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.

Been neglecting the blog a bit while writing.  I learned two things today that here seems as good a place to write about as anywhere else, though.  Thing 1: During the organizing campaign for the Yale Non-faculty action committee, a clerical worker drive based in the Yale school of Epidemiology and Public Health from 1969ish to 1971, HERE intervened with the National Labor Relations Board to contest the unit that YNFAC, an affiliate of the National Council of Distributive Workers of America, a lefty breakaway from the RWDSU, was arguing for.  YNFAC wanted to organize an EPH-only unit.  Vinnie Sirabella told the NLRB this was wrong.  HERE had recently tried to organize a universitywide clerical union in 1967-1968 that couldn't get past workers' fear of the boss, and fizzled.  YNFAC eventually brought a universitywide election before the board and lost.  In a lot of ways, it's the most interesting of the pre-Local 34 organizing campaigns.  It's the most feminist, the most progressive, and the most expressive.  But it got crushed by the university's anti-union campaign.

Other new thing I learned today: Joe Lieberman's 1970 campaign for the CT state senate against an incumbent who was the senate majority leader became entangled with a conflict between the conservative democratic mayor of New Haven Bart Guida and his political machine and Yale University over taxation.  Supporters of the incumbent claimed that Lieberman, a 28-year old "liberal" Yale graduate and assistant dean, was getting campaign funds from money the university had earmarked for "the community."  (This would have been illegal on like fifteen levels.)  Meanwhile Lieberman's people accused the mayor of announcing plans to unilaterally add 11 Yale properties to the city's Grand List as a way of drumming up anti-Yale fervor against the Lieberman campaign.  (Meanwhile, -I knew about this part already - the university is suing the mayor over the tax stuff and imposing a hiring freeze on service workers which winds up leading to the second near-wildcat strike in under a year and fuels a lot of the militancy that explodes into the 7-week long strike in May-June of 1971, the 10-week long strike in 1974, and the 13 week long strike in 1977.

Oh, also, two months ago I wrote a 3,000 word essay on the UAW, the university, organizing, capitalism, mustaches, bureaucracy, winning, etc that I have only shown to two people and don't know what I am going to do with.  If I publish it, it will need to be edited and rewritten, and I don't really have the time to do that at the moment or know when I will or if I even want to publish it.  But I was going to post it here, and I want to note that just so you know I haven't entirely ignored this space for the last however many months it's been since I published anything.

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.

"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.

dispatches from the dissertating.

Yes, this blog still exists.

ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope.  I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota.  In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities.  It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal.  The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability.  So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus?  I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.

You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.

Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931

Last night I finished reading Model City Blues. Last year, you may recall, I came down against Paul Bass's criticism of the book without having actually read it. Now that I have, I want to talk a little bit about the text itself.

Model City Blues is an important and fascinating book, one which speaks volumes about the history of New Haven, its people, and its social movements, about the struggles over the right to the city that defined the last half of the twentieth century and continue to define this moment, about gentrification and dislocation, recuperation and organizing.

My undergraduate senior essay was about the relationship between the forms of resistance Jackson writes about and the emergence of Local 35 as a militant force in the city by the early 1970s, so I knew some of the story Jackson tells here. I knew about HPA and John Wilhelm's involvement with them. I knew about AIM and Rick Wolff and the ring road, about Oak Street and Trade Union Village.

