On Strike at Yale

Cynthia Young On Strike at Yale There is no question that this institution has a broad and deep commitment to freedom of expression on the part of all of its students as well as other members of the Yale community . Graduate students are free to express whatever political sympathies they may choose, and there should be no "academic retribution" against graduate students on account of their participation in GESO activities." —Thomas Appelquist, Dean of the Yale University Graduate School1 Among the many statements issued by the Yale administration on the subject of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), Dean Appelquist's is one of the most ironic, since it was written in response to the public revelation ofjust such an incident of "academic retribution" involving Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale College, who wrote a student a letter of recommendation in which he suggested that her union activity was characterized by poor judgement and a failure to observe proper university hierarchies.2 This statement came to seem all the more pernicious and incongruous given the events that followed: it appeared one day before teaching assistants in GESO voted to undertake a grade strike in an attempt to win a contract for graduate teachers and twelve days before the administration's campaign of reprisal began in earnest with the initiation of disciplinary proceedings against three of the union's leaders. In order to understand recent events at Yale, we must locate them in their institutional context. The 1995 grade strike was not an isolated instance of civil disobedience undertaken by pampered graduate students, as the administration maintains. Rather, it is part of a longstanding campaign to improve the conditions under which graduate students do their teaching and research. The Yale administration has aggressively downsized the teaching workforce, so that graduate teachers spend more time in the undergraduate classroom than do professors at a fraction of the cost.3 In attempting to unionize, graduate students have contested their status as low-paid employees whose exploitation is a necessary component of this restructuring. Downsizing has meant a deterioration of work conditions at Yale and most colleges and universities throughout the U.S., and has drastically diminished possibilities for long-term, stable employment for graduate students as we enter an abysmal job market locked in a (seemingly) endless downward spiral. 180 the minnesota review The recent grade strike at Yale is only the latest episode in the long-standing conflict between graduate students, administrators, and to a lesser extent, faculty over the function and value of graduate student labor. This history of confrontation, followed by negotiation and short-term compromise, stretches back to 1971 when teaching assistants in the Philosophy department withheld fall semester grades to protest their scant wages—$400 per semester. Their strike, which was later joined by teaching assistants in other departments, prompted the administration retroactively to double teaching assistant wages for the entire fall semester. A new crisis arose during the 1987-88 academic year, the issue being Yale's erratic payment schedule. Six hundred graduate students organized into a group called T.A. Solidarity and planned a grade strike. Though the strike vote failed to win a twothirds majority, the threat of a strike combined with pressure from the Connecticut Department of Labor convinced university administrators to institute a biweekly pay schedule. To understand these confrontations as simply skirmishes over monetary compensation is to miss their larger significance. While these initial conflicts were aimed at improving inadequate and irregular wages, they also refuted one of the central tenets of the university's ideology: that graduate students function as apprentices whose primary compensation is the onsite teacher training they receive.4 To this day, faculty and administrators maintain this fallacy of an antiquated guild system. In demanding a wage increase and biweekly paychecks, graduate students were claiming compensation as wage laborers; they were not receiving a stipend or honorarium. This ideological contest assumed a new life in a more insidious form when Yale administrators announced the initiation of the KaganPollitt plan in the 1989-1990 academic year, which was an indirect response to the previous graduate student activism. The plan, named after then-deans of Yale College and the Graduate...