Three Strikes and Levin's Out.

As I am writing this, blogger seems to be malfunctioning. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it while it’s still salient.

Should GESO join Columbia's GSEU and strike April 18, which, judging by the myopic YDN coverage at least and stray comments on other people's blogs (a bit out of the loop here,) seems to be what will occur, barring a sudden epiphanic outpouring of actually giving a damn about the future of teaching and research as something other than profit machines and prestige banks on the part of university administrators, the event will be an important milestone - the first joint recognition strike by graduate teachers and researchers at private universities (that i'm aware of, at any rate.) It will also be the third strike at Yale in just over two years, a fairly stunning figure, and, by my count, including the '95 grade strike, either the sixth or the seventh strike (depending on whether you count the separate walkouts by Locals 34 and 35 in '96 as one or two strikes) to take place during Richard Levin's twelve year term as University President.

Levin's administration has functioned along a set of clear principles aimed at fomenting a neoliberal reworking of the spaces and structures by which the university produces and markets knowledge and manages those whose labor makes such processes possible. To be clear, the ONHSA era of developmentalist paternalism couched in shrewd messaging, dollar diplomacy, and a great deal of right wing identity politics, while bearing some strong resemblances to earlier eras of Yale’s “urban imperialism,” (a phrase used by critics of the university’s landgrabs in the late 1960s and early 1970s,) in its host city, it is a mistake not to view both of these eras in the context of Yale’s transformation from a nationally, even globally renowned research university reacting against student and popular (problematic, I know) insurgencies against its patrician exclusivity and cold war praxis into a globalized, corporatized, “informatized” brand with an endowment larger than the GDPs of many of the disintegrating nation-states of the global south, upon whom the university has become uniquely and characteristically dependent.

Yale’s changes have occurred in the context of, made possible, and been made possible by the seismic shifts in New Haven’s populations and economies. In particular, beginning in the 1930s with the first stirrings of skilled maintenance and custodial workers in the university’s heat, light, and power department, the university’s workers, in successive and expanding waves of newly proletarianized strata, have shaken Yale to its rancid colonial core. Graduate students first began to assert themselves as exploited producers in the postwar knowledge factory during the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly in the 1972 wave of threatened grade strikes in the Philosophy and Political Science departments. (See my senior essay.) GESO, the current and, historically speaking, the most powerful graduate student union movement on Yale’s campus evolved in part from the experiences of solidarity and managerial intimidation of many TAs during the organizing and contract fights of the university’s clerical and technical workers which led to the fall 1984 ten week strike by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 34’s C&Ts and Local 35’s Maintenance and Service workers. (The history of attempts to unionize Yale clerical workers dates as far back as 1946 and deserves more attention elsewhere.) In the twenty years since the January, 1985 settlement, and in the fifteen since TA Solidarity became the Graduate Employees and Students Organization-HERE, affiliating with the Federation of (Hospital and) University Employees, Yale workers have put forth and fought for a vision of the Yale University and New Haven, Connecticut at odds with that of Levin and his team of corporate transplants – David Swensen, John Pepper, and Bruce Alexander, to name a few. The university has gone to great lengths – giant black curtains, jaunts through sewer tunnels, llamas – to ensure that this vision and the voices of those who share it are unseen and unheard. They have failed.

The last two strikes in particular, like earlier walkouts throughout the 1970s and the famed 1984 strike, which garnered the national spotlight to such an extent that Phil Donahue actually filmed an episode of his talk show from the campus while the strike raged, pitting Yale president Bart Giamatti against union leader Lucille Dickess and organizer John Wilhelm (’67), have successfully and powerfully articulated a democratic and just vision of teaching, work, and learning and a more egalitarian and honest relationship between the university and New Haven. For too long, President Levin and the Yale administration have tried to ignore or silence those who articulate this vision. It’s time for them to start listening or get out of the way.