Will Brehm 1:55
Jennifer Klein, welcome to FreshEd.

Jennifer Klein 1:57
Thank you for having me.

Will Brehm 1:59
So, what on earth is going on at Yale right now?

Jennifer Klein 2:03
There is a dramatic fast that has been launched by the graduate teachers at Yale University in the Division of Arts and Sciences. Because they elected a union. It has been certified by the National Labor Relations Board, the official labor apparatus of the government, and Yale University has been refusing to recognize the union and live up to its legal obligation to bargain with them for a contract. And so, after many petitions and marches and rallies and letters, the students have decided to begin a fast and an occupation in front of the president’s offices.

Will Brehm 2:50
And how many graduate student teachers are we talking about?

Jennifer Klein 2:54
We’re talking about a few hundred. They are in the social sciences, the humanities, the physical sciences, the biological sciences, mathematics, so the whole Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Now, it was eight departments that voted in the first round of elections. They range from political science to sociology, history of art, East Asian languages, and literatures, mathematics, geology and geophysics, history. So, they include sciences, they include humanities, and they include social sciences. And now another four to five departments, such as religious studies, and Slavic studies have also applied to have their elections. So, they are continuing to act upon the rights that have now been granted to them by the National Labor Relations Board.

Will Brehm 3:58
So, before we get into this issue of the National Labor Relations Board, and how it connects with President Trump of all people, I want to ask you about what sort of working conditions led these students to unionize and to, you know, lead them to this fasting, which seems like a very drastic step here.

Jennifer Klein 4:21
Well, the graduate teachers at Yale have been trying to organize for almost three decades. And during those years, their workload, in fact, has increased. And they do the teaching for more courses, more laboratories, more senior thesis essays over these decades. And yet, the university has tried to put up the fiction that they are not employees of the university, they are merely apprentices of their dissertation advisors. But if you take the example of mathematics, calculus is taught solely by graduate student teachers. There are no top-level professors who are going to teach calculus. So, calculus is solely taught by the graduate student teachers, and they are supervised by an adjunct person or a lecturer. So, there is no dissertation advisor-advisee relationship involved in that. These people are teaching calculus. They are teaching East Asian languages. And so, you know, the National Labor Relations Board, I mean, a lot of this struggle really has been over who gets to be considered a worker. And as we know, that’s a political contestation that has happened, you know, over centuries. What gets recognized as real work is both a historical and a political process. And so, the graduate teachers have been trying to get this recognition as employees, they have this at public universities, there have had, there have been graduate student unions at public universities like the University of Wisconsin, or the University of Michigan, since the 1960s and 70s. There are also unions in the University of California system. However, this was about private universities. And so, in August of 2016, a case emerged from Columbia University. And the National Labor Relations Board ruled that indeed, graduate teachers in private universities are employees who are covered by the rights of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gives them the right to collective action and collective bargaining. And so, this ruling finally opened the door for private university graduate students to organize. But Yale, just like Columbia, and just like Harvard, had no intention of accepting this ruling.

Will Brehm 7:02
These graduate student protests, or the unionization of graduate student teachers at private universities, has happened in other universities, like Columbia and Harvard as well. Have there been other universities that have seen graduate students organizing?

Jennifer Klein 7:20
Yes, New York University, Brown University, Duke University. So, you know, it’s absolutely a growing movement. And so, at Yale, some of the particular issues are health insurance related, mental health benefits, family benefits. The other thing is to have a much more direct and explicit procedure for dealing with sexual harassment, that this has been dealt with very lightly by the university, has not been taken seriously. There are real gender inequality issues in terms of how the graduate teachers are treated. There’s also an issue of as you get further along in your program, and you’re more advanced, and you have more teaching experience, your salary actually goes down. So, you get paid a higher amount in, say, your third or fourth year of the program. But if you teach in your fifth or sixth year, your salary goes down. And they do this, you know, so they don’t recognize experience, they’re not willing to take seriously the experience that the teachers have gained in teaching a range of courses. And you know, similarly for the contingent faculty who are at the university, their salaries are also frozen at a very low level. And their experience doesn’t get recognized. We have lecturers, or at Yale they’re called non-ladder faculty who have been here 20 years, who have been here 30 years, and their experience is not valued either. And so that is what the graduate teachers see as well. So those have been the key issues that they’ve been organizing around. And so again, this gets to the issue of the kind of speciousness of the universities’ argument that what, you know, what the graduate students are, they are students, they are apprentices. This interferes with the mentoring relationship with their dissertation advisor. But what the National Labor Relations Board ruling in the Columbia case made clear is, there are two different relationships. Yes, of course, there’s the relationship that you have with your graduate advisor. There is also the relationship that you have with the university as an employee because the faculty and the department, nobody in the department determines their pay, we don’t determine their health insurance benefits, we don’t determine their level of teaching, we don’t determine the policies on sexual harassment and sexual discrimination. Those are all determined by the provost office, and by the Graduate School deans. So as the National Labor Relations Board made clear, there is an employment relationship. And this is not foreclosed by the existence of some other relationship that is not covered by the act. And these can be distinguished, and they should be, which is why they have the rights now of all other workers.

