Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

ZACHSW@GMAIL.COM

In November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall manager who'd harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she'd worked in the university's dining halls.  Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As a new hire, she had not yet completed the 90-day probationary period that would qualify her for membership in Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees, Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union and thus secure her access to the union's then-flimsy grievance procedure.  Williams’ act happened to occur during a semester in which several members of Yale Students for a Democratic society had taken jobs in the dining halls, inspired by a broader current of “industrializing” – taking working-class jobs in order to organize mass workplace resistance – across the New Left.  Yale SDS in particular was part of the somewhat notorious Progressive Labor faction, which continued to claim the organization’s name following the split at the 1969 national convention (which led to the creation of the Weather Underground.)  The presence of these student radicals in the dining halls made workplace struggles that students might otherwise have ignored objects of widespread concern and political urgency.  Following Williams’ firing, a hundred students, members of Yale Students for a Democratic Society as well as the Black Student Alliance at Yale, marched into the university's human resources office in the basement of Wright Hall to demand the university reinstate her.  The students occupied the office and took several administrators hostage for a few hours.  With the conclusion of the occupation, 47 students were immediately suspended, though all were eventually reinstated.  (One alumnus, who’d taken a job as a university custodial worker, was eventually fired for his role in the occupation.) The occupation was successful - Williams won her job back – or rather, Yale administrators discovered, they claimed, that they had never actually fired her.  But, a month after returning to work, Williams had quit. Subjected to continued harassment from white supervisors due to her newfound notoriety, Williams explained that working at Yale was "agony."

Williams' action, and the actions of her supporters, directly implicated the racist and sexist conditions of service work at Yale in the late 1960s.  Over the last few weeks, a contemporary parallel has emerged in Corey Menafee's decision to destroy with the butt of his broomstick a stained glass pane depicting two enslaved people of African descent picking cotton in the dining hall of Yale's Calhoun College, where Menafee worked as a General Service Assistant.  Although Menafee broke the window this past June, his action has only become public knowledge in the past week and a half thanks to reporting by the New Haven Independent.  Like Colia Williams' defiant glass-throwing, Corey Menafee's window-breaking evokes a long, submerged history of property destruction and direct action by Yale employees.  Much of this activity occurred throughout the long, hard decade of labor struggles between the calamitous defeat of the workers in a truncated 1968 strike, when student scab labor blunted the strike's impact and a weak settlement prompted rank and file rebellion at the contract ratification vote and subsequent threats of wildcat strikes, and the 13-week long walkout in 1977, still the longest at a university with a history of long strikes.  During the 1971 strike workers slashed the wiring and tires of university vehicles.  They and their supporters among a now-radicalized student left also flooded dining halls and blockaded the university' power plants to stop oil deliveries.  (In a speech on campus during one of two strikes in 2003, then-presidential candidate Howard Dean recalled his participation in the blockade.)  In 1977, when a belligerent, right-wing anti-union white student provocateur tried to shove his way through a picket line of striking black blue-collar workers, a striker punched him in the face.  The student required 23 stitches.  (Even senior university administrators agreed that the student was “out to antagoniz[e] or incite violence.”  During the same strike, an unknown party firebombed a university safety office adjacent to one of the power plants, throwing a pair of burning whiskey bottles through a window. Though those responsible for the firebombing were never found, the incident was reported as if it were related to the strike, an act of sabotage by rogue workers or their supporters. 

Most of these actions were directly related to labor struggles, perhaps more so than they directly referenced the university's long history of profiting from and glorifying slavery and the trade in enslaved Africans and their descendents.  Yet these were hardly ever discreet, separate phenomena.  Yale’s labor struggles and battles over its legacy of slavery and genocide have often intersected.  It was three graduate student union activists, Antony Dugdale, J.J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, who wrote the 2001 report “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” tracing the university’s connections to slavery in the midst of its hagiographic tercentennial celebration. There's often been an explicitly Antiracist character to labor struggles at Yale, as true of when the vast majority of the university' black workforce refused to work on the day following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university had made work optional in the hopes of avoiding disruptions) as when thousands of striking workers and members of the New Haven community demanded equitable hiring of Latino workers during a weeklong strike in March 2003, or when the graduate employee union waged a campaign against the university’s investments in the Corrections Corporation of America which culminated with the university’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management LLC, divesting from CCA when Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility refused to do so. 

