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 the full extent of the group psychosis involved in these faculty responses to GESO doesn’t begin to come 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