Will Brehm 10:35
Why wouldn’t Yale want to recognize these workers?

Jennifer Klein 10:40
This is a good question, which I’ve been trying to figure out because Yale has spent an extraordinary amount of money to fight this unionization effort. And so, it’s deeply ideological for them to begin with. I don’t think it really is, you know, a cost factor, because they have spent in this year alone, hundreds of thousands of dollars to retain the anti-union, elite law firm Proskauer Rose, which is a New York, Washington DC top level law firm. And they have been fighting this for so long. So, part of it is that I think they profoundly can’t take the challenge to their authority in any way. I think they cannot accept that the graduate students can make collective decisions on their own and might actually have some good ideas in input. And third, I think it must deeply interfere with this kind of long-range corporate agenda that is being implemented in the university. Yale over the last several years has brought in management consultants from the corporate world, they’ve brought in vice presidents from PepsiCo Frito-Lay, because you know, higher education is so much like soda and junk food, you know, and you know, they’ve now brought in other corporate management consultants. And so, this is part of the way in which they’re trying to rationalize and reorganize all work within the university. They’re trying to reduce the work that the staff does, they’re trying to reduce the level of staffing all over the university, in departments, in the libraries, in the archives. They’re trying to downsize the workforce by not replacing people. They’re trying to centralize the labor, they’re trying to take away staff from small departments and try to say, well, you know, you’re just the Slavic literature department, right? You only need staff from September to May, or Near Eastern languages and civilizations, they tried to do this to them to say, well, you really only need to be open September to May. And so, the graduate students are really the ones who have articulated a very clear critique of the neoliberal corporate university, they have been leading the way on that.

Will Brehm 13:21
And this is not a phenomenon that’s unique to Yale, right? I mean, the neoliberalization of higher education is really a global phenomenon, right?

Jennifer Klein 13:32
Absolutely. And I think, first of all, you know, what we should see, I mean, I can tell you from American universities, is I think, over the last 30 years, there’s been a significant increase in the labor that both graduate students and adjunct and contingent faculty did. I mean, when I was in college in the 1980s, if I can admit that, you know, there were very few courses that were sectioned out, right, or that were taught by graduate students. They were just lecture courses, and you sat in them with professors. But now what you have our graduate students, other low paid contingent faculty, adjunct professors who teach language and writing classes, labs, sections, special programs, upper-level seminars, they do significant senior thesis advising, they do individual mentoring. So, they are really central to undergraduate education. And then, you know, if we look at the workforce as a whole, in the United States, 71% of university teaching is being done by contingent faculty. Only 20% of the academic workforce is tenured. And, I mean, even private universities, I recently heard that something like 70% of the teaching at a place like Tufts is adjunct. I mean, this has been happening at public universities for a while, like the City University of New York (CUNY), the State University of New York. But you know, it’s really spreading into the private universities now, too. And so, where do we expect our graduates with PhDs to go.

Will Brehm 15:23
That’s right, I mean, and, you know, how much money are these contingent faculty making? I mean, it’s not an easy, livable wage, is it?

