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Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com
Date: 12/05/97
Section: The Faculty
Page: A16
December 5, 1997
Yale's Labor Strife Leads Some of Its Ph.D.'s
to Abandon Academe for Union Organizing
Does trend say more about divisions at the university,
or the naivete of its teaching assistants?
By COURTNEY LEATHERMAN
If she hadn't gone to Yale University for graduate school,
Ivana Krajcinovic figures she'd be an economics professor
right now. "Thank God I went," she says.
Ms. Krajcinovic, who earned her Ph.D. in economics in 1993,
is instead a union activist. She organizes dishwashers in
Monterey, Cal., for Local 483 of the Hotel Employees and
Restaurant Employees.
She credits Yale for her change of heart. Ms. Krajcinovic
started graduate school there in 1987, intent on becoming an
academic, like her father, an engineering professor at Arizona
State University. But during her six years in New Haven,
Conn., she grew increasingly turned off by the academic
enterprise and turned on by the labor movement. She got a
feel for organizing as a leader in the continuing drive by
teaching assistants to gain recognition from Yale for GESO,
the Graduate Employees and Students Organization.
Yale is "like boot camp for organizing," she says. "They run a
real good program there."
Ms. Krajcinovic is not the only recruit labor has won from
Yale in the past few years. While the university has a long
tradition of launching the careers of corporate chiefs,
Supreme Court Justices, even U.S. Presidents, more recently
it has proved to be a starting point for a wholly different kind
of leader: a union leader.
Over the past five years, nearly a dozen graduate students
and twice as many undergraduates have pursued jobs in labor
after leaving Yale. Many of them had worked for GESO or
two affiliated unions, which represent maintenance and
clerical workers. All three unions make up a federation
affiliated with the hotel and restaurant employees' union. And
all three have had bitter, protracted disputes with Yale that
have led to strikes and arrests.
Critics of GESO say the idea that graduate students can be
compared with janitors is a delusion. "People with the most
advantages have the need to go out and identify with the
huddled masses," says Donald Kagan, a Yale historian and
classicist.
Of the students who have abandoned academe for the labor
movement, some earned their Ph.D.'s, and others quit. Some
are now organizing bartenders and garment workers; some
are working with graduate students on other campuses.
"One of the things the Yale administration has unintentionally
done is make Yale into a breeding ground for experienced,
tested union activists," says Gordon Lafer, who was a GESO
leader and earned his Ph.D. in political science in 1995.
Dr. Lafer is now an assistant professor at the University of
Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center. He works
with nurses, loggers, and construction workers, teaching them
the ropes of collective bargaining.
To be sure, Ph.D.'s from other institutions, like the
Universities of California, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin,
also have joined the labor movement. Under the new,
more-aggressive leadership of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., labor and
academe have been trying to make stronger connections --
many of the teaching assistants' unions are affiliated with the
American Federation of Teachers -- and many graduate
students have responded.
Those at Yale who have answered labor's call account for
only a tiny fraction of the roughly 300 Ph.D.'s that the
university produces every year. Still, the
academics-turned-activists are noteworthy, for what their
career moves mean for labor and say about Yale.
Many of these students were drawn to Yale precisely
because of its prestige and their desire to teach at such an
institution. Along the way, however, many graduate students
experienced what one who was there, Trip McCrossin,
describes as a "gestalt shift." He and others came to feel not
like the chosen few, but like a bunch of badly treated
workers.
Yale spends about $130,000 in tuition waivers and stipends
for each of those "workers." "Yale invests heavily in its
graduate students, realizing that they are the next generation
of scholars," Thomas Appelquist, dean of the graduate school,
has said (The Chronicle, April 18).
As it has turned out, some in the next generation were more
interested in organizing bottom-rung workers. Their turnabout
reflects something of Yale's own reality -- prestige tarnished
by a long, very public history of labor unrest.
"Labor relations is not something you can ignore at Yale,"
says Robin L. Brown, who became an organizer for the
hotel-and-restaurant-employees' union in Santa Monica, Cal.,
after leaving Yale's comparative-literature program last
spring. "At most universities, labor relations takes more of a
back seat. At Yale, certainly in my lifetime as a student and a
teacher, it's always been at the forefront."
Students who have worked with GESO since its inception in
1990 have pushed the issue of teaching assistants to a pivotal
moment now. A grade strike they held in 1996 has brought
before the full National Labor Relations Board the question of
whether graduate students who teach at Yale are students, as
the university argues and the labor board has stipulated since
the '70s, or employees, as the students maintain. The board
may take up the matter this month, and its decision could
change the rules for graduate-student unionization on every
private-college campus in the country. A lot of eyes are on
the case.
"I think a great deal -- even the future of graduate education
the way we understand it -- turns on what happens at Yale,"
says Steven B. Smith, a political-science professor there who
deeply opposes GESO's activities. Mr. Smith had been
Gordon Lafer's adviser until the student shifted from political
theory, Mr. Smith's specialty, to labor relations.
The professor didn't consider Dr. Lafer's career shift a
betrayal. "Not everybody who enters the academic program
is cut out for the academic life," Mr. Smith says. "Some go
into consulting, some go into public service, some go to law
school, some go into the labor movement."
He has no problem with that. "What I think is inappropriate,"
he says, "is using the graduate-school experience as a way of
trying to unionize and mobilize graduate students as a labor
force. I think that's wrong, and destructive of the intellectual
climate of the university."