But I didn't know about the origins of the Freddie Fixer Parade in the urban renewal machine's attempts to produce consent for Dixwell slum clearance. I didn't know that Malcom X spoke in New Haven's first mosque on Dixwell ave, didn't know that the half empty shopping areas on lower Dixwell were themselves products of renewal policies, or about the rent strikes led by the Hill Neighborhood Union or that so many people were arrested during the riots that the NHPD renditioned people to Farmington and other fairly distant cities. I didn't know about State Street's Bread and Roses Cafe, or Dixwell's "sit-outs" against renewal. New Haven has a long history of people sitting in the street as a form of protest and a way to reclaim contested, policed, and "planned" space, a history Jackson evokes quite powerfully. This is a theoretically rich but deeply grounded work of scholarship. The breadth of Jackson's archives and interviews are astounding, and the careful way Jackson situates the events of thee Lee era in relation to New Haven's present and more recent past (NHSB redlining, YNHH unionbusting, University Properties expansion and Yale's technocratic (and biopolitical) optic of urban development) is skillfull and politically resonant. I would have liked some account of why Edward Logue, the first staff organizer of what's now Local 35, becomes a Robert Moses disciple and one of the betes noires of New Haven social history as the grand poobah of renewal and dislocation - his younger brother later became mayor - or the role of union leaders like Vincent Sirabella, a hero to the Yale Unions and the former organizing director of HERE - in supporting renewal policies and the Lee machine. But this isn't their book. It's a book, instead, about the Fred Harrisses and James Gibbses, the residents of the Hotel Strand and the folks who fought against Yale's expansion into the Hill many years later, about the people who collectively imagined and fought for a different mode of urban existence than that held by the planners and highway builders on church street, and it's a valuable and insightful account of those movements and their place in urban history. Go read it. Now.

Ok, next up on this blog will be the first in a series, hopefully, of posts in a conversation with Eli on international crises in and contours of academic neoliberalism. Yeah, that's right. This blog is back. (Maybe.)

Resist, Occupy, Grade Papers

Today somewhere between 70 and 100 NYU graduate employees occupied the cavernous lobby of Elmer Holmes Bobst Panopticon for an hour and, wearing our "GSOC Is Here To Stay" t-shirts and a panoply of awesome signs created in a frenzy of creativity and unintentionally-inhaled marker fumes, graded, read, and otherwise made visible some of the many forms of the labor the university administration's been trying to occlude and obfuscate for so many years.

After a vicious anti-union campaign, after everything the bush administration could throw at us, we're not only still here, we're growing every day. Today's action sent a clear message to President Sexton and his "University Leadership Team," (Beckman, fresh from his 'mountainous region,' was wearing a puce fleece vest and looking about nervously) that we aren't going away, that we're in this for the long haul, that they might as well negotiate because none of the many ways they've tried to destroy our union have been successful and none will be.

I like actions - like one which took place six years ago last week - that combine the performative, the disruptive, and the practical (that is, the committee-building,) this action worked because it did this well. I'm excited for the next steps.

Oh, by the way, Watchmen (the movie) was atrocious, poorly directed, politically lobotomized, an utter failure at capturing or gesturing towards the comic's complex intertextualities and deconstructionist position. Indeed this was an over the top, milleresque, grim and gritty orgy of hypermasculinity and fascist aesthetics, exactly the sort of thing that Watchmen parodized and critiqued and which only Rob Leifeld ever thought it actually stood for. Alan Moore should be very glad his name was nowhere on this thing. I want my twelve fifty back.

Much to blog about - Obama's appointment of Brown Decision dissenter Wilma Liebman to the chair position of the NLRB, power struggles in the two most dynamic labor unions in the U.S., and much less important, the conclusion of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, but i don't really have time to write about any of these things right now and instead i will leave you with a list of songs randomly compiled by my ipod.

The temptations - "since i lost my baby"

woody guthrie - "talking fishing blues"

NaS - "Project Roach (ft Last Poets)"

Sleater-Kinney - "I wanna be your Joey Ramone"

The pioneers - "long shot" (not to be confused with their "long shot kick de bucket," which is a different song with the same chord progression.)

Madness - "My Girl"

Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop/That Thing"

Helium - "All the X's Have Wings"

Destroyer - "Certain Things You Ought To Know"

Refused "New Noise"

good smattering of mid 90s post riot grrrl, 70's "skinhead reggae" and white british appropriations thereof, and, uh, swedish anarchist post-hardcore?

Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.

This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?