Jennifer Klein 15:31
No, there are significant inequities, and I’ll give you an example. Barnard College, which is a liberal arts women’s college in New York City. It’s actually where I went to school. This is a place where now the tuition is probably $50,000 a year, but they had adjunct faculty who were making as little as $5,000 per course. So, they teach two to three courses per semester. That means they make 20 to $30,000 a year, which is slightly above the federal poverty level for a family. So, these are people with PhDs, and at Barnard they are primarily women. In fact, many of them actually have Barnard College degrees. And so, here’s a college that, you know, offers women a capacious humanist education, it’s supposed to value and promote their intellectual and artistic talents, offer up this opportunity. And they’ve been employing these adjunct faculty at 20 to $30,000 a year and also only on term-to-term contracts. So, they wouldn’t even know if the next year they had the job. But yet, they would actually be there long term. And so, this is a phenomenon we’ve seen throughout the service economy in the United States, not only the temp economy, but the emergence of permatemps. You know, people who are allegedly brought on as temps but 10 years later, they’re still there doing the same job. So, they have become permatemps. So, I think we also need to understand this as a women’s issue and as a feminist issue. And so recently, the contingent faculty at Barnard unionized, they voted overwhelmingly to join a union. And then again, Barnard College refused to recognize them, refused to negotiate. And what they did was, they turn to one of the truly nefarious anti-union management consulting and law firms, Jackson Lewis. And let me tell you why this is significant if I can put this in context, because I think this is somewhat unique to the United States, but we need to think about how they’re promoting it now, internationally. Beginning in the 1970s, and really expanding particularly in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan came into the presidency, we saw the emergence of this whole quote, “union avoidance sector,” management consulting firms, law firms, firms that advise companies to break the union. And what they do is instead of offering their services as a way to deal with, you know, difficult negotiations and arriving at resolution, instead, they tell employers, what you have to do is eradicate the union threat, root and branch, you have to play hardball. And so, what they literally say is, employers need to, quote, “wage war, they need to drop bombs,” sometimes, quote, “when dealing with the union threat, war is helpful.” Now, I think we should really ask ourselves; do we really want our colleges and universities to be battlefields for those who work and teach and study there? And so, Jackson Lewis, they created all these, like handbooks and workshops for quote, “winning NLRB elections,” and “how to fight the union.” And so, some of the most prominent companies in the US ran anti-union campaigns up to millions of dollars. And Jackson Lewis refers to this as, you know, unionism as a contagious disease, a virus they have to root out. And so, Yale, as NYU had done before them, New York University and Columbia decided to hire Proskauer Rose to do this, to fight this war. And even though the National Labor Relations Board had already ruled that the graduate teachers had a right to have an election and form a union, Yale drag them into an NLRB hearing in the fall in October, to try and derail this and I attended some days of this hearing, and frankly, I was truly shocked. I was just appalled at the level of hostility and harassment towards our own students.

Will Brehm 20:26
What did you see?

Jennifer Klein 20:27
So, the students had one lawyer, Yale had four lawyers at council table. They were openly hostile, they tried to discredit their knowledge, they demean them, they attacked their teaching, they actually were dripping with contempt for higher education in general. I mean, I was really, and they said, you know, kind of quasi-racist stuff, actually, about Asian students. You know, there was a student who grew up in Canada, attended the English language university in Canada. And then they asked him, oh, but did you take an English language test to teach at Yale? And they said, you know, really racist things about students teaching Japanese language. They tried to act like, you know, teaching art history in the Yale Art Gallery was the same as teaching calculus or the same as teaching political science. And so, you know, I was really shocked at the hostility. And then I asked the dean, you know, because by my calculation, these lawyers are charging about $1,000 an hour. And they have a research team, because they’re doing, you know, all this background research to figure out how to smear people. And so, I really said, why is this a constructive use of university funds to be spending 25 to $30,000 a day to harass and discredit our own students who teach Yale undergraduates? And who will come out of Yale with a university degree? How can this possibly be a constructive use of university funds?

Will Brehm 22:18
Have you asked the Yale administration? Like what is Yale’s response to this? It seems like they are clearly violating the law. I mean, if that’s what the National Labor Relations Board has ruled, and they have legal authority, and I mean, what is Yale’s response?

Jennifer Klein 22:35
First of all, yes, they’re absolutely evading the law. They’re not acting according to the law. And in the NLRB hearing, they threw out so many inappropriate questions at the people on the stand, that the hearing officer had to keep saying, “Don’t answer that, that’s out of bounds. That’s inappropriate, you do not have to answer that question.” So, they were just tossing out any hostile thing that they could do, just to put it on record. And it was what, it was way out of line. And yes, I wrote very detailed letters to the dean of the graduate school, to the dean of Arts and Sciences, and to the president of the university. And people from around the country did also because they’re profoundly disturbed to hear about this. And they wrote from places like NYU where they said, “Look, NYU use Proskauer Rose, and it caused all kinds of ill feeling and hostility,” it only did finally end up with the result of a union, which has been fine for everybody. So, what their response is, you know, they truly don’t get the basic principle of the National Labor Relations Act, which is workers freedom of association. The basic principle is that workers have