Employment of English. Michael Berube
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not until November 1996 that a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board finally demolished the faculty position on their students’ union activities: unambiguously, the NLRB held that Yale faculty who in any way penalized students for their involvement in GESO were in violation of federal law.3 In the meantime, during the winter of 1995–96 when the Yale strike became national news, it was officially an unsettled question as to whether GESO’s job actions were matters of labor relations or of academic protocol: if they were the former, then Yale was clearly involved in illegal union busting; if the latter, then striking GESO members were clearly abrogating one of their primary obligations as undergraduate instructors by failing to turn in their grades.
Of course, the grade strike made a crucial political point, a point that Yale’s administration denied and incredibly continues to deny, namely, that a great dealof basic undergraduate instruction at Yale is carried out by graduate students. What’s more, Yale students have convincingly argued that the strike was a measure of last resort; every prior attempt to meet and negotiate with Yale had been rebuffed. As Cynthia Young reports, by November 1995,
the grade strike was the only effective action—short of a teaching strike—left to GESO. Demonstrations, petitions, a one-week strike, a union election, and corporation visits had all failed to convince the Yale administration that graduate teachers were indeed serious about winning a collective bargaining agreement. It was this bleak recognition that mobilized GESO organizers with barely three weeks left in the semester to begin organizing graduate teachers to withhold their grades. A grade strike would not only reinforce the central import of graduate teachers’ labor at the university, but it would also undercut the Yale administration’s attempts to depict GESO as dependent upon the other two locals to secure a contract. A grade strike barely a week before final exams had the capacity to spur undergraduates and faculty to pressure the administration to negotiate with GESO. It was certainly not intended as a strategy to harm undergraduates; in fact, striking teachers expressed their willingness to write letters to graduate and professional schools evaluating the student and explaining the reasons for the grade strike. In any case, it is unlikely that any school would have disqualified Yale candidates because of their incomplete transcripts. A grade strike is far less disruptive of undergraduate education than an indefinite teaching strike, a possibility that seemed to loom on the spring horizon. Weighing these various considerations, graduate teachers voted to withhold their fall semester grades until Yale committed to negotiating a written and binding agreement with GESO’s negotiating committee. (188)
Even when considered in the light of these various justifications, however, the grade strike seems to have made two tactical errors in a Machiavellian sense. First, it underestimated the possibility that such an action would in fact spur undergraduates and faculty to pressure the administration to move forcefully against GESO. Second, and no less crucial, it regrettably allowed Yale faculty to pretend, after the fact, that they had been sympathetic to GESO, or generally supportive of graduate student grievances, or even opposed to GESO but in favor of collective student organization—until that deplorable grade strike came along and ruined everything.
The level of faculty vindictiveness and double-talk on this issue has been simply astounding. At various times, Yale faculty and administrators have claimed that they are opposed only to GESO and not to the idea of graduate student unionization; or that they are opposed to student unions at Yale but not other forms of collective (and nonbinding) student representation; or that they are opposed to unionization at Yale but not elsewhere, at other schools. It should not escape notice that each one of these rhetorical escape-maneuvers begs the original question concerning the sanctity of faculty-student relations. Perhaps it is plausible, for instance, that GESO would disrupt the delicate, collegial relations between graduate students and faculty, but another union would not. Or perhaps it is plausible that faculty would look kindly on graduate student representation that took some shape other than that of a union, as Peter Brooks has claimed.4 Or finally, perhaps it is plausible that unionization always disrupts the faculty-student relationship, but does so in ways that can be tolerated at plebeian, inferior schools like the Universities of Kansas, Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Massachusetts-Amherst, Massachusetts-Lowell, Florida, and South Florida, or at Rutgers, SUNY, and Berkeley (all of them home to recognized graduate student unions), but not at an institution so prestigious as Yale University, where talk of “unionization” is not only harmful to morale but also, and more vexingly, bad form.
What’s remarkable is not that different Yale faculty have appealed to these various, contradictory rationales for union busting; what’s remarkable is that individual faculty members have frantically appealed to each of them in turn, desperately trying to justify not only their opposition to the grade strike but also their intransigence during all GESO’s attempts to negotiate prior to the strike. For a vivid illustration of this brand of double-talk I need only turn to my mailbox. On January 24, 1996, Annabel Patterson, Karl Young Professor of English at Yale, wrote a letter to Phyllis Franklin, the MLA’s executive director, protesting the MLA Delegate Assembly’s passage of the resolution censuring Yale for its handling of GESO. Patterson’s letter, together with three other letters from Yale faculty and administrators, was circulated to the entire MLA membership in February 1996. There is much to remark upon both in Patterson’s letter and in the manner of its distribution, but for now I want simply to focus on one crucial paragraph—the paragraph in which Patterson addresses what she calls “the nature of the ‘union’” (nowhere in Patterson’s letter does she employ the terms “union” or “strike” without scare quotes). The reason the paragraph is valuable, for my purposes, is that it voices almost every single rhetorical escape-maneuver I enumerated above; when read together with Margaret Homans’s equally evasive letter, also distributed by the MLA, it provides us with a useful introduction to faculty psychology at Yale.
Patterson writes,
The university administration, whose leaders are all Yale faculty, has consistently refused to recognize [GESO] as a union, not only because it does not believe this to be an appropriate relationship between students and faculty in a non-profit organization, but also because GESO has always been a wing of Locals 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, who draw their membership from the dining workers in the colleges and other support staff. Yale is not prepared to negotiate academic policy, such as the structure of the teaching program or class size, with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Yale administrators have made it perfectly clear that they have no objections to working with an elected graduate student organization other than GESO, one that is not tied to the non-academic unions on campus. (6)
According to Patterson, Yale has properly refused to recognize GESO because the graduate student “union” is affiliated with the smelly hotel and restaurant workers, who don’t know how a university works. But wait a minute: look at the closing and opening passages of Patterson’s paragraph. Apparently, Yale has no aversion to “working with an elected graduate student organization other than GESO” so long as the organization is not tied to Locals 34 and 35. Does this mean that Yale would have been happy to recognize GESO if only GESO had had the good taste to affiliate with the AFT? The earlier passage had seemed to close off this possibility, declaring that Yale has refused to recognize GESO as a union because “it does not believe this to be an appropriate relationship between students and faculty in a non-profit organization.” So what is one to conclud from this? If only GESO hadn’t affiliated with a nonacademic union . . . if only GESO had been something other than a union . . . and (by the bye) if only the Yale Corporation were something other than a nonprofit institution . . . then, obviously, Patterson implies, we’d have had no objection at all to dealing with these students in good faith.
Margaret Homans then adds two more “if” clauses to this already impressively obfuscatory list when she writes, in her January 14 letter to the MLA,
Quite possibly, it would be appropriate for students to unionize at those schools where teaching loads are much higher than at Yale and where reliance on graduate teaching is much greater. Part-time and adjunct faculty with Ph.D.s present an even more legitimate motive to unionize, although they are not