YNHH, the state, and the post-fordist city

I'm in the process of working out my dissertation proposal, which is about the history of service workers at urban universities, about what the expansion and restructuring of universities looks like when read through the experiences of racialized and gendered food service, maintenance, custodial, clerical, and technical workers. I'm also going to talk about, but have been thus far giving short shrift to, workers at university hospitals, which have been a major part of the aforementioned expansion as universities prioritize the maintenance and care of bodies in what's been an era dominated by economies of biopolitical (re)production. Universities and their teaching hospitals have come to dominate the social and physical geography of urban spaces - just look at this peice today in the New Haven Independent reporting that Yale has now completed it's formal takeover of the building that was once an important Hill neighborhood high school (and site of student protest) and has in the process subtracted even more New Haven real estate, as one anonymous commenter notes, from the city's dwindling tax base.

And if that isn't a good enough reason why i need to more centrally address the effects of hospital service work on the terrain of post-fordist labor relations, Undergraduate Organizing Committee member Hugh Baran offers readers of The Nation an even more instructive tale about a violated community benefits agreement, an intimidated and betrayed group of 1800 Yale New Haven hospital employees, and one of the clearest examples we have of the necessity of card check neutrality agreements in protecting the rights of working people, and a strong message about the role of the state in protecting or assailing workers' voices. Whether you're like me, and you've been following what's happened at the hospital, on whose governing board many Yale executives and trustees sit, along with local New Haven plutocrats and a scant few medical professionals, since you watched Rick Levin shrug off questions from concerned SLAC members eight years ago, or you're learning of this just now (in which case, welcome to the blog) Hugh writes powerfully about what YNHH tells us about U.S. labor politics, and you should go read his article.

quo usque tandem abutere, Zache, patientia nostra

Marc Bousquet has posted video of the interview he did with Andy, Monika, Rana, Steve, and me at last April's Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis. View it here. Monika has many insightful things to say in the latest installment. I am the fidgety bearded man in the back.

I'm feeling ambivalent yet again about graduate school, about professionalization, about my project, about New York, about the skillsets required to perform the administrative labor of the professoriate, and to play the game of marketing my self and my project as a graduate student, but this will seem like whining to folks not in the academy, and, i am sure, many in it so i will stop there. I believe very much that another university is possible, i'm just not sure i want to stick around and wait for it much longer, and, with teaching, my diss proposal, and my incompletes all weighing on me, i'm not really doing enough to bring it about at the moment. Enough about that.

I'm flying to Aluquerque tomorrow for my first American Studies Association conference. My passport is a mess and i really hope they let me fly on it. Right now i'm sitting here in my apartment preparing to return to planning my lesson for tommorow, wanting to go to sleep, and wanting more to figure out a way to do work that has a very different relationship to institutional logics of exclusion, control, discipline, and privilege. I'd rather be (figuratively) storming woodbridge (not as a return, which is impossible and politically useless, but as a continuing ethic) than sequestering myself in bobst, two floors beneath sexton, revisiting two year old trauma.

Cleaning up my apartment a bit tonight i accidentally ripped my picket sign from the March '03 strike. My superstituos side, the side that had to go to sleep with a stuffed animal into my tweens lest Freddy Krueger murder me in my sleep, feels gnawing anxiety about this. The rest of me feels gnawing anxiety about lots of other things.

I've been meaning to blog about this and this and this. Unfortunately, i'm swamped and sick, and i don't know when i'll get around to it. So let me instead briefly commemorate this, which happened six years ago today, and which i have been thinking about even through my post-nasal drip haze. That was a little too graphic and doesn't do justice what the movement did that day and in the years since. Not much can, which is why all the media accounts of that action, particularly the snarky one in the NYT to which i will not link here, completely misunderstood what was at stake and what was going on.

Back to preparing for tomorrow's sections, in which we'll discuss racialized and gendered service work and affective and emotional labor in Mary Romero's Maid in the USA, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Domestica, Robin Leidner's Fast Food Fast Talk, and Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart.

dispatches

"Pure maths be damned." The Washington Square News reports on the Courant Institute's ties (the Math department, specifically) to Wall Street, through fields like financial math and programs to train PhDs in the kind of mathematics valued by money managers. By the way, capitalism appears to be in crisis - though that didn't stop Yale's endowment from growing. At whose expense this time, we wonder...

