Employment of English. Michael Berube
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like Berkeley . . . if only they were among the truly exploited, like part-time and adjunct faculty . . . why, of course we would break bread with these students. Note here that Homans’s admission that graduate student unionization is sometimes appropriate (at lesser schools) makes hash of the claim that faculty-student relations are destroyed by unions. Yet Homans’s attempt to play one underpaid constituency off another—in this case, juxtaposing graduate students to adjuncts—presents an odd mixture of fuzzy thinking and bad faith: fuzzy thinking, because adjunct faculty already have the right to unionize (precisely the right denied to Yale’s graduate students), and bad faith, because the nation’s largest union of college faculty, the AAUP, had already disposed of this question, when its Collective Bargaining Congress passed a resolution on December 2, 1995, strongly endorsing the right of all graduate teaching assistants to engage in union activities, from collective bargaining to grade strikes.
It is possible that somewhere deep in the recesses of its political unconscious, Homans’s text always already acknowledges its bad faith in adjudicating and ranking therights claims of graduate students and adjunct faculty; for no sooner does Homans mention the exploitation of adjuncts than she moves on to threaten Yale students with the exploitation of adjuncts. “The students who introduced the resolution,” she writes, referring to the MLA Delegate Assembly’s resolution to censure,
captured and capitalized on a legitimate anxiety, widespread in the profession, about the exploitation of non-ladder instructors. But graduate students at Yale are “paid” more (in some cases twice as much) for running a weekly discussion section of a lecture course (often with as few as fifteen students) than Ph.D.s are paid for teaching their own independent courses at area schools. . . . If they were paid the local rate for part-time academic work, they would receive a good deal less. (11)
What is the implication of this last sentence? Take that, you pampered, sheltered students! You people haven’t yet seen what we could do to you if we really wanted to exploit you! If Patterson’s letter was notable for the extent of its author’s identification with the Yale administration—“Yale is not prepared to negotiate academic policy . . . with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union”—then Homans’s is notable for its author’s willingness to begin the union busting herself. For why else would Homans remind Yale graduate students (as if they needed to be reminded) that Ph.D.s are working for even lower wages at the University of Bridgeport or Southern Connecticut State? (Though Homans does not acknowledge as much, rumor has it that the endowments and budgets of Bridgeport and Southern are somewhat smaller than Yale’s.) Is GESO, then, supposed to be grateful that their masters and overseers at Yale are at least treating them better than the freeway fliers at the college down the road? “Well,” one imagines a Yale ABD replying, “we’re paid $2,000 less than Yale’s own cost-of-living estimate for New Haven, and Yale requires that we live here so that we cannot seek higher-paying part-time employment elsewhere while pursuing our degree; but golly, it’s great that we’re doing so well compared to the part-time schleps and losers at New Haven’s own Albertus Magnus College, a nearly penniless institution. Thank goodness Professor Homans straightened us out on that one.”
Despite the passages I’ve cited above, Homans’s letter is not unaware that unethical labor practices might in fact be unethical. Though Homans is not shy about suggesting that graduate students be paid “the local rate” for discussion sections in which they do all the grading (so that people like Homans don’t have to), she is appropriately uneasy about the charge that Yale might have had plans to hire “replacement workers” to take on the teaching responsibilities of striking graduate students when classes resumed in the spring of 1996. The aura of hiring “replacement workers” is apparently more unsavory than the aura of breaking unions and depressing wage scales, and thus Homans writes,
The most basic standards of evidence were not adhered to in the formulation of the resolution, which complains (for example) of faculty being asked to “serve as replacement workers for striking graduate student staff.” Faculty teaching lecture courses are in fact responsible for all grades; forms for reporting grades are mailed only to the faculty in charge and not to the Teaching Assistants, who are exactly that—assistants. We can’t be described as replacement workers if we turn in grades for our own courses. (10)
One has to admire the faculty member who can write this without fear of exposure or contradiction. Faculty are responsible for all grades: the wording suggests that Yale faculty are actually reading the papers and evaluating the written and oral work of all their undergraduates, when, in fact, teaching assistants in lecture courses are hired precisely to release faculty from much of the labor associated with those tasks. (Hence the rationale for the grade strike.) One wonders how many MLA members, many of whom are actually college faculty themselves, could possibly be fooled by Homans’s reasoning here: the grade forms are mailed to us and not to the “assistants, “so obviously we’re the ones doing the grading!
Delectable also is the “we” in Homans’s declaration that “we can’t be described as replacement workers if we turn in grades for our own courses.” For one thing, the fear at Yale was not that Professors Homans and Patterson would step in and teach extra classes; the fear was that junior faculty—who you mean, “we”?—would be “asked” to teach in place of graduate students, or, still more outrageously, to do the grading for the lecture courses of senior faculty (some reports indicate that this latter request was in fact made by the senior faculty of the English department). And for another thing, Homans’s letter is in this respect directly contradicted by Patterson, who admits freely that “some classes had been reassigned to faculty members” (5). (Personally, I am glad that Yale faculty have so little practice in conducting disinformation campaigns. Were they more practiced at the art they would never have let a major slip like this get into a mass mailing.) Homans, of course, would countercharge that faculty can never be considered “replacement workers.” Again, though, one wonders who might be fooled by this. Even if faculty turn in all the grades “for their own courses” (once their teaching assistants have collected them, that is), that doesn’t mean that faculty are not being used as replacement workers when they are asked to turn in the grades for other people’s courses, particularly when those other people are out on strike. A faculty member who is asked to teach a course or lead a discussion section for a striking graduate student is being asked to cross a picket line, and thus to serve as a replacement worker. That should be clear enough. And when the faculty member in question is untenured, then such a request broaches serious ethical and professional issues that neither Homans nor Patterson attends to. That, too, should be clear enough.
Yet why is it not clear enough to most of the senior faculty most immediately involved? I want to suggest that something strange is going on here. When a professor of English begins sounding like an employer of migrant citrus workers (at least you’re being paid here—at Sunkist they give their workers only an orange a day), or when the possessor of a named chair at one of the world’s wealthiest universities insists that $9,750 is more than adequate compensation for graduate teaching assistants (see Patterson 6), then clearly some of the protocols of the profession have gone haywire. For the response of the Yale faculty to GESO is by no means confined to the rhetorical circumlocutions of Homans and Patterson; on the contrary, as Patterson herself notes, a special late-December meeting of Yale faculty, attended by 170 persons, indicated “overwhelming support for President Levin’s policy of refusing to recognize GESO, with perhaps half a dozen voices against it” (7; emphasis in original)—and Michael Denning, one of those half dozen voices, does not dispute the numbers. David Brion Davis, professor of history, went a good deal further than Homans or Patterson, and submitted the name of one of his students, Diana Paton, to the office of the dean for disciplinary hearings, as did Sara Suleri-Goodyear, postcolonial critic extraordinaire (in the case of Cynthia Young);5 meanwhile, Thomas Carew, chair of the Department of Psychology, called one of his students in India during the winter break, “falsely informing her that everyone else in the department had dropped out of the grade strike” (qtd. in Gage 11). Some faculty, it appears, were truly eager to go the extra mile to break the strike and punish the students they “mentor.”
But