Yale Retaliates Against Striking Graduate Students

In 1995, Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) held a grade strike, refusing to release grades unless Yale University agreed to negotiate with them about their demands for better benefits, improved teacher training, and smaller class sizes. Administrators accused graduate assistants of holding "the academic process hostage."

But a threat to academic freedom is coming from Yale's efforts to stop the strike. Yale administrators are threatening to withhold financial aid or even expel the graduate assistants involved in the strike, and three union leaders have been targeted for disciplinary hearings. A memo from Yale deans warned that strikers would be blacklisted from teaching appointments. Some faculty are punishing the strikers by writing negative recommendations.

Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead criticized one graduate student in a letter of recommendation for "poor judgment" in becoming a union leader. Another graduate student accused history professor Donald Kagan of withholding a recommendation; Kagan denied it, but said that he would take the student's strike into account if he wrote a letter of recommendation. The head of the teaching fellows program openly declared that such retaliation against strikers would be used because graduate students "can't hold undergraduates captive and expect that not to be taken into consideration in future academic appointments or careers."

The Yale Administration has not only refused to condemn these unprofessional acts of retaliation, but it is also actively encouraging such attacks: "in evaluating graduate students, faculty must be free to take account of actions that demonstrate a failure to meet responsibilities as a teacher, to the detriment of undergraduates in the class, or actions that violate law or academic regulations, such as withholding undergraduates' papers and grades."

Yale officials argue that graduate students are "developing scholars, not employees." However, Yale and colleges across the country exploit graduate students as cheap labor, and these students (like their teachers) are entitled to join together for the sake of better working conditions, especially since (unlike faculty) graduate students have no formal power within the university. If the graduate students are "developing scholars," then they should be treated as scholars, with the same rights of academic freedom and collective organization that other scholars have.

It should be clear that graduate students have a right to engage in union or political activity without having it affect recommendations, which should be based solely on their abilities as a teacher and a scholar. As Ellen Schrecker noted: "academic freedom is just as endangered by the insertion of a hostile description of a Ph.D. candidate's union activities into a letter of recommendation as it is by the politically motivated dismissal of a tenured faculty member."