unpaid labor in US universities, II

I got pulled down the rabbit hole of graduate student spousal labor by the combination of my chapter and the intro to the labor history text i mentioned a couple posts ago. But I think it's important to acknowledge that one of the originary and preeminent forms of labor sustaining U.S. universities was that of enslaved people of African descent. Slave labor - in the form of George Berkeley's Rhode Island plantation - funded Yale's first scholarships. The profits of a slave trader endowed the university's first chaired professorship. "Slave labor contributed towards the financial foundation of the Yale Library system," and slave labor's profits flooded the university's coffers during its first endowment drive. University faculty owned slaves and university donors made their fortunes on the trade in slaves and the commodities their labor produced. For many years, in the room where the Yale Corporation meets, a painting was hung depicting Elihu Yale with a shackled slave kneeling at his feet. Until very recently, Calhoun College, one of Yale's dormitories named after slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, featured a stained glass display of enslaved people of African descent at work in a cotton field.


The Browns of Providence, the benefactors of their namesake university, bankrolled slave trading voyages in the same year they made their gift to the university. Other slave traders donated wood hewn by slaves' hands, or the living labor of their slaves themselves for fixed periods. As at Yale, Brown's endowment was built on the labor of enslaved people. More informally at both Brown and Yale, professors' ownership of individual slaves made possible their own teaching and research work and thus also contributed to the universities' prominence and wealth. The history of Harvard, one of the oldest and most important and prestigious of American universities, is not dissimilar. Harvard, writes historian Sven Beckert, "had the labor, products, and profits of slavery woven into its very fabric."
At least in the Yale case, the project of unraveling this fabric was an oppositional one born of struggles over university labor. The report Yale, Slavery, and Abolition, well timed to interrupt Yale's tercentennial autohagiography, was largely the work of three graduate student labor activists with support from local antiracist and peace activists. Management initially sought to minimize, debunk, and dismiss the claims which emerged from the research - a project into which eminent anti-union faculty who had played important roles in persecuting the leaders of the 2005 grade strike were easily recruited. Although the community organizing around the report was coopted by the attacks on the world trade center and the march to war in Afghanistan, the university's ultimate response was death by cooptation - it held a conference on "Yale, New Haven, and American Slavery" over a year after the report's publication, which, according to one participant, completely failed to take up the report's findings or thematic concerns. The institutional response at Brown was far more significant, set in motion in part by the university president, herself responding to earlier calls for reparations.  Harvard's own examination was spearheaded by history department faculty who sought to use the university's history as a teachable moment in the relationship between slavery and northern capital.


The labor of slaves made possible the creation of the American university. The traffic in and exploitation of enslaved bodies, of racialized labor as pure commodity, saleable, usable as collateral, required for all of the other labor it made possible, were instrumental to and inextricable from the establishment and reproduction of the colonial and modern American university in both northern institutions and southern ones (like Clemson and Emory, whose president made news last year by citing the three fifths compromise as an ideal example of bipartisan cooperation.) The slave trade and the history of the founders and funders of the earliest and most venerable institutions of U.S. higher education thus continue to haunt the university of the present. The endowment booms of the pre-crisis aughts, the investments in private prisons and water privatization schemes and oil companies complicit in the Sudanese civil war and the farallon capital management llcs and other sundry university (as) hedge funds - all of them were made possible by a recirculation of money prime produced in part by the labor of enslaved people. At the outset of this post I claimed that slave labor was the originary form of the unpaid labor on which universities operate. Maybe that's wrong, both because those other forms coexisted with slave labor, from the very beginning of the U.S. university. And maybe it's wrong because slave labor was never merely unpaid, never defined primarily by the absence of a wage, but instead different in form and character from the modes of unpaid labor I referenced in the previous post. Free labor was not slave labor's opposite but rather a coexistent mode of production built upon its foundation, and the university has long modeled the synthesis of both, reappropriating and recirculating surplus extracted from multiple forms of free and unfree labor and exploitation towards its own growth and that of the classes which manage it. The unpaid surplus labor over which capital exerts its control is not the same as the enslaved labor which was so profoundly important for A materialist account of university labor and its racialized history of integration into and profits from the "fabric" of imperial capital makes salvific, reformist narratives which demand the university's redemption or its return to its original mission prior to neoliberal distortions wholly insufficient. We may be able to move beyond the university, but if we are serious about the decolonial, we can never save it. Nor should we want to.

