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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