Employment of English. Michael Berube
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or create meaning. (In Levine 160–61)
2. One of the reasons it is useful to contest the narrative of decline is that the Right has jerry-rigged and publicized that narrative for its own purposes, and in so doing has distorted or suppressed everything that doesn’t fit the narrative. For instance, the well-publicized National Association of Scholars’ study of “core courses,” released in 1996, claimed that American universities had precipitously “declined” since 1964 in that fewer colleges required Western Civilization courses of their undergraduates. What the NAS study deliberately hides, however, is that although the number of universities offering core courses has declined since 1964, that number has increased in the past decade and a half; the reason the NAS chose 1964 as the basis of comparison, of course, is that it allows the NAS to blame the “decline” of higher education on their all-purpose scapegoat, the sixties. Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, in weaving their narrative of decline about primary public schools, like to focus on 1962, the year the Supreme Court banned prayer from the classroom; the NAS chooses 1964 presumably because once the Free Speech Movement had taken hold at Berkeley, the chant of “hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go” was merely inevitable.
3. For discussion of the rise in graduate enrollments, by contrast, see Bérubé and Nelson 18–20.
4. For a more detailed version of my analysis of Readings, Guillory, and cultural capital, see my review essay, “The Abuses of the University,” forthcoming in American Literary History.
5. For a discussion of “critical cosmopolitanism,” see Robbins, Secular Vocations; for the relation between nationalism and canons, see Connor, Postmodernist Culture; Eagleton, Literary Theory; Graff, Professing Literature; and Shumway, Creating American Civilization; for “nationalist” literatures and their relation to postcolonialism, see Ahmad, In Theory.
2 THE BLESSED OF THE EARTH
In the fall of 1995, not long after graduate students at the University of Kansas voted to unionize, affiliating themselves with the American Federation of Teachers, I was invited to speak at Kansas on the future of graduate study in the humanities. In the course of my talk, I not only endorsed the unionization of graduate students at KU and elsewhere, but also referred, in passing, to what I called the “bad faith” attempt of administrators and faculty at Yale University to claim that their graduate students were simply students and not also “employees.” As long as people are working as instructors or as teaching assistants and being paid for their work, I thought, it makes sense to consider them “employed,” to consider their work “employment,” and to admit, therefore, that they are in some sense “employees.” And if administrators and faculty at Yale or elsewhere want to claim that their graduate students’ wages are not “wages” because their teaching (which is not strictly “teaching”) is merely part of their professional training as apprentice professors, then it makes sense to call the bluff: take graduate students out of the classrooms in which they work as graders, assistants, and instructors; maintain their stipend support at its current levels; and give them professional development and training that does not involve the direct supervision of undergraduates. Then we’ll see how long Yale University can survive without the labor (which is not strictly “labor”) of its graduate student teaching assistants.
At the time, I thought my support for graduate student unions—in a speech delivered to, among other people, unionized graduate students—amounted to endorsing candidates after they’d won their elections. To my surprise, however, I learned later that the graduate students were very pleased with my speech, and that some even considered it “courageous.” It seems that I had denounced as ridiculous Yale administrators’ claims that graduate students were not employees in front of a number of Kansas administrators who had claimed that graduate students were not employees. (I told the students I had had no idea that my audience included actual bad faith negotiators, and that my “courage” in denouncing them was therefore attributable to simple ignorance.) I asked them what other kinds of opposition the union had met; they told me of faculty in department after department who had insisted that the unionization of graduate students would disrupt “morale” and destroy the delicate, collegial relationship so characteristic of, and necessary to, healthy interactions between graduate students and faculty. When I asked these students whether their faculty had entertained the possibility that delicate, collegial relationships don’t normally involve one party dictating the other party’s interests and threatening punishment if party number two failed to act in what party number one had determined those interests to be, I was met with bitter laughter. It would be one thing, I was told, if the faculty’s relation to graduate students were simply paternal rather than collegial; that would be undesirable but understandable. “But Michael,” said one union leader, “half the faculty who spoke to us about the importance of faculty-student collegiality didn’t even know our names.”
Nothing, I suggest, could make more palpable the vast differences between Yale and Kansas. If there’s one good thing we can say of the faculty who broke the graduate student strike at Yale University, it is this: they knew their students’ names. Indeed, had they not known their students’ names, they would not have been able to preserve the delicate, collegial faculty-student relationship at Yale by submitting their students’ names to Yale’s administration for disciplinary hearings and possible expulsion. As Yale president Richard Levin put it in a November 1994 letter to the chair of Yale’s Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), unionization of graduate students would inevitably “chill, rigidify, and diminish” the relationship between graduate students and their mentors and advisors on the faculty (qtd. in Young 180). Accordingly, from that point on, Yale graduate students who were not satisfied with their warm, flexible, and capacious relations with faculty members would have to be punished harshly and swiftly.
I will not attempt here to retell the history of graduate student organization at Yale, or the Yale Corporation’s long and sorry history of union busting and unfair labor practices (for information on those histories, see Young, “On Strike at Yale,” or contact Gordon Lafer, research director of the Federation of University Employees, the union with which GESO had voted to affiliate).1 Instead, I want to examine a more narrowly professionalist issue—the role played by Yale faculty during the events leading up to the short-lived grade strike of 1995–96—and its implications for professional self-governance in American higher education. I believe the actions of the faculty at Yale have potentially grave consequences for the future of graduate study in the humanities and social sciences, just as they provide (less importantly but more poignantly) an object lesson in just how politically obtuse, shortsighted, and self-serving a university faculty can be.2
This is not to say that GESO has been always and everywhere beyond criticism, or that it is impossible for a well-informed person to lodge reasonable objections to the grade strike that precipitated the faculty’s collective decision to crush GESO. That grade strike did indeed pit GESO against the interests of undergraduates and faculty alike, thus isolating the union politically and earning GESO harsh criticism from the Yale Daily News, the student newspaper. Moreover, it seemed at first to strain the meaning of “academic freedom” GESO had hoped would protect graduate students involved in job actions: to wit, GESO claimed that its members should be free from “academic reprisals, including letters of recommendation, disciplinary letters, academic probation, firing of teachers, denial of promised teaching jobs, or expulsion” (in the language of the resolution submitted by GESO to the MLA) and that any such action taken by Yale administration or faculty constituted a violation of academic freedom; but faculty responded that their academic freedom would be violated if they could not considertheir students’ participation in the grade strike