The most telling part of this piece in today's Times is the end: And even some who oppose the union drive acknowledge that both sides bear responsibility for the current climate. James Terry, president of At What Cost?, a campus group opposed to the union, said that the university had grown increasingly inflexible on labor issues and that he was among many on campus who have been alienated by the stubbornness and language of union organizers. "They have some intrusive recruitment tactics," Mr. Terry said, adding that a graduate student he knows was approached by organizers about membership nine times after she initially refused. "I don't think that Yale is treating us so bad that we need to compare ourselves to Birmingham in 1963," he said, "and that's what GESO will do, and I find that personally offensive." Still, even union opponents like Mr. Terry see some cause for alarm in the suggestion that some students, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened if they speak out. "There is reason to be concerned," he said. "The academy runs on different precepts. Differences of opinion have to be respected. If even one of these cases should be true, that's something people at all universities should be concerned about." Terry's first comment sets forth the tired dichotomies that GESO opponents of all backgrounds have relied on: between a historical epoch in which real injustice existed and a modern period of mere political differences; between poor sympathetic workers who have the right to organize and wealthy sheltered ones who don't. But his more interesting contribution, following At What Cost's line before the Academic Labor Board, is his politically smart refusal to defend the intimidation tactics of Yale's administration. AWC has also declined to endorse Yale's stonewalling through refusal to meet with GESO and refusal to agree to acknowledge even the results of an NLRB election. As long as AWC wants to frame itself as a grassroots operation interested solely in democratic deliberation (a difficult mantle to take on, even if all the charges nationally of faculty members making illegal contributions to such groups are true, simply because AWC is benefiting in fighting GESO from the pressure power of the entire University apparatus), it saves face better this way. But it leaves the Yale administration, in its most aggregious violations of its own principles - intimidation of students and refusal of the right to a vote - without any semblance of student support.