Make no mistake; Yale’s involvement with slavery far exceeds its continued honoring of John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery ideologue, senator, and statesman.  As Dugdale, Feuser, and Castro Alves noted, the labor of the slaves who worked George Berkeley’s Rhode Island plantation provided the capital for Yale’s first scholarships.  The slave-trader Phillip Livingston financed the university’s first endowed professorship.  (Yale, in turn, trained Livingston’s children in the management of his transoceanic enterprise.)  The profits from slave labor funded the university’s library and laid the groundwork for its endowment, which now exceeds $25 billion.  Besides its close ties to slave-trade merchant capitalists, and the West Indies plantocrats in particular, Yale was itself a site of slave labor.  “Slaveholding,” notes the historian Craig Steven Wilder in Ebony and Ivy, his 2013 history of US universities’ relationships with colonial genocide and racial slavery, “was common among Yale’s early faculty and governors.”  

But if Yale’s legacy of slavery stretched back to its earliest days, the slave pastoral stained glass window Menafee broke is of a much more recent vintage.  Like the residential college in which it was until recently installed, it was constructed slightly more than eighty years ago, in the early 1930s.  Not only has Yale been slow to reckon with its past; well into the twentieth century, it was actively affirming the central role slave capitalism played in its origins and development.  Until 2007 the room where The Yale Corporation (the university’s board of trustees) meets prominently featured a painting of Elihu Yale, the notoriously abusive official of the East India Company whose name the university has borne since 1718 and who may have himself profited from the sale of slaves.  The painting depicts Yale with a dark-skinned child at his feet.  Around the child’s neck, an iron collar is clearly visible. 

Yale University has mostly avoided substantive discussion of its history, choosing instead to emphasize conversions to abolitionism or early African-American graduates.  But one is constantly reminded.  In some ways, conditions for dining hall workers are very different now than they were when Williams worked at Yale.  The three long strikes of the 1970s, the ten-week long strike in 1984, the two strikes in 1996, and the landmark settlement of the second strike of 2003 increased pay substantially, slowed the administration’s attempt to undermine the union by subcontracting and casualizing the labor force, ended the practice of routinely laying off hundreds of workers each summer, and won unparalleled job security language which prevents layoffs during the duration of the contract cycle.  But, in other respects, things haven’t changed that much.  Many food service and custodial workers still work 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat.  Several stories about Menafee include the detail that he can’t afford a cellular phone.  Yale remains an institution soaked in and celebratory of a long history of white supremacy.  It is impossible to walk through, or by, the university’s many service entrances and not understand this, to not sense how interlinked white supremacy is with the everyday experience of work and/or study.  Indeed, Menafee's action might itself serve as a reminder of the continuities between racialized service work and slavery, at a university that slavery funded, a university where slaves labored, in a city profoundly shaped by the history of slavery and abolition as by the confluence of deindustrialization and capital flight, university tax exemption, real-estate speculation, and expansion, and a mode of racial capitalism which conjoined them through the labor of a predominantly African American workforce of food service and custodial workers whose history of struggle produced Yale's unprecedented history of strikes - as many as twenty between the early 1940s and 2005, depending on what and how one goes about counting.

Corey Menafee's act of refusal, the refusal to continue working under the symbols of Yale's history of chattel slavery and colonial genocide, punctures the hypocrisy which has suffused so much of Yale's recent hand-wringing over its white supremacist past and present, a hypocrisy which led it to try to fold Menafee's broken window into an ongoing "art survey" launched in response to student discontent over the decision to keep John C. Calhoun's name on one of its residential colleges.  Perhaps it also kept the matter quiet to discourage other such acts against other symbols of Yale’s racism and imperialism, of which many remain.  The tinted glass which quickly replaced the smashed panel could just as easily be read as a small form of counterinsurgency, rendering the university’s interior once more opaque to the New Haveners whose congress along Elm Street, the major thoroughfare adjacent to Calhoun College, has been so heavily monitored by the university’s police department, and projecting a pristine, undamaged facade to the world.

Menafee's act further makes transparent three fallacies: that recent campus protest over cultures of racism and white supremacy on US campuses speak more to the coddled nature of millienial students than the actual political economy of US racial capitalism, that the continued presence of such celebrations of the university’s racism is permitted only for educational purposes, and, above all, that service workers are not themselves implicated by and participants in those debates and struggles.  Maybe nowhere more than in their role as employers of racialized service work do US universities suture old and new forms of white supremacist racial capitalism.  Through studying the history of that labor and those who have performed it, we can gain better insight into how universities have continued to occupy slavery's afterlives.  Standing in solidarity with Corey Menafee and with those who have come before him requires both an unflinching and rigorous critique of this relationship between university service labor and the American college's debt to the enslavement of and trade in people of African descent, and a collective commitment towards its overturning.

