciences who voted Republican would earn a Pulitzer for investigative reporting). But suddenly we have the officials of this liberal university acting like ... hard-hearted, union-busting capitalist exploiters of the working class.

Well, the students can take it as fieldwork, but they are paying about $3,000 per month ($36,000 per year) for their education. Do students ever strike?