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 in this respect, particularly with regard to the self-regard of its faculty in the modern languages. It was not long ago that 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
