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 diversity of opinion,” Homans wrote, “the process by which the resolutionw as pushed through gives the lie to that claim” (10). (Homans and Brooks were both present at the Delegate Assembly, though Homans’s letter does not indicate as much.) The MLA staff dutifully and rigorously investigated the charges that the resolution had been improperly introduced, and found, in the words of executive director Phyllis Franklin, that “the assembly’s action was valid” (1). So much for Homans’s precarious sense of proper procedure. Nevertheless, the mailing itself quite clearly seems to accept Homans’s charge that “diversity of opinion” was not honored at the convention; no other explanation will account for the MLA’s curious decision not to seek opinions sympathetic to GESO for the purposes of the mailing. As a result, the claims of Yale faculty were allowed to stand utterly uncontested—including Homans’s unsubstantiated and grossly misleading “procedural” complaints that “the most basic standards of evidence were not adhered to in the formulation of the resolution” (regarding the status of faculty as “replacement workers”) and that “the resolution violates several of legal counsel’s criteria for acceptable resolutions: it is factually erroneous, slanderous, and personally motivated” (10).
When I first read over the special MLA mailing, I was appalled—so appalled that I did not consider it worth my time to complain to the MLA directly. Instead, I considered leaving the organization altogether. A great deal of effort and deliberation had obviously gone into the production and mailing of this unprecedented and one-sided document; a portion of my MLA dues had supported it, as had a portion of the dues of every graduate student and adjunct faculty member in the MLA; and as a result, my own professional organization had clearly given its members the strong impression that the Yale resolution was ethically dubious and factually mistaken. Ironically, Homans’s claim that the MLA had violated its commitment to “diversity of opinion” had been circulated to over thirty thousand faculty and graduate students without a single word of rebuttal; the claims of Yale faculty that the Yale resolution was ethically dubious were themselves circulated in an ethically dubious manner. It is testimony to the outrageousness of faculty behavior at Yale—and testimony to the air of unreality with which Yale faculty spoke of the self-evident rightness of their behavior—that despite the MLA mass mailing, the MLA membership voted convincingly, 3,828 to 2,474 (with 836 abstentions), to uphold the Delegate Assembly motion to censure.
Yet at the very least, the MLA mailing suggested that when confronted with a professional dispute between senior faculty and graduate students, the organization would go to extraordinary lengths, even “initiate a new procedure,” to publicize the views of seniorfaculty at the expense of the views of graduate students. It is worth remembering here that the Yale resolution is one of the few substantive resolutions the MLA has passed in many years that materially addresses the professional working conditions of MLA members; the other burning issues on the table for 1996, for instance, included a resolution expressing “appreciation of and respect for the support staffs in our departments” and another resolution recommending a “common application form” for fellowships in the humanities. It is difficult, in the wake of the MLA’s February 9 mass mailing, to imagine what the professional role of the MLA—and its Delegate Assembly, to which I was elected in the spring of 1996—can conceivably be. For the moment, it appears that the MLA is quite efficient at passing resolutions about being nice to secretaries, treating books with extra care, condemning U.S. foreign policy, and refusing to hold the national convention in forty-six of the fifty states. But when the MLA at last confronts an issue that addresses head-on the crisis of labor relations in American universities, the entire “resolution” system is thrown into profound crisis—by, of all things, the objections of a small handful of elite faculty seeking to win a fleeting PR victory.
And yet if recent MLA Newsletters are any indication of the state ofthe profession at its highest echelons, MLA inattention to academic labor relations may prove to be much less harmful to the profession than actual MLA attention to academic labor relations. In the winter of 1995, as the Yale standoff heated up and thousands of new and recent Ph.D.s made their preparations to attend the MLA convention for yet another costly and generally fruitless exercise in job hunting, the MLA Newsletter featured a column by the brilliant and internationally renowned Sander Gilman, who, writing his final column as MLA president for 1995, proposed a novel solution to the job crisis in the humanities. The column, “Jobs: What We (Not They) Can Do,” was written explicitly as a response to angry graduate students caught in the job crunch. Gilman opens by narrating a confrontation with such graduate students at the 1994 MLA convention, remarking that “it was clear that the candidates’ anger was directed not at any amorphous ‘they’ but at their own professional
