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 part of the union movement at Yale. (11)
If only they were worse off, like those students at second-rate schools 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