(Wouldn't it be nice to have similar data on NYU...?

Alison Richard, universities, and social justice

As provost of Yale University for the first eight or nine years of Richard Levin's presidency, Alison Richard, an anthropologist by discipline, actively fought the attempts by Yale TAs and research assistants to win union recognititon and negotiate with the university. At worst, this was complicity with the multiple administrative harassment and intimidation campaigns which were promoted by the administration and often prosecuted by an all too willing tenured professoriat. At best we might imagine Richard a mere ideologue of a university with close relationships to "the marketplace" (scroll down) but to which collective organizations of employees were nonetheless anathema. (See pages 11-12.)

It shouldn't really surprise anyone, then, that Richard has recently come under fire for remarks asserting that the prosperity of universities depends in part on their autonomy from the demands of social justice movements.

The quality of what we provide and our capacity to attract talent are both at risk. Ironically, in my view one of the greatest risks is driven by the growing appreciation of the relevance of universities, in many ways so welcome: the problem is that the conception of relevance is often narrow while the fact of relevance encourages meddling. As institutions charged with education, research and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice. Responsive to and helping shape the national policy context, we need the independence and autonomy to chart our individual institutional courses, and to experiment.

Maybe Richard is right. Maybe the sort of "business-facing" institution she here asserts that Cambridge is can't afford to worry about such things, though not even Richard's former colleagues Richard Brodhead and Richard Levin would go so far in public - all that rhetoric about training leaders is, after all, an elitist neoliberal version of a theory of the university's role in promoting social justice, or at least "progress" in managerial and corporate terms. But really I think this invites us to do two things - one, to recoil at the "leadership" that universities like Yale are exporting all over the world in the form of academic administrators like Richard, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford, Susan Hockfield at M.I.T., Brodhead at Duke, etc., as well as in the form of politicians it trains - neoconservatives like Ashcroft and Bush, and neoliberals like the Clintons and so many others, and protofascist journalists of multiple generations. Two, i think we should take Richard's remarks as an occasion to reflect upon what new university we might bring to birth from the ashes of the old (campus,) what a university that is indeed an engine for promoting real social justice might look like, if such a thing is indeed possible (and I think it is.)

serendipity.

In the process of trying in vain to track down an old article from the Yale student publication The New Journal on the 13 latino replacement workers who joined the September 2003 picket lines, I came across a scholarly article on the '84 strike that I'd never heard of before - Pushkala Prasad's "Organizing Culture in a Union," from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1991. I guess the reason I hadn't come across the article before is that it's disciplinary sociology, which is not where I'd locate my own research methods, and it came out significantly later than most of the scholarly literature on the strike, from Herbert Janick's "Yale Blue" to Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Women Workers and the Yale Strike" and Linda Anderson''s article in Fronteirs to On Strike For Respect. By 1991, GESO had already struck once.

But Prasad's article's pretty interesting. There's a discussion of tensions between HERE officials and strikers over whether singing on the picket line removes focus from the economic issues, which is fascinating. And the early 90s social constructivism approach does interesting work to resolve some of the questions Josh Eidelson raised in an excellent term paper he wrote about the strike a million years ago and was nice enough to share with me when I was doing some research on the clerical worker labor movement shortly less than a million years ago.

Back to work.

twee pregnancies and postindustrializing racializations of space

As with most things, I'm about five months late with this, but I finally saw Juno tonight. My reactions follow, though it's narcissistic of me to assume that anyone would care at this point.

My parents loved the movie, my great aunt thought it was anti-abortion (but never saw it), and my own reaction falls in with the ambivalent chorus that my own age cohort seems to have with the movie. I do think it's a bit anti-abortion, moreso even than Knocked Up and the whole "shmushmortion" claptrap that actually merited column space in,like, the New York Times and The Nation. But then I've never actually been in an abortion clinic, so maybe barely post-pubescent goths do regale patients with tales of their boyfriend's grape penis and anti-abortion protesters engage potential aborters in well meaning conversations about fingernails rather than shouting threats and physically accosting them, cause, you know, that sort of thing only happens in movies. Like Dogma. Or not.

