"My God," the enemy is among us! We are the enemy.

To the Editor: I was disturbed to read about the havoc those

union vandals are wrecking on Mother Yale. Thus, here is a proposal that will

solve all of the administration's problems at once:



Everybody loves a show trial! Why not just pick a few more

graduate students (arbitrarily, of course), and subject them to "disciplinary

hearings" and "academic probation." It worked for the grade strike -- it can

work again! This practice will meet every administrator's needs: qualified

students will stop applying to the graduate schools, our sense of justice will

be offended and with luck, the unions will cave in and we can pay workers far

less than they need to live and offer no benefits at all.



Hey, it worked for trigger-happy agribusiness in the Imperial

Valley in the 1930s, so why not try it today at one of the nation's leading

enlightened institutions. Best of all, my plan doesn't require any action that

could improve Yale in any way!

Matt Rockman '97

February 15, 1996

A search for "grade strike" as i procrastinate filling out applications and figuring out how, when, and where to take the GRE, not to mention agonizing about my future as a boycott coordinator, reveals anti-union vitriol that would make Boise Kimber blush (and he was on our side back then). The union as "poison," the union as the decaying corpse of academe or as the metastasizing cancer eating it from within - these are the images and tropes with which Yale administrators and Goldman Sachs-bound undergraduates represent the transient teachers whose fundamental indispensability to the casualized post-Bayh-Dole university was the awful revelation , for them, of the grade strike - not the vicious, career-sabotaging vituperations of publicly progressive professors. (That they lauded.) I will not launch into an exploration of whence this anxiety about the role of the graduate student in the postmodern university originates - others, whom i have cited repeatedly, have done so far better than i ever could. Suffice to say that as i'm trying to decide whether i want to become a graduate student (and i doubt i have the chops to wind up at Yale - the Amstud grad students i know there are all fucking brilliant Plus, i told brenda i would write a chapter of her dissertation for her, and i wrote my mediocre senior essay instead,) it's a strange feeling to think that i might become one of these figures of academic dread at some university somewhere all too soon. But then i realize that in some ways, being a site at which the confused articulate anxiety about the corporatization and casualization of academic labor and knowledge isn't really all that unfamiliar. I mean, some poeple have already expanded such a textual schema to include undergraduates they don't agree with.