Yesterday, I wrote about this photograph and the incident which produced it. The first time I wrote about this incident, ten years ago, I was relying on microfilm and the photos were too dark to see anything. Since then, this newspaper has been digitized, so we can all see the look of utter agony and dismay on the face of the wife of the President of the university after students supporting a service worker strike stole/expropriated a bunch of food from a scab-operated dining hall and then dumped it on the front lawn of the president's mansion. There’s something deeply sexist about the way Mrs. Brewster is represented in the photograph, as an object of simultaneous scorn and pity, as a symbol of the putative wrongness (or radicalism) of the students’ act, in the way she is only knowable here through her husband’s name, and in the invisibility of the male administrators who were also trying to pick up the garbage. But the photograph, and Mrs. Brewster’s dismay, also mark the dislocation, the profound disruption of the social order, which accompanies the moment when one has to do that work which others usually perform because those others refuse to do it any longer. In this sense, the photo of Mrs. Brewster thus suggests the reversals and utopic imaginaries which the strike had already enacted and made possible, even as it subjected the workers who waged it to insecurity and want.

Yale Break was a feminist newspaper written mostly by clerical and technical workers during the YNFAC organizing campaign.  (1969-1972).  From the chapter I'm writing:

The logo atop the first page of each issue is a clerical worker in a matching prison-striped Yale cap and miniskirt. A comically large IBM typewriter is shackled to her leg just above her high-heeled left foot. In one hand, she carries a stack of books, and in the other, a tray of hot coffee mugs. On her face, she wears glasses, and, like the flight attendants Arlie Russell Hochschild describes in her classic ethnography of emotional labor, The Managed Heart, a wide, cartoonish, haunting smile, part of the job as much as the typewriter or coffee

Yale Non-faculty Action Committee Newsletter, Vol. I, No. 1, June 20, 1969

Education in the streets, 11 years on

Today is the 11th anniversary of Education in the Streets.  I've written about it so many times already that I'm not entirely sure what it's useful for me to say here other than that it was a moment that was politically formative and euphoric enough that I am still thinking about it and writing about it today, still deeply invested in the project of stealing the university from the university through the refusal of work, of creating spaces of insurgent knowledge production within oppositional practice of insurgent and transformative labor organizing which moves beyond the workplace to challenge the colonial logics of university service labor urbanization.

The potential for that kind of transversal organizing practice, for the kinds of radical affinities modeled in the organizing that produced that day (March 6, 2003) to emerge elsewhere is maybe the most exciting outcome of the GSOC election victory, besides, you know, remembering John Sexton's promise to the faculty that the union could either die a quick death or a slow death and taking a long, slow drink of wild cherry diet pepsi.   I'll be doing both today, but mostly I'll be thinking about how what it means to teach and what it means to learn are transformed by struggle, how the strike troubles the limits of the enclosure of knowledge-labor, how insurgent labor produces forms of thought and collectivity capable of radically destructuring the most imperial and expansive modes of academic neoliberalism.  Thanks, Abbey.

And happy birthday to Robert Schwartz, z''l.

of institutional instagram accounts and the spectrality of service work

Yale's instagram account (I blog about that place too much, I know) is mostly full of campus building porn and shots of well-dressed undergraduates doing things well-dressed undergraduates do.  Sometimes it features old photographs - one of a lone and bedraggled woman undergraduate walking across Old Campus on the first day of Yale's first year as a co-ed institution, one of a Yale swimming team in 1913.  These are intended to celebrate the university's history, to situate its past in a teleological narrative of progress, of increasing openness, of constantly embracing modernity and staking a claim on a proprietary futurity which all universities imagine to be their provenance.

Yesterday, though, I noticed this photograph, which someone had reshared on facebook.  If the accompanying text notes the time of the photograph (1937), it also clarifies why it has been included in Yale's promotional archive, which seems to exist primarily to sell prospective students on the university's grandeur, and, more salient here, to produce in alumni the sort of uncritically nostalgic affect which might motivate them to donate large sums of their investment banker salaries to the university's development fund.  Yale wants us to view this photograph through a fetishized relationship to the geography of the campus.  Which residential college is this?  Which entryway?  The alumni/ae are interpolated into a particular relationship to the university and its ideological and fiscal project through the invitation to recognize themselves and their own experiences of the university through old photographs of familiar spaces.

