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 as a factor in writing letters of recommendation or awarding teaching positions. It was 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