Graduate students' wives as a gendered labor category

As an addendum to my post from last week, I wanted to write down some thoughts on the figure of the graduate students' wife as a source of labor for the university.  Although PhD programs at institutions like Yale, which did not co-educate its undergraduate population until 1969, were often open to women far earlier (1892, in Yale's case) than were those same institutions undergraduate schools, the majority of PhD students for most of the 20th century were men.  (It wasn't until the end of the 21st century's first decade that women outnumbered men among both full and part time graduate students, with a far larger margin in the latter category.  By 2004-5, women also outnumbered men as recipients of doctoral degrees, a figure which includes PhDs as well as MDs, EDs, DDSes, and LLDs.)  Many of these 20th century male graduate students were married, and many of them were married to women who were not themselves graduate students.  Given the cost of graduate school and the miniscule salaries of teaching assistantships (Yale TAs, for instance, made three hundred dollars per semester until a series of grade strikes in the spring of 1972 raised wages in some departments) women who were married to graduate students often worked to support their households, and often provided universities with a source of short-term labor in a variety of clerical and related positions.  But the contingency of these jobs often meant a high rate of employee turnover, which could be destabilizing and expensive for institutional operations.

In a 1968 Yale Daily News article on the restructuring of the university's library system, the turnover of graduate students' wives was raised as a distinct challenge facing library administrators.  The graduate student's wife was a common and important, usually informal, category of university labor, bound to the university by the unwaged world of gendered domestic labor as well as by her own waged work, her relationship to the university and both worlds of labor profoundly determined by her gender (as well as her class and her race - there weren't very many black PhD students at Yale, and their wives would have had a much more difficult time gaining access to the kinds of work white students' wives did.  The graduate student's wife was a desirable worker because of her education, her impermanence, and her need to earn enough to support both her and her husband, but also a problematic worker for the same reasons.  For other library employees, the graduate student's wife could represent at the very least a bellwether of an encroaching "9 to 5 feeling" (this was over a decade prior to the film of the same name.)  As wives' turnover clogged the works, remaining employees voiced a feeling that they were themselves "cogs in the machinery" of the increasingly taylorized operations of university managers.  But the wives themselves also played important roles in some radical movements within and beyond the university -- several were involved in the women's liberation movement and in radical and populist and labor organizations.  In New Haven, for instance, they were critical to initiatives like the American Independent Movement's Radical Community School.  Others joined organizing campaigns which were widespread among university clerical and library workers in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Despite challenges to compulsory heterosexuality and marriage and the increasing numbers of women in graduate school since the 1960s, the graduate student's wife has remained both a discursive category within popular culture and a laboring subject, the concern of social scientists.  In the conventional mythology of the figure, the woman who supports the student while he works towards his degree (a relation haunted by the implicit failure of normative masculinity) is then abandoned by him upon or nearing completion of his dependence upon her.  It's a relationship structured by exploitation made possible by love, or at least justified by love, sustained by the sanctification of gendered forms of work which are projected beyond the walls of the home as an act of sacrifice.  She supports him because she loves him, and he leaves her for a younger woman because he has extracted all the use value from her which he cares to.  If both instead stick it out, she gets effusive praise in his acknowledgements which invariably belie the real value of her labor, the extent of his dependence upon it.  This is what Scheinkman (1988) calls an "asymmetrical marriage".  A staff social worker at the University of Chicago's Student Mental Health Clinic in the 1980s, Scheinkman observes that male graduate students dependent upon female partners were likely to "maintain an overadequate position" toward non-academic wives.  Like most white working women who were not performing waged domestic labor (some surely were) graduate students wives performed what feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called the second shift, unwaged domestic household labor in addition to the waged work they performed outside of the home.  (I should note that this is a schema which scholars like Mary Romero have complicated through attention to the particular forms of value and labor extracted from working class women of color who perform domestic and other forms of care work in multiple waged and wageless contexts.)  Part of what is interesting to me as graduate students' wives pop up now and then in my archives are the ways in which these women were often working for the university in the formal sphere of clerical and other forms of waged labor, and in the informal sphere of reproductive labor as unpaid workers often making possible both the subsistence of both the household and the reproduction of the academic labor force.  Just as the historiography of the university elides and omits the millions of hours of formally-paid service work which has played a significant role in the growth of endowments and the administrative class alike, so it elides the ways in which formally-unwaged labor has been crucial to its project in a variety of forms for much of its existence.  It seems to me that this is a history worth exploring at length.

(I describe waged service labor as formally-paid because as Marx notes in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 18, the capitalist never pays the laborer the full value of the labor.  Surplus value is the remnant, the time the worker loses and the capitalist takes gratis.  Thus, capital is "is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labor."