But labor creeps into the nostalgic gaze in this photograph -- I'm interested in this photograph because it's the only one on their page which depicts a Yale worker - the bearded man mowing the lawn by hand as the golfclub-bearing student passes by, completely indifferent.  1937 was a critical year in the history of the university's labor politics, the year when long-boiling discontent among university maintenance and groundskeeping workers - and administrative repression of students and faculty who advocated for better conditions for the workers - erupted in headlines at the end of the year proclaiming the first attempt by the Committee for Industrial Organization to organize Yale.

"I'd be glad to join any union that comes around here," one worker told the YDN, "and I am sure that I speak for my coworkers when I say this.  But the watch us closely, and we are all afraid that if we join we will be put out in the street without a job."  Although the News reported skepticism towards the drive among janitors, whom it dismissed as "old traditionalists," within a few years, they would be at the center of the successful organizing campaign, which won its first contract after a short strike on November 9, 1941.  We have here, wrote the editors of the Yale Daily News "a real test of Yale's potential liberalism... ...will the university recognize the existence of a problem and face it openly, or will students again be sent to the dean for attempting to find out the bare facts?"

There are, then, histories embedded in this photograph of fetishized plantation architecture and practiced neglect which continue to haunt the university's iconography of power, tradition, and privilege, the specter of immigrant construction labor which built the college in which the scene takes place less than a decade earlier, the specter of hyperexploitation of university labor which was notorious even among students while the photograph was taken, and the specter of all of the struggles which have taken place on the Yale campus in the intervening seven and a half decades.  During the March 2003 strike, Mark Wilson, one of the chief stewards of Local 35, the union which was the ultimate result of what began with that 1937 campaign, spoke at a rally supporting workers at Yale-New Haven hospital, about 140 of whom were also on strike.  "If they won't let us in the picture," Wilson said, "we'll take the camera and make our own damn picture."  I recite this line from memory.  It struck me then as an incredibly powerful statement.  But the instagram photograph serves a reminder that even when the camera and the photograph are quite clearly in the bosses' hands, histories of labor, struggle, and exploitation remain visible, even if barely, in the stories the university tells us about itself.  Pulling on these loose strings of imperial institutional memory, exploding the myths of idyll on which this instagram exercise depends, not to mention the forms of racialized and gendered annihilation which sustain it, strikes me as crucial to creating something other than the university in which we work today.




Edited to add: The best single source on this era in Yale's labor history is Deborah Sue Elkin's unpublished 1995 dissertation Labor and the left at Yale.

It seems that while we were all worrying about the DOD, Yale Psychiatrist Charles Morgan was already helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution with its own lengthy history in New Haven, to practice interrogation tactics on New Haven's growing Colombian immigrant population.

Local immigrant advocates like Kica Matos are more skeptical of Morgan’s use of New Haven immigrants for terrorism-related or military research. Matos, a longtime Fair Haven-based immigrant rights activist, said she and fellow organizers are gearing up a campaign to urge local Latino immigrants not to participate in Morgan’s research.
Matos said Morgan’s current study at the Gold building “troubles” her because it racially profiles “vulnerable communities of color.” She also questioned the ultimate purpose of the research into how to question and assess responses from foreign-born Latinos.
“Interrogations are inherently coercive,” said Matos, the director of immigrant rights & racial justice for the national Center for Community Change. “The FBI is not a friend of communities of color. They have a long history of engaging in the most subversive and devious engagement with communities of color.COINTELPRO is an example.”

EDIT: Yale responds by disavowing involvement in Morgan's private research, of course.

"Yale is Elitist in Its Basic Design"

Yale is teaming up with the Department of Defense to teach aspiring tortucrats how to interrogate brown people in New Haven.

That YDN op-ed i just linked to is, I think, pretty good about the racial politics of such a move, though in at least one respect I take issue with it.  I am certainly in solidarity with any attempts to obstruct the university's use of working class and poor New Haven residents to further the knowledge/power couplet of the neoliberal security state.  But I think it's important to historicize the longue duree of the university's mutually beneficial relationship with the state to hone such techniques on those very populations, and to recognize that the university has all too often used those communities for its own purposes - that this program is not evidence of the security state corrupting the university's curriculum and social mission, but is instead the latest development in a long and mutually constitutive relationship between the university's governing corporation and local, state, and federal police and military power.  