The twee-ness of the dialogue, and really therefore the uber-reliance on commodity fetishism (The Stooges, Sonic Youth, Orange tic tacs, blue slurpees, Kimya Dawson) in lieu of meaningful character development is either a really profound comment on postmodern aporia or just really lazy, probably both. And it's weird to see a song I got over quickly when i first heard it like six years ago treated as if it were the most profound piece of music in a film since John Cusack's boom-box discovered "Within Your Reach," which was the real star of Say Anything, not that Peter Gabriel song. I've always felt, since i first saw them at one of the Sideway anti-folk nights (I'd gone to see Sam play) that the moldy peaches were good, but not great, fun but hardly world altering, and this seems to be the kind of intervention the film wants to make too, just in a much more pretentious, Wes Andersonny kind of way.

Let me also add, on a totally unrelated note, that while I have not yet read, but look forward to reading Mandi Isaacs Jackson's new book about New Haven in the 1960s and 70s, Model City Blues, I have read an earlier essay Jackson (who i've known for about six years) wrote on the subject and I've done a good amount of research on the period (for my senior essay, which looked at the years between 1968 and 1971) and Paul Bass's review in New Haven Independent, which posits Bass collaborator Doug Rae as paragon of multivocality and textual democracy, is a bit problematic. Some of Bass's criticisms may be justified - I haven't read the book yet, but what I have read and my own knowledge of New Haven history leads me to be skeptical of some of the more pointed allegations Bass makes of Jackson's alleged historiographical failures, which would be strengthened if Bass were willing to discuss the actual text beyond offering a scarequote here or there. Though we need to be skeptical of the idea that people are organically speaking for themselves when interviewed by an academic or journalist - speech is always mediated - Bass might be right that there may be value in talking to more people than he accuses Jackson of doing. Again i don't yet know enough to form an opinion. But that doesn't, i think, invalidate the way Jackson reads the archive that she works with, the way she finds traces of a very real subaltern resistance (Hill Parents Association, anyone?) to the New Haven planner state in file photos and newspaper articles, for instance. Bass's claim that the fact that Jackson only interviews seven people means that her massive archival work is somehow flawed is thus specious. This is not an adequate lens by which to evaluate Jackson's project and/or its viability.

Bass's takedown really seems to unravel, though around his offering up of Rae as paragon of scholarly virtue - Rae whose investment in the actions of planners (ordinary people appear anecdotally and occupy a decidedly subaltern position in Rae's text, which tows orthodox lines on all matters of New Haven political history - Lee flawed, Panthers bad, John Daniels happy ending, Levin era implicit new epoch in Yale's investment in city though analysis of university's role largely absent from book despite G. William Domhoff's urges to the contrary) erases much if not all of the history Jackson treats on, almost completely ignores any popular involvement in the conversation around the city's future in favor of the narrative of heroically flawed planners. Rae's book - and i will admit it's been a few years since i read it, seemed to me far more invested in taking arrogant potshots at the left than in adequately answering the questions Jackson's work does deal with - the untold stories of urban redesign, the fraught and contested histories of racialized urban space, and the ways in which such spaces are shaped and reshaped not only by the Doug Raes of the world, but also the movements that Rae largely dismisses, ignores, or pathologizes in his own text. (Rae's hostility towards, for instance, the FHUE that Bass namedrops and that Jackson has been involved with for nearly a decade, is well known.) There's far more value in such a project than what Bass, despite his pointed references here to FHUE's complex tactical frames, seems, of late, willing to admit.

I feel a little weird posting this having not yet read Jackson's book (i just ordered a copy this morning,) so I'll stop there and maybe I'll post more later after I've finished reading it. But let me end with a question: does the fact that, say, Vinnie Sirabella was a backer/booster of Richard Lee's renewal programs really invalidate what i am sure is a very smart account of movements against said transformations or for a different kind of city if the author of such a history is a product of a political legacy which unites that opposition with the unions Sirabella helmed? That is what I take to be Bass's overriding argument, and it's unsatisfying.