This afternoon, a coalition of fifteen Yale undergraduate groups came together to call on Yale to make a fair-share contribution to New Haven and to discuss how such a policy would affect them as members of their groups – the Black Student Alliance at Yale, the Muslim Student Association, MEChA, Social Justice Network, Jews for Justice, Women’s Center Political Action Committee, Peace by Peace, Early Childhood Educators, Yale Coalition for Peace, Yale Coalition to End the Death Penalty, Climate Campaign, Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project, the Student Legal Action Movement, the Progressive Party, and the Undergraduate Organizing Committee – and as members of the Yale and New Haven communities. It was a powerful event and a strong kick-off for a coalition that will keep organizing and mobilizing for real partnership between this city and this University.
Tag Archives: Yale
I’m yet to run into anyone on this campus who supports Yale’s History Department’s decision to deny junior professor Mary Habeck tenure. Several people have pet theories about why it happened and what it demonstrates – that Yale discriminates against women, that Yale discriminates against conservatives, and so forth. What this demonstrates most compellingly, though, is that Yale’s ongoing casualization of its academic labor force is contrary to the best interests of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates alike. I’ve never met or studied with Habeck, but I’ve heard only good things about her from students, all of whom are poorly served by a system which transfers more and more work from ladder faculty to transient professors and graduate teaching assistants. As “Blackboard Blues” demonstrated, a real concern with undergraduate teaching should translate into institutional support for transient and graduate teachers who do 70% of the teaching here, and into an expansion of the ranks of ladder faculty. Mary Habeck, it seems, is the latest casualty of Yale’s failure to follow that advice.
The Yale Daily News, covering an anti-immigrant initiative for Connecticut, implicitly demonstrates a point all too often absent from its news coverage and its staff editorials: GESO’s struggle to improve the working conditions of graduate students is crucial to the health of the University:
While the bill was introduced as an initiative to strengthen homeland security, both Yale and GESO officials expressed concern that it would pose an unnecessary burden on international students at the University.
GESO Chairwoman Mary Reynolds GRD ’07 said her group plans to publicly oppose the legislation and asked Yale President Richard Levin to use his position to help prevent the bill’s passage. “I think it’s an anti-immigrant bill, and I don’t think that driver’s licenses should be taken away from people who live and work in this state,” Reynolds said. “It will force them to apply and reapply for licenses, which will put undue pressure on the motor vehicle departments.”
Levin said the University is doing its best to oppose the measure by lobbying legislators in Hartford. “We’re working against it,” Levin said. “Obviously, it won’t be good for our foreign students.”
…This issue marks the second time in recent months that Levin and GESO have expressed mutual concern over government policies affecting international students. This winter, both sides called on Congress to scale back heightened visa requirements instituted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
If Levin lobbied as hard to protect the rights of his graduate students on visa reform as he has to curtail the rights of his graduate students to organize, we’d be in business.
Top headlines I would have liked to see in today’s Yale Daily News include:
Yale pulls ahead of Harvard in training opportunities for clerical and technical workers
Yale financial aid policy to put Harvard to shame
Yale trounces Harvard in financial investment in surrounding community
Instead, we just got this.
Wednesday, I went from a conversation with an 1199 member at Yale – New Haven Hospital to a dinner at Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life with Marvin Lender (that’s right – the one with all the bagels), prominent Jewish philanthropist and Chairman of the Board of the Hospital. The topic? Jewish tradition and business ethics.
I showed up with fifteen-some friends eager to discuss, in light of Jewish tradition: the Hospital’s three-year refusal to make a contract offer with across-the-board raises for its unionized food service workers, who’ve now twice gone on strike (although in a meeting with students a few months back, the Hospital’s Vice President for Public Relations claimed that they hadn’t, and he had to be corrected by the Vice President for Labor Relations); the paralyzing, and empirically justified, fear of the Hospital’s non-union workforce, who make significantly less than the Local 34 and 35 members who perform identical work beside them, that discussing organizing will cost them their jobs; and the Hospital’s failure, even after its latest reforms, to formulate a policy which ensures access to healthcare for New Haveners lacking full health insurance.
Lender’s response to the first few questions along these lines have two basic parts. First: He could serve on “any board I wanted to,” but “I chose Yale – New Haven Hospital” because of its work helping people. “My heart goes out” to “those poor people” who work there and “love their jobs” but “are being targeted by the unions.” The Hospital “is too busy helping people” to “get into a – excuse me – a pissing contest with the unions.” Second: Secular organizations, like Yale – New Haven Hospital, “aren’t like Jewish organizations,” in that there’s a rigid structure and so “my job isn’t to tell [Yale – New Haven Hospital President] Joe Zaccanino what to do.” The Board just “hires and fires” him. So “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on specific issues.”
