Employment of English. Michael Berube
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clear, I think, until you step back and realize that for all their bellowing and blustering, Yale faculty had no direct stake in the prospect of unionization. GESO was not demanding to have their salaries augmented by stripping Annabel Patterson of the Karl Young chair; at no time did GESO demand that David Brion Davis be personally prevented from dictating university policy regarding class size and health care for graduate teaching assistants. Nevertheless, many Yale faculty insisted that graduate student unionization would take fundamental issues concerning graduate employment out of their hands, apparently oblivious to the fact that most of the issues GESO had placed on the table—from salaries to health care—were always already out of their hands. Faculty resistance to GESO, then, was almost entirely a matter of imaginary relations to real conditions, as Peter Brooks amply demonstrated when he claimed that “a union just seems to militate against core values” (qtd. in Eakin 58).
No commentator on the Yale strike has yet made this most obvious point: until the grade strike, Yale faculty had nothing important to lose in recognizing GESO. By contrast, once the grade strike was under way, then Yale faculty most certainly had something material at stake, namely, public recognition of the fact that graduate students do more hands-on teaching and evaluating of undergraduates than faculty do.6 One would think that any sane, calculating university faculty members who are interested in maintaining their privileges and hierarchies—and few faculties, clearly, are so interested in this as are Yale’s faculty—would have foreseen the potentially explosive political ramifications of well-publicized job actions by graduate students, and moved to palliate GESO with band-aid, stopgap measures while the faculty still had nothing at stake in the dispute. The fact that the faculty did not do so suggests that we should not look for “real” explanations of the Yale dispute—we should look instead to the realm of the Imaginary.
By their own report, antiunion faculty at Yale were stunned by the volume of GESO’s sympathetic support among faculty members at other institutions; hence their obsessive insistence on their own near unanimity in opposing the grade strike, and their willingness to accuse GESO of lying in order to manipulate public opinion. As Annabel Patterson puts it, when Yale received over three hundred letters from faculty protesting Yale’s refusal to recognize GESO, “we observed that many of [the letters] were from people conscious that they were hearing only one side of the story” (7). In other words, GESO’s external supporters (including myself) were really rather tentative, because they knew they had not yet taken into account the weight (and the prestige) of the opinions of Yale’s senior faculty. The level of arrogance here is audible. But if you want to get a vivid sense of just how insular and blinkered Yale’s senior faculty have been with regard to the broader issues at stake in the recognition of GESO, Patterson’s letter is insufficient on its own; you need to hear another side of the story. You need, at the very least, to read an account of the Yale strike written by people for whom the legitimation crisis of American higher education is always foremost on the agenda:
There can be little doubt that graduate students at Yale, like graduate students almost everywhere, are exploited as cheap labor. Teaching assistantships are notoriously poorly paid, and the rationale that they should provide a welcome “apprenticeship” for future college professors looks more and more shabby as universities increasingly rely on these cadres of relatively untrained teachers to supplement their regular professorial ranks at discount prices. In fact, Yale has been better than most institutions at requiring its “big name” professors actually to teach undergraduates. But even at Yale, the habit of fobbing off the ever more expensive education of undergraduates on teaching assistants is a scandal waiting to be exploded. For graduate students, teaching has more and more become simply a form of financial aid instead of a genuine apprenticeship; for universities, graduate students have become more and more like a pool of migrant workers. (3; my emphasis)
There isn’t a false note in this passage, but you’ll search in vain for this succinct, scathing analysis of American universities’ labor relations in the pages of the MLA Newsletter. It appeared, instead, in that stalwart voice of trade unionist activism, the New Criterion.
Of course, the folks at the New Criterion have only a limited sympathy with GESO, and the unsigned editorial goes on to inveigh against the existence of any university-based unions, not only among graduate students but also among faculty, claiming incoherently that “the idea that students of any description should seek to organize themselves into a union is preposterous. The spectacle of graduate students doing so is only marginally less ludicrous than the prospect of undergraduates or high-school students doing so would be” (3). Somewhere between paragraphs, surely, the New Criterion editors forgot that graduate students teach classes whereas undergraduates and high school students generally do not; and you would think Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, would have good reason not to forget this, since he himself taught undergraduates at Yale when he was a graduate student in the English department at the turn of the eighties (such was the basis of the claim on the back of his famous book, Tenured Radicals, that he had once taught at Yale). But whatever the source of the New Criterions schizophrenia concerning graduate teaching assistants, one thing is indisputable: when the editors of the New Criterion have a vastly better sense of what’s at stake at Yale than the faculty at Yale, it’s time for some serious perestroika in the groves of academe. Yale officially insists, of course, that all its “teaching fellows” are guided and supervised by a faculty member, but this claim is emphatically contradicted even by one of GESO’s strongest critics, Camille Ibbotson, who told Lingua Franca not only that “no faculty member has ever visited my class or expressed an interest in what I was doing” but also that “there is no formal teacher training in my department” (qtd. in Eakin 60).
Surely, part of this debacle is attributable specifically to pathologies endemic to Yale and Yale alone. The Yale corporation has long had a history of toxic aversion to unionization of any kind, be it among graduate students or clerical workers, and the vast majority of Yale faculty, apparently fully interpellated as members of the Corporation, seem to have such an enormous investment in their own prestige that the very idea of unionization threatens their sense of privilege, their sense of distinction from mere public universities like Kansas and Berkeley. The weight of “prestige” in the collective faculty imaginary should not be underestimated here. The New Criterion casts Yale graduate students as “exploited cheap labor”; Peter Brooks insists that “they really are among the blessed of the earth” (qtd. in Eakin 56). They are not, after all, just any garden-variety cheap labor; they are cheap labor at Yale. What makes Brooks’s insistence all the more interesting is that Brooks is reportedly one of the few anti-union Yale faculty who freely admit that TA teaching loads (in contact hours) have risen over the past twenty years while wages (per hour, adjusted for inflation) have fallen. That profile sounds more like the plight of post-Fordist American workers in general—higher productivity, lower wages—than a description of the blessed of the earth. Does Brooks know a secret the New Criterion and the AAUP do not know? Or is Brooks revealing something about the assumptions undergirding graduate instruction at Yale?
Let me propose the latter, and let me further propose that if I am right, then many Yale faculty may have been not merely offended but positively hurt, emotionally and professionally, by the existence—and the persistence—of GESO. When Yale graduate students point to the job market as evidence that humanities Ph.D.s are not automatically to be classed among the blessed of the earth, what must this argument signify to Yale faculty? The very premise of the school is that there is no need to pay graduate students a “living wage,” since the Yale degree assures them of lucrative academic employment at the end of their term as “apprentices.” When Yale students reply to this premise by pointing out their school’s abysmal placement record in the humanities, what are they saying? They’re saying that Yale is not exempt from the rest of the economy in American higher education. They’re saying that they’re not the blessed of the earth, any more than are the graduate teaching assistants at the University of Kansas. And that means that Yale faculty are no longer so uniformly powerful as to grant their Ph.D. students exemption from the great depression in the academic job market.
Recall that Yale has more to lose than most schools