Many professors and administrators at Yale don't buy the
notion that there is something singular about the Yale
experience that propels students into union work. The
skeptics believe that such students lack "the calling" for
academe. As a result, they are more susceptible to the
frustrations and loneliness facing graduate students on most
campuses.
Jerome J. Pollitt, a professor of classical archaeology, served
as dean of Yale's graduate school from 1986 to 1991. He
was deemed an enemy by graduate students who said he
ignored serious problems, like the low salaries paid to
teaching assistants. He suspects that some of the most vocal
GESO members already had a "proclivity for that sort of thing
and probably wanted to do it, deep down, more than they
wanted to be scholars."
Yale has "frequent and noisy" negotiations with its clerical
and maintenance workers, Mr. Pollitt says. Students have
been drawn to what he calls "a festival of confrontations"
because "it was kind of exciting to go out and demonstrate."
Some union observers beyond Yale believe that graduate
students there get involved in the labor movement out of a
sense of noblesse oblige. "It's almost like the powerful
class is going to step down and help the masses," says Joel M.
Douglas, a professor of public administration at Baruch
College of the City University of New York. "And if I were
one of the masses, I might be a bit concerned about the
motivations."
Dr. Douglas, a former director of the National Center for the
Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the
Professions, at Baruch, explains: "If I were going to be a
graduate student and it didn't work out -- for whatever reason
-- and I needed a new identity, union organizing is an
interesting identity. It's much more interesting than being an
account clerk for an ad agency. It's jazzy."
As an undergraduate at Yale, Eve S. Weinbaum helped
support a clerical workers' strike. When she returned in 1989,
to do doctoral work in political science, she had no interest in
organizing graduate stuents. "I was interested in looking at
much more serious issues, like poverty."
But Yale made it increasingly difficult for her to focus on her
work, she says, and she joined the union. Teaching assistants
weren't being trained to teach and were encouraged to cut
corners in grading papers, to keep up with the load, she says.
Members of GESO held walkouts in 1991 and 1992 to win
support for a teacher-training program for graduate T.A.'s.
Ms. Weinbaum insists that she did have the "calling." She
was supported by a fellowship from the National Science
Foundation, and she sought academic posts. But she grew
disillusioned with faculty members who seemed to be "on the
right side" when it came to "empowering the oppressed" but
on the wrong side when the downtrodden were graduate
students.
So she changed her plans and wound up as political director
of the Southern region of UNITE, the Union of Needle
Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees.
Many Yale professors think the fact that graduate students
wind up working in labor organizing is an indictment more of
the academic job market than of Yale.
The indictment has two counts, responds Tamara Joseph,
who left Yale in 1994 before completing her dissertation in
English literature. As a member of GESO, she began to find
"academia becoming less attractive -- partly because of the
ghastliness of the job market," she says, "but also because of
the ways in which the institutions were intensely hierarchical
and anti-democratic."
Organizing, on the other hand, gave people a way to "exercise
control over their lives and was incredibly exciting." Now, she
says, "I know more people from Yale who are union
organizers than in any other single area of employment."
Ms. Joseph has taken the GESO brand of organizing on the
road. GESO aims for one organizer for every five union
members, to insure lots of personal contact. She taught that
approach to union members at the University of Michigan,
before moving on to the University of Minnesota, where she
is an organizer for the Council of Graduate Students. Her
husband, Trip McCrossin, is working on his dissertation in
philosophy and is an organizer for the T.A. union on
Wisconsin's Milwaukee campus.
Some Yale students who were active in GESO have pursued
academic careers. Kathy M. Newman, who will receive her
Ph.D. in American studies this month, has taken a job as an
assistant professor of literary and cultural theory at Carnegie
Mellon University. Recalling the support for GESO provided
by two Yale political scientists, Michael Denning and David
Montgomery, gives her confidence in her decision to stay in
academe. "I can't imagine what Yale would have been like
without them," she says. "I want to be that person for
students and colleagues wherever I am." Dr. Newman still
calls herself "an intellectual worker."
Mr. Kagan, the Yale history professor, snickers when he
hears such descriptions. A former dean of the college, Mr.
Kagan was reviled by union activists for his attitude and his
actions toward their union efforts. He finds their transition
now from academe to labor trendy, affected, and, ultimately,
hypocritical.
Students who try to paint Yale's graduate school as a horrible
place have no basis for comparison, he argues. "Unlike these
guys, I've been to other places." Mr. Kagan earned his Ph.D.
at the Ohio State University. "These guys wouldn't be seen
dead at Ohio State. It's beneath them. They're Ivy League
types."
"They fought like tigers to get in," he says. "For every one
who got in, seven, eight, nine didn't. They get here -- most
provided with financial assistance that allows them to do their
work -- and they're proteges. Then to complain that they are
exploited workers is ludicrous."
Scholars who believe that graduate school is a training ground
for academe are bound to oppose efforts "to convince folks
this really is like a coal mine," he adds.
As it happens, though, the problems of coal miners may end
up helping Yale workers. Ms. Krajcinovic, the union
organizer who works with dishwashers, published her
dissertation, From Company Doctors to Managed Care:
The United Mine Workers' Noble Experiment (Cornell
University Press), last month. That proves she was a scholar,
she says, and a loyal worker: Proceeds from her book will go
to a strike fund for Yale employees.
Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com
Date: 12/05/97
Section: The Faculty
Page: A16