Writing in 1970, amidst the tumult of the New Haven trials of nine members of the Black Panther Party for the murder of suspected informant Alex Rackley, the authors of "Go to School, Learn to Rule: The Yale Method"  - a collaboration between the American Independent Movement and the Africa Research Group (the former was a dissident New Haven labor-left organization which formed in 1966 around the congressional campaign of a Yale sociology professor named Robert Cook, whose members included local radicals like the Yale grad student Rick Wolff and alumnus turned labor organizer John Wilhelm, and should not be confused with the American Indian Movement) recognized that the university was itself "the vanguard of liberal repression," that it "exercised its power to control and exploit the local community", that it's hospital resembled a "colonial outpost where the doctor is the colonial administrator."  AIM (and ARG) traced the university's "constant policy of abusing and exploiting the New Haven community" through the university's relationship with and role in the city's powerful urban renewal machine, which displaced thousands of New Haven residents during the 1950s and 1960s.  

The pamphlet is important for my research for the ways it links an analysis of the university's labor politics to its imperial spatial practices within and beyond New Haven, themes which have recurred throughout the long and often bitter labor struggles between the university and diverse groups of its employees between the 1930s and the present.  But I bring it up here for its analysis of the university's relationship to and interest in what it described as the machinery of state repression.  In the late 1960s, Yale was already training the New Haven Police Department in its interactions with the city's growing Puerto Rican population which had been at the center of the city's riots in the summer of 1967.  How far this went beyond the instruction of rudimentary cop-Spanish I don't know - not much, I imagine.  But by 1970 the university's relationships with the Department of Defense and its Social Science Research Center had eclipsed its collaboration with the NHPD for most New Haveners.  For the authors of "Go To School: Learn To Rule", the university's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) represented the "right of the university to train officers for an army whose main function is to suppress wars of national liberation, ghetto riots, strikes, and other interruptions of the smooth running of the capitalist order."  The university's ROTC program, which was recently restored after having been driven off campus by student militants in the 1970s, was, the pamphlet's authors were careful to note "not an alien intruder at Yale," but rather, "in a Yale which is run like a corporation by a corporation for the corporations," it was "only natural for it to train the defenders of these corporations."  Thus, noted GTSLTR, "the movement to abolish ROTC was not a movement to purify an otherwise unsullied temple of learning, it was, instead, a direct blow to American Capitalism."

The relevance of this critique to the present moment is pretty straightforward.  The same is the case, I argue, with the conflicts over the creation of the university's Institute of Social Sciences, which was a target not only for radicals like AIM and the city's Panthers, but also for more institutionally acceptable segments of the city's political spectrum.  For its AIM critics, the ISS was, like ROTC, counterinsurgency, "an attempt to reinforce the organizations and institutions of a repressive capitalist society precisely at the points where they are weakest."  The institute represented a colonial model of expropriating knowledge from, and producing technocratic mastery over, the people who lived in Yale's shadow, a population which was, throughout the 1960s, becoming both poorer and more disproportionately racialized.  (As New Haven's industrial decline continued throughout the next two decades these trends would only accelerate, as would the relative importance of the university as employer and landlord in the political economy of the city and region.)   

None of these ventures likely involved the deliberate instruction of state agents in interrogation tactics to the extent that this new venture will - though here the 1967 post-riot partnership with the NHPD does seem an appropriate analogue.  But all of them used New Haven as a laboratory and a playground.  All of them understood and appropriated the city and its inhabitants as instruments of and appendages to the will of university administrators.

In their condemnation of the new center, Batraville and Lew write

As a university, Yale purpose’s is to forge a global community of scholars working together to produce, share, debate, question, challenge and reformulate knowledge. Its purpose is not to promote the agenda of the U.S. political elite.

 The authors of "Go To School, Learn To Rule," and the histories of struggle over the relationship between Yale and New Haven from which that document emerges, offer us the profound insight that Yale's purpose is and has for quite some time been in part "to promote the agenda of the U.S. political elite."  I don't even think that the university's current President would substantially disagree with that claim.  My purpose is not to scold Yale activists for naivete and bourgeois idealism.  I think it makes a great deal of sense to organize against and resist such measures as this new center.  But I think part of that organizing needs to incorporate a recognition of the long history of the university's imperial relationship to its workers (today's the 21st anniversary of one of the university's many strikes) and neighbors, its entanglements in human terrain mapping avant-la-lettre, and the long complicity of its academic departments in imperial and intelligence projects such as CIA recruitment and Cold War exceptionalism.  (For this last point, see also Michael Holzman, "The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale," American Studies 40:2 Summer 1999.)

PS: Oh, BTW, the very name of this blog originates in Yale President Richard Levin's role on the Bush administration's sham of a WMD inquiry following the invasion of Iraq. As noted, Yale's purposes have been aligned with US empire for a long time.

PPS: I hope this doesn't come across as too critical of Batraville and Lew in a dickish and academic sense.  I don't know them but I support their work.  Here's a link to the petition they and others are circulating.