Tag Archives: Yale

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Read about the clerical strike at the University of Minnesota here. As at Yale, the University is claiming large numbers reporting to work; as at Yale, it looks like administrators are seeking numbers complementary to an ideology which makes working people disappear. As at Yale, hundreds of classes are moving off campus, and students are deeply involved in solidarity with the larger community to call for a resolution to the crisis and a better future. As one wrote:

Bruininks and the University administration are trying to pit students against striking workers. With media complicity they’ve attempted to paint the strikers as isolated and weak, while in reality student, faculty, and community support has been growing exponentially in the last week. Come show the administration, the media, and especially the clerical workers how much support they really have! Come demonstrate that students won’t fall for divide and rule tactics, and that we understand unity between students and workers is necessary to confront an arrogant administration trying to make us shoulder the burden of the budget crisis.

Amen.

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Earlier this week, William Sledge, from his perch as Master of Calhoun College – a spot that puts him in loco parentis for one twelth of Yale’s student body – having already donated $250 to Ward 1 Aldermanic candidate Dan Kruger, took to the pages of the YDN to vilify current Alderman Ben Healey for supporting the removal of arrest powers from the constables at Yale – New Haven Hospital, who are accountable not to the city but to the Hospital Board, in response to a pattern of that Board using the constables not to protect patients but to arrest leafletting staff. Sledge, who serves as Medical Director of YNHH’s Psychiatric Hospital (that he serves as Calhoun Master while otherwise employed not by the University but – since it was subcontracted last year – by the Hospital further disproves the argument that the two institutions are discrete), argued that Healey’s move to defend patients and workers from illegal, counterproductive, and unjust abuses of the constable power,

reflected a strong bias towards meeting the goals of the union and indicate that his activity as an alderman is driven by an ideology that is so strongly pro-labor that it overwhelms matters such as the security of those he represents. This bias gets in the way of clear thinking and inhibits the political and administrative imagination required to work out creative solutions.

Alek Felstiner, who witnessed the arrests last year, ably and resoundingly refutes the argument here.

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This editorial from the new board of the YDN repeats the usual anti-union catechism: GESO is ideologically “tainted,” dangerously “single-minded,” and suspicious for its concern with, say, the job security of graduate students. It also suggests, falsely but popularly, that arguments against casualization of academic labor – the transformation of teaching jobs into low-wage, no-security, short-term positions – are about impugning the quality of graduate student and adjunct teachers, rather than about improving their conditions, lessening their workload, and brining in more ladder faculty to contribute to the academic work of the University. Even the YDN Board, however, is forced to conclude that GESO’s new report on casualization, “Blackboard Blues,” raises urgent issues that undergraduates would do well to be aware of and speak out about, and about which Yale’s administration has been suspicously silent. As the Board writes:

TAs don’t replace good professors, and an overreliance on visiting faculty can create a revolving-door of professors that leaves students in the lurch. Visiting professors should supplement full-time professors, not replace them. These concerns warrant a critical examination of the role of non-tenured faculty, and we are disappointed the academic review did not include one. We urge the administration to expand tenure opportunities or consider ways to increase institutional support for deserving faculty. At the same time, however, the contributions of our non-tenured faculty should be recognized.

UOC undergrads and GESO grad students hosted a forum this weekend to discuss this issue with visiting parents, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. We’ll be bringing those conversations to parents’ homes around the country in fora next month. Check out the schedule here.

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Hundreds rallied outside of the Albertus Magnus College office of the school’s President, Julia McNamara, who serves as the Chair of the Board of Yale – New Haven Hospital. The energy was real strong, and the cause imperative. Everyone who was there realizes that the fight goes on to get these 150 workers contracts, and Locals 34 and 35 will not soon forget the solidarity that brought us a win and that will will make us keep winning until Yale comes to internalize the extent to which its self-interest is tied up in that of this city and this movement. As the YDN reported:

“The members of our unions know, and Yale knows, and New Haven knows that we have unfinished business at the hospital,” Smith said. “It’s justice, it’s equal treatment, it’s treating people with respect for the hard work they do every day.”

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Zach agrees that to see the Editorial Board of the YDN slamming University Properties for the vision for New Haven suggested by replacing a supermarket with a specialty running gear store, but faults me for not noting that they passed up the opportunity to Yale’s entire colonial project in the city. I guess I figured that was assumed until noted otherwise. I mean, I’d like to see the YDN come out for dismantling the Yale Corporation and replacing it with a Worker’s Co-operative, but they’re even less likely to give me that than that pony I asked them for (not that I’d have anywhere to put it). As I see it, for an editorial board closely aligned with and fairly uniformly supportive of the leadership of this University to take it to task for acting like New Haven belongs only to “upper-middle-class Yalies, wealthy suburbanites and runners who demand a certain kind of windpants,” is a real victory and a bad sign for Yale’s colonial project.

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Perhaps in anticipation of their departure at the end of the week, the YDN Editorial Board has printed an unusually articulate, compelling, and critical editorial in today’s paper, discussing University Properties’ choice to replace Krauzner’s on York Street:

We fear, in particular, that Sound Runner’s inapplicability to much of the community, apart from the serious runners in need of serious running clothing among us, reflects University Properties’ questionable motives for its selection of what retailers and restaurants fit best in the area surrounding Yale. The coming of this retailer typifies a development scheme that seems aimed to serve a dual purpose in the city: gentrifying for the sake of an image and further narrowing the level of clientele who will be drawn to the area. Despite what the newly unveiled roster of stores may seem to indicate, Broadway and New Haven are not just commercial destinations for upper-middle-class Yalies, wealthy suburbanites and runners who demand a certain kind of windpants.

If Yale’s vision for New Haven is drawing the ire of the Yale Daily News (as well as Republican economists), one wonders what kind of support it has left…

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There are moments when Yale’s leadership takes significant, even potentially unpopular progressive stances in line with the best values of the University. While they tend to be on symbolic issues – like reimbursing lost financial aid for students with drug possession charges – and exclusively on national and international debates rather than local struggles, they should be acknowledged, both because credit should go where it’s deserved and because it’s nice sometimes to be able to be proud of the leadership of this institution. While there’s certainly much more Yale could do to defend its non-discrimination policy, the letters released to the YDN, showing a nearly two-decade struggle with the Pentagon over the incompatability of the army’s hiring practices, Yale’s non-discrimination policy, and military recruitment on campus, are a nice break for those of us used to only seeing Levin directing pithy and blistering rhetoric at the working people of this University.

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The most telling moment in Paul Bass’ latest follow-up on the Yale strike is his account of Levin’s attempt to field his question:

The road to a settlement proved that strikes do work. At least at Yale. Levin insists the two sides could have come to this agreement without a strike.

“Had we been able to sit down” sooner in a “small group” holding serious negotiations, the deal would have come sooner, he says.

But for a good year before the strike, union leaders argued that Levin, or another high-ranking administrator, needed to appear at negotiations for real progress. Levin denied it. Then, on the eve of the strike, he showed up at the table–and kept returning over 23 days, helping to crunch numbers and work toward compromise.

Asked whether he would have shown up without a strike, Levin at first offered pause and no answer. Then he said, “At the right time and place, I would have been there.” But before the strike, he denied repeated requests to do just that.

Actually, at a Master’s Tea in March, he told a group of undergraduates I was in that calling on him to come to the table was ridiculous. Once more, here’s hoping next time Yale’s leadership has an easier time recognizing the real interests of this University – and their resonance with the interests of this community.

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A surreal moment, courtesy of the Badger-Herald:

For Yale sophomore Josh Eidelson, who has worked with the Undergraduate Organization Committees to educate fellow students about the strikes, the new contracts represent progress on various fronts, something the campus community is gladly accepting.

“Decent contracts are vital to create a university community I want to live in. It’s safe to say there is a tremendous sense of relief on both sides” he said. “Everybody that I know is glad to have a sense of peace in the immediate sense.”

Nonetheless, Eidelson feels that for labor relations to improve, the New Haven community, administrators and union members must all take progressive steps together.

Although he feels Local 34 and 35 could have been handed more benefits, he still sees the contracts as “a positive show of greater faith in a foundation of future progress.”

Conroy also sees the settlements in a similar light.

And here you thought Yale’s PR team and I couldn’t see eye to eye on anything…

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Today marked my first time back in Yale’s dining halls this semester. It was a triumphant, emotional experience. I shared hugs with several of the workers in my residential college, and I wasn’t the only one. And the food, despite Aramark’s cut backs since they took over, is real, real good. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

I won’t rant here about the settlement, since I already linked a (long) piece I wrote on it today. I’ll just write here that a settlement which doubles pensions and protects job security (and, in one of many less-noted improvements, undoes Yale’s silly and elitist policy of only granting tuition assistance for four-year universities) is a win for everybody here, a tremendous victory won by a tremendous movement despite tremendous opposition. And there’s much, much more ahead.

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This piece in the AP is right to recognize Yale as a politicized and politicizing campus, but does a pretty sad job of trying to explain this phenomenon – mostly evidenced by the writer’s decision not to interview any undergrads about undergrad activism. The expert cited, instead, is Yale’s Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs, Bruce Alexander, who essentially describes vocal leftist students as cute gadflies who bring some color to the campus by taking potshots at Yale to get attention before gearing up to run for Congress. Must be that liberal media, and that liberal university administration, at it again…

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At a press conference tonight at City Hall, DeStefano, Wilhelm, Levin, Proto, and Smith announced the settlement – pending approval by workers in votes tomorrow – of contracts for Locals 34 and 35. The details will be released tomorrow after they’ve been seen by those in the bargaining unit – what I’m hearing is that the contracts are very, very good.

Tomorrow we continue the fight for a more just, more progressive, more whole Yale.

Tonight we celebrate and rest.