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.