Employment of English. Michael Berube
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Yale was not merely a school but a School, where proteges and epigones could be produced in the high European manner, carrying forward the work of the Yale masters in learned journals and even (sometimes) in the interior of the continent. Back when Roger Kimball was still working away at his dissertation, Yale dominated the English charts in the manner of the early Beatles, and Paul, J. Hillis, Geoff, and Harold “Ringo” Bloom made their insights and influence felt even as they redefined “influence” and “insight.” Later came the breakup, the solo efforts, the persistent rumors that Paul was dead. But all that did not matter, because the imprimatur of the Yale degree was still a sure thing, academe’s version of a vintage Lennon/McCartney single. If GESO has done nothing else, the union has put Yale faculty on notice that this is no longer the case. And the revelation is so painful, it seems, that the vast majority of affected faculty can respond only by lashing out at the students who would dare to act on the recognition, pace Homans and Brooks, that graduate student labor at Yale is not, in the end, significantly different—even after the Ph.D. has been granted and the years of “apprenticeship” ostensibly ended—from graduate student labor at Kansas.
In one sense, then, Yale is an object lesson only for Yale. But in another, more important sense, Yale is not a special case at all; on the contrary, the events at Yale in 1995–96 might very well signal a new day in higher education throughout the United States. Toward the end of her letter to the MLA, Margaret Homans names the problem precisely, arguing for Yale’s exemption from the academic economy in terms that make clear why Yale is not exempt from the academic economy: “I believe the delegates [who voted to censure Yale] confused legitimate problems in academic labor relations with issues quite specific to the situation at Yale, issues of which they seemed content to remain ignorant. . . . The exploitation of academic professionals—a national problem—is being trivialized for the sake of winning a small, elite group a fleeting PR victory” (11). In a dazzling display of looking-glass logic, Homans has derived exactly the wrong lesson from the job actions at Yale: her argument is not only (once again) that there are real problems elsewhere that have no bearing on the blessed graduate students of Yale; now, her argument is that GESO, by highlighting the “national problem” of exploited academic professionals, by putting the issue in the pages of major American newspapers up and down the Eastern seaboard, has somehow trivialized the problem. Thank goodness the New Criterion knows better: the exploitation of academic professionals is indeed a national problem, and Yale is but the leading edge of a national scandal.
Think of Yale this way: the university’s endowment is already well over $4 billion, and recently has been growing faster than the national debt. According to a document released over the Internet by Michael Denning, “The University’s investments manager recently revealed that Yale’s endowment is having its best year in a decade. In 1995–96, the endowment will earn roughly $1 billion—after accounting for all expenses, Yale is earning almost $2 million a day, every day of the year.” Moreover, whatever the limitations of its humanities faculty, the school remains relatively well respected and much in demand among high school graduates (though one presumes that aspiring graduate students in the modern languages, if they have some sense of self-preservation, will want to apply elsewhere in the future). Given Yale’s extremely fortunate position in American academe, then, it should not have been hard for Yale faculty to have adopted something like the following reasoning: if Yale University can’t pay graduate students a living wage, complete with free health care, then who can?
The reason so few Yale faculty have adopted this reasoning, I suggest, is precisely that they cannot see any structural relation between Yale and the vast legions of lesser American schools. The idea, for instance, that destroying GESO at Yale might just have deleterious effects for graduate student unions elsewhere (even at schools where such things might conceivably be necessary) seems never to have occurred to Homans or to her colleagues in arms. Likewise, none of GESO’s opponents on the Yale faculty seems even to have entertained the possibility that other universities might look to Yale and say, “If a school so incredibly rich can farm out so much of its undergraduate instruction to adjuncts and graduate students, surely we have all the more reason to rely on part-time labor.” Nothing, I submit, could be more painfully indicative of academe’s idiot savant culture than the spectacle of dozens of bright, articulate scholars, skilled at reading mediations, overdeterminations, and cultural texts galore but incapable of understanding that their relations to graduate students at their own university might just have repercussions for labor relations at other universities.
As if this spectacle weren’t depressing enough, there’s the further question of GESO’s relation to Locals 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Here I must shed the temperate language I have used to this point, and speak bluntly for a change: in late 1995 any damn fool, even a distinguished Yale professor, could have seen that the Yale administration’s attempt to crush GESO was but the prelude to its full-scale attempt to crush Locals 34 and 35 in the spring of 1996. Yale faculty may have been offended that their doctoral students had chosen to consort with menial laborers, but Yale administrators had a much better reason to oppose the affiliation: recognition of GESO would have complicated—perhaps even short-circuited—their plans to devastate the working conditions of Yale employees across the board.
Here, in a nutshell, is what those plans look like. One of the world’s wealthiest universities proposes to cut future workers’ wages by 40 percent and redefine them as ten-month workers so as not to pay them benefits. Again, this is at a school that’s clearing a cool $2 million a day. As Denning’s Internet communique noted, “Since Yale is realizing this level of profit under the current labor contracts, it cannot be that drastic cuts are required for the university’s fiscal health.” The Yale labor pool is (of course) overwhelmingly nonwhite and drawn from New Haven, the seventh poorest city in the United States; Yale is by far the city’s biggest employer, accounting for roughly one in seven city jobs. According to Gordon Lafer of FUE, when Locals 34 and 35 went out on strike, during one of New Haven’s coldest winters on record, the university tried to ban workers from keeping fires in oil cans for warmth on the grounds that the fumes would violate campus air quality standards; when a local bakery offered its day-old bread to striking workers, Yale threatened to cut off all future contracts with the bakery unless the bread was thrown out. Yale’s new policies for its service staff are so draconian and mean-spirited, in fact, that I do not know whether to call them post-Fordist or pre-Fordist. So let’s simply call them obscene.
Annabel Patterson’s letter to the MLA, as I have noted, remarks that the leaders of the Yale administration “are all Yale faculty”; presumably Patterson made this in order to suggest that she and her colleagues were professionally bound to stand by their men in their opposition to GESO. The question for Patterson and her colleagues, then, is this: does that logic also dictate that Yale faculty should support their administration’s Dickensian assaults on the workers in Locals 34 and 35? Financially there is absolutely no justification for Yale’s latest effort at union busting: the university is rich and getting richer, an enviable position for a nonprofit institution. One would think, therefore, that Yale’s senior faculty, being the humane, decent people they are, would oppose their administration’s policies with regard to Locals 34 and 35. But then, one would also have thought that Yale faculty, being the smart, well-spoken people they are, would have seen the connection between their university’s opposition to GESO and their university’s broader plans for union busting on campus.
If ever an institutional crisis demanded the attention of professional organizations like the MLA, this is it. But the MLA’s response to the strike at Yale was somewhat less than encouraging. Six weeks after the Delegate Assembly passed the resolution censuring Yale in December 1995, the MLA conducted its mass mailing of the letters of Homans, Patterson et al., introducing its twelve-page document with the words “we write to initiate a new procedure” (1). The chief purpose of the mailing was to circulate to the MLA membership the views of Yale faculty opposed to GESO, the grade strike, and the resolution. No views sympathetic to GESO were included. In subsequent communications, the rationale for the mailing became clear: the GESO forces had had their say during the MLA convention, and, according to Margaret Homans, Yale faculty had not been able to respond sufficiently to the resolution at the time it was proposed: “if the MLA sets itself as representing and honoring