When we questioned Lender’s categorization of a non-profit Hospital’s service to the poor and treatment of its workers as “day-to-day issues,” he became visibly more uncomfortable and markedly more curt. He was relieved to get a question from one of the couple people in the room not there to talk about the hospital, this one about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and spoke sympathetically and articulately about his responsibility, as a confidante and ally of leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations, to pressure them to commit to a two-state solution. So I expressed my agreement with his principle that those in positions of influence over powerful leaders who’ve gone astray have a moral obligation to speak out, cited some sources from Leviticus, Megillat Esther, and Pirkei Avot to that effect, and urged him to push Yale – New Haven Hospital into line with our shared ethical tradition. His response: “Are you trying to tell me that Esther or Mordechai with Chairman of a Board?”
Lender became increasingly rude as Jared Maslin, drawing on his experience at SHOUT helping the poor file applications for Yale – New Haven Hospital’s Free Bed Fund, tried to briefly describe the process to contextualize his question. “Are you going to ask me a question or not?” Lender asked, to which Jared replied that he wanted to make sure everyone in the room could understand the situation, prompting Lender to tell him that that was a waste of time. Jared, taken aback somewhat, suggested that he and Lender could talk about the issue after the dinner, to which Lender responded adamantly, “Now we won’t.” So Jared related that his experience suggests that the application system intentionally erects intimidating and often insurmountable beuracratic boundaries to dissuade those who need assistance from seeking it, and asked Lender what he would think of giving a third-party of some kind oversight over the process. Lender’s response: “It would be inappropriate for me to comment on that ‘yes’ or ‘no.'”
Shaking his head in his hands during questions, Lender announced, in a supreme moment of irony, “I’d didn’t come here to talk about this. I didn’t come here to talk about the Hospital. I came here to talk about business ethics.” That just about said it all. He then accused us of being rude and insisted that he was being “respectful” anyway, and accused us of “wasting the time” of all the people there who didn’t care about the Hospital, a peculiar sentiment given that all but a few of us had come specifically to discuss with one of the most powerful leaders of the Hospital how it’s treatment of the New Haven community clashed with religious and ethical values and what he planned to do about it.
Towards the end, Lender insisted that those who wanted to talk about the Hospital should “send me a letter.” That sounds like an invitation to me.
Talked this afternoon to an eighteen-year employee in dietary services at Yale – New Haven Hospital. She described her anger at the Hospital administration’s attempts to divide reassign, and cow the Hospital’s union employees into settling for a humiliating contract, and its campaign to scare the rest of its workforce out of discussing a union. She recounted a manager’s response to the gash on her face from a broken door which slammed down on her at work: “I hope it knocked some sense into you.”
Guess who wasn’t invited to Yale’s Sixth Annual Teaching Forum and Innovation Fair, focusing on teaching section?
That’s right: the people who teach section.
The Yale Daily News write-up, of course, didn’t talk to any of them either.
Three months ago, newly-appointed Yale Vice President for Finance and Administration John Pepper told the Cincinnati Post:
At this point in my life, I feel like I can contribute to a team and an institution that in many ways is like Procter & Gamble.
The Yale community got a better sense of just what that means when Pepper announced (Monday’s YDN still not on-line) the lay-offs of a hundred Yale clerical and technical and managing and professional employees. Yesterday, members of the Yale community came together to protest the University’s breach of faith and call for a better vision of the University:
“We will not let John Pepper strip away all that Yale can and will be in this community under the guise of some fabricated budget deficit,” [Laura] Smith said. “With or without you, John Pepper, we will build a future for Yale that we will all be proud of.”
…Smith called forward approximately 20 laid-off workers to take the stage at the rally. “It’s difficult to go out and start a new career,” Stanley Kobylanski, a 52-year-old laid-off telecommunications worker, said. “I’d like Yale to rescind the layoffs. Our major concern is the battle we wage with subcontracting and outsourcing our work.”
Pepper’s response:
“I believe in dialogue on these subjects,” Pepper said. “Unions are important organizing units and should be respected as such. But we are all part of the Yale family.”
Unfortunately, Pepper is yet to translate his stated belief in dialogue in real partnership with Yale’s workers of the sort John Stepp called for in the RAI Report. Meanwhile, despite what Wal-Mart and other union-busting firms may tell you, paternalism does not a family make.
On today’s YDN op-ed page, Grayson Walker begins by arguing that dollar for dollar, your money does more good going to an anti-poverty organization than directly to someone who asks for it on the street – a position I generally agree with, with the caveat that most people who make that argument don’t end up giving money to either. Unfortunately, he goes downhill from there, recognizing that Yale has a vested interest in ameliorating the appearance of poverty in New Haven but not that Yale has a vested interest in substantive change in the plight of New Haveners or in real partnership with the larger community. The only partnership he suggests is
a coalition that includes Yale administrators and students, local businesses, New Haven city officials, and social welfare advocates
which sounds all well and good – unfortunately this coalition is charged not with addressing the structural inequality whose victims are in the thankless position of asking for money on the streets of New Haven, but with finding more creative ways to police them.
Conveniently laid out next to his piece is one from the head of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs, Mike Morand, which beneath more artful rhetoric also attempts to absolve Yale of responsibility for real partnership in New Haven. Specifically, he argues that restricting Yale’s tax super-exemption would threaten Yale’s financial solvency without really helping New Haven because the state would respond to any move by Yale to shoulder its own tax burden on its profit-making properties by proportionately scaling back Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) to New Haven from the state. The problem with his argument, besides the irony of New Haven tax payers subsidizing Yale’s exemption, is that the state government has under-funded PILOT consistently over the past years, and thus the percentage of Yale’s tax exemption it compensates has steadily decreased. What would keep PILOT funding secure would be for Yale to step up and pay its fair share and for ONHSA to join CCNE in lobbying for increased PILOT. Unfortunately, that prospect seems to be about as attractive to Levin as joining forces with GESO to fight for international student visa reform.
The YDN on the administration’s response to yesterday’s “Dissertation Derby”:
An estimated 300 graduate and undergraduate students rallied on the steps of the Hall of Graduate Studies Thursday to protest what they claim are overly stringent Graduate School registration policies and pay inequities.
…Butler, who will assume the Graduate School deanship this July, said the current extended registration policies are designed to help students. “It is to every student’s advantage to complete a superb dissertation as efficiently as is possible,” Butler said. “History is imposing no new time deadlines and it’s erroneous to suggest otherwise.”
But according to an internal History Department memo obtained by GESO and released to the News Thursday, Yale’s largest department may require graduate students to submit half of their dissertations to proceed to the seventh year. “[Students] can petition for extended registration [after their sixth year in] the Graduate School in exceptional cases where unique personal circumstances or substantial difficulties in obtaining archival sources have prevented normal progress,” the department’s policy proposal reads.
What’s in every graduate student’s best interest, as a student and as an employee, is to have the full institutional support of the University for the full duration necessary – given the challenges dramatized in yesterday’s street theater but unfortunately undiscussed in the YDN’s write-up – to complete their academic work, and assistance in attaining gainful employment afterwards. That’s what GESO’s fighting for, and what Butler and Salovey should be working for as well, rather than working to accelerate the casualization of academic labor at one of the wealthiest and most prestigious universities in the world.
Oh – and then there’s this picture, with this caption:
A baguette-wielding man attends a GESO-rally…
Um, Weapon of Mass Destruction, anyone?
Yesterday, undergrads joined graduate students in marching to David Swenson’s and Richard Levin’s offices to demand investment disclosure to shed some light on the truth about the impact of Yale’s money.
Today, undergrads set up three installations on Beinecke – eight hundred paper plates whose distribution represents the racial and gender make-up of Yale’s tenured faculty, a mini-classroom to discuss academic casualization, and a weighted game of juggling based on financial aid status – and talked with peers about the impact of these issues on our education and our community. Then we marched to join GESO at HGS and stand together in calling for a more progressive vision of the academy.
Oh – and the “Dissertation Derby” was pretty fun too, as well as a vivid demonstration of the disjuncture between administration policy and the best interests of graduate students and the academy.
Yesterday, several dozen undergraduates and grad students met up to discuss the ways in which Yale’s graduate student pay inequity disvalues their work and our education, to deliver a letter to Graduate School Dean Peter Salovey, and to begin planning a larger mobilization for March.
Back home in Philly, U Penn’s superior-acronym-bearing graduate student union, GET-UP, has announced plans for a two-day strike next week to coincide with parade welcoming Penn’s new President to demand that Penn agree to count the ballots from the union election held by its grad students a year ago:
Rich Klimmer, an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers based in Philadelphia, said that, by contrast, when he was a graduate student at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, graduate students did not do any teaching until they had finished all their coursework. He said they also were given three weeks of training on how to prepare and give lectures and how to build and grade exams.
“Now, under the corporate model of running a university, they take anyone and put them in the classes,” Klimmer said.
Money and benefits are at the root of the bid to unionize. Graduate students, who are paid on average $15,000 a year, argue that they don’t earn a living wage for this region. Many graduate students are older, returning students who have families. Deirdre Martinez, 36, a graduate student in Penn’s education school, has two children ages 5 and 7 and a husband who teaches at Temple University. She said universities such as Penn need to treat adult learners with the same respect they would expect elsewhere.
Penn, Brown, and Columbia, at Yale President Levin’s urging, have all had the ballots from their NLRB elections impounded, pending a potentially decade-long appeal process as far as the Supreme Court. This is the legal limbo into which Levin has expressed his desire to shunt GESO as well. That’s why GESO continues to demand a fair process whose results can be recognized by both sides.
Democracy, Levin often likes to remark in disparaging the more democratic Card-Count Neutrality process, means voting. If democracy means voting, then surely it demands that the votes be counted, and the results followed. That’ll take the continued struggle of graduate students across this country.
Josh Eidelson 