Lip Service, Labor, and the New Academic Institution: A Conversation On Yale's Corporate Model of Education with GESO co-Chair Stephanie Greenlea

By KATHLEEN POWERS

February 28, 2011

On Wednesday, February 8th, GESO (the Graduate Employees and Students Organization) hosted a rally and march down Wall Street for the release of “Yale Inc.: The Corporate Model in Higher Education.”

Photo: David Burt, Yale Daily News

The report discusses the dangers involved in designing university systems like business corporations. Yale has not recognized GESO as a union, and according the National Labor Relations Board, in order for GESO to have the capacity and bargaining power of a union, a majority vote by the graduate students is not enough. They must have the official recognition of the University. Though it is obvious that the work of the graduate students enables the University to function, Yale has not provided recognition. Stephanie Greenlea is co- Chair of GESO, and is a graduate student studying articulations of and challenges to anti-Black racism in the information age in the African American studies and Sociology departments. This interview was conducted on Friday, February 25 at Woodland coffee in New Haven, and has been edited for clarity.

Kathleen Powers: How did you get involved with unionizing at Yale?

Stephanie Greenlea: Some upper year women approached me, told me about the union, [and] asked me if I wanted to be involved. It was here, when this place was Oolongʼs 6 years ago. We were drinking bubble tea. I did not know what to make of it. The thing that she said to me was —this was a Black woman—“GESO is the only space that Iʼve found on campus where people are actively trying to create and maintain a critical discourse around the university and what intellectual projects mean here.” And I was like, “Wow, that is what I need. This place makes no sense to me. I am just being told to do my coursework, but I donʼt have the space to think about why I am doing it, or what it is for.”

At the end of my first semester was the height of the Community Benefits agreement drive [a social contract between the Yale-New Haven Hospital and nearby neighborhood residents promising respect and transparency in their proceedings as well the provision of jobs and services to community members], at the Yale New Haven hospital. I remember it being this December night, and weʼd had this big meeting with GESO and there were these buses parked outside the union hall. I did not really know what was going on, but some of my colleagues said, “Get on the bus we have to go to this rally in the Hill neighborhood, at the hospital.” Academics, academic workers, neighbors working in all type of sectors were all pushing for the same thing. We walked eight to ten abreast in the street. That kind of coalition interest was precisely what Iʼd been told was possible through the academy and what was desirable through the academy

After that I was really in. It occurred to me that not only was [GESO] a movement on Yaleʼs campus for academic workers, but it was also part of a broader movement and collaboration in the city which is not only right but necessary.

KP: Part of a broader movement in what way? In that it brings together people from different communities?

SG: I would not say GESO brings together people from different communities. But academic work is not in a vacuum. Work in academic departments, for example, [is] supported by clerical and technical workers who do the money handling, logistics, and bookkeeping. Academic work is supported by registrars who do the paper work and give you advice on scheduling and transcripts. It has been very important for me that the people doing the work—even if it is not teaching and research, but those who do the work that teaching and research depend on—also have really good jobs and are treated with respect and dignity and have the right to self determine and negotiate over the terms of their labor. If they are not overburdened, and if they feel like they are members of community on the job, then they feel like they can attend to their lives outside the office, then there is an opportunity for community to form.

KP: What are your goals as chair? Any specific ones?

SG: The union does not really work that way. What we do is driven by what graduate teachers and graduate students want. It is not the case that I have an agenda that I lay out. I spend a lot of time actually trying to create new common spaces for critical discourse around what is happening here. Our programming reflects that.

KP: Were you happy with rally that occurred on the 9th of February in front of Sterling Memorial Library?

SG: Yeah, I think that it demonstrates that there is a lot of concern and interest about these questions on campus.

KP: How do you think the report has been received? Has there been any response from the university, any kind of action laid out?

SG: We only have one response from the university. In advance of launching the report, we delivered a letter from the organizing community and the union to the new Dean Pollard, welcom[ing] him as the new Dean of the Graduate School, and asked if he would meet with us in our departments about our collective concerns. He declined that invitation saying that the university does not recognize GESO. So that was in early December and in February we launched the report, and we have not had any response from the University. But that is not surprising; we do not often get a formal response from the University.

We have gotten decent media coverage. [Itʼs also been] pretty well received by graduate students [and] a fair amount of undergraduates too. And you know, even some members of the faculty too have said that they are interested in speaking with us on the concepts of the report. And that is exciting.

KP: The report discusses the application of the ʻcorporate modelʼ to the academic institution. How do you personally see the changes of “restructuring of the academic workforce and the application of corporate strategies” manifesting themselves at Yale? In what ways is the general trend happening?

SG: Decision-making is not made by academics who are doing the work. The unionʼs sense is that the people doing the work should have a say in how the work happens; the shifting of power from academics is of serious concern.

KP: There is also the much discussed ʻresponsive PhDʼ in the report which sounds a lot like a physical therapy procedure.

SG: The responsive PhD was a project in 2007 [in which administrators from] Yale and 20 other schools participated. There is a significant part of this report that is about diversity and I remember reading and thinking that what it was a reiteration of a rhetorical commitment to the underrepresented, [and] feeling that it was a bit disingenuous for these universities to launch a rhetorical—to restate a commitment to diversity at the same time that decision making is shifting away from academics, and at the same time that there is a casualization of academic work. And by that I mean that there is an increasing reliance on part time, contingent, non-tenure track faculty.

KP: Contingent is such an interesting word to characterize oneʼs work, or category of labor.

SG: Yeah, so my main concern is that, okay sure, letʼs imagine that we make an effort to hire more female faculty, more people of color. Okay. But if we do that at the same time that we are creating more and more positions that actually donʼt have decision making power… They are hiring these folks into a second tier and you get a kind of occupational stratification.

KP: On that point, the notion that the University as mentioned in the report is “reconsidering programs that serve very few students” seems fairly sinister and euphemistic. So, what is being reconstructed within the institution and who is being affected?

SG: We do not know yet, but it makes me worry for fields like African American studies and Womenʼs, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Right, it makes me nervous. I canʼt say we know what is going to happen, but what I do know is that these newer fields with shorter disciplinary histories, and shorter histories within Yale, have not amassed the sort of alumni donation pool, or endowment, or extra resources. So when budget cuts happen, right, itʼs likely that younger fields are experiencing [them] differently from, say, fields like political science and economics. That is one concern.

KP: Do you see this institutional jargon, terms like ʻreconstructingʼ, or ʻcontingentʼ as perhaps cloaking the real issues at stake? Or the gender problems of the institution?

SG: Yeah, gender problems, race problems, class problems. Yeah, All types.

KP: The Daily Princetonian published an article in 2009 about female faculty at Princeton, basically a critique of how Princeton has the lowest female faculty percentage in the Ivy League, it is 27%, and Yaleʼs is 37%. The article [discusses] how Yale is doing better than most other Ivies in “recruitment and retainment” of women and underrepresented persons. The article puts Yale at the forefront of diversity work in institutions. How do you think Yale is doing?

SG: Yeah, I mean I think diversity initiatives are great. This is what I mentioned with the ʻResponsive PhDʼ—I think they are right and necessary. I think the University not only needs to continue to make but also to honor its commitments to bring people here. I think the question is to not go about diversity issues as just a question of presences and absences, but what does it mean to bring people here and support them. There are other things that have to come along with them. It is why affordable healthcare matters, what a workplace is like matters, whether these are jobs with autonomy or stability or whether these jobs are revolving doors. It matters. The question is what are we diversifying and what are we diversifying into. I think that [these commitments] need to happen in tandem with a more democratized system of decision-making, [otherwise] you undermine all of your diversifying work.

KP: Do you consider yourself a feminist? Do you have a particular conception of your own feminism?

SG: Yes. I identify sometimes with that. I guess itʼs a similar thing as [to] when someone asks me if I think of myself as a Christian. There are aspects I identify and disidentify with. But, the ways of asking questions, the postures, the demands for responsibility that go with feminism – I identify with, but then there [are] institutional constructions and philosophies that I disidentify with, and practices that I disidentify with.

I think about Audre Lorde a lot. She is a Black, lesbian, feminist poet. I feel aware a lot of the stories of the people who came before, I often feel responsibility to that, both to the people who came before me but also to the people around me and who will come after me. Iʼm always pressing myself to think about who is not speaking or who is not being allowed to speak. Who is not being represented. How [and whether] any given thing that I would build in terms of a movement can respond to people. [And I] try to explore all the time, go out and speak with people. Doing that work—which is not easy —[is why] movements have to model what theyʼre asking for. If people should have a say in how their cities and lives look, they should also have a say in their movements.

Kathleen Powers is a junior at Yale College. She is a contributor to Broad Recognition.