Season of Protest.

My son had been at college only two weeks when he announced he was going to get arrested. "Arrested?" I fairly screamed down the telephone. "Why? For what? There must have been some misunderstanding-- maybe I can help clear it up."

"You don't get it, Daddy," he said, sighing. "There's no misunderstanding. I'm going to be courting arrest."

"Courting arrest?" By this point I was shouting so loudly I could probably have been heard in New Haven without the benefit of a telephone line. "This is what I'm sending you to one of the best universities in the world for, to spend your time in jail?"

"It's a question of justice," he explained. "For the workers of the university."

"What about justice for me?" I demanded. "Do you know how much I'm paying to send you to Yale?"

My son interrupted my fulminations with a pointed reminder. "You taught us to admire Mahatma Gandhi," he said. "So why be angry about a simple act of civil disobedience?" Ah, the devastating logic of the young. That silenced me for a minute. "All right," I said. "What's this all about?"

Allegedly, Yale doesn't pay its workers enough, doesn't offer decent pensions, doesn't allow graduate-student teaching assistants to unionize. More than half of Yale's clerical and technical employees retire with benefits of less than $200 monthly; 85 percent got less than $400 a month, and this after decades of service. An assistant registrar at the prestigious law school retired in 2000 after 29 years with a total pension of $798 a month. "It isn't fair, Daddy," my son said. "So we're going to do something about it." The "something" was to break the law by demonstrating peacefully on College Street, at the heart of the campus. Since the demonstration would be without a permit, that act of civil disobedience would lead to arrest. Jail, my son assured me, was not in the cards, though a fine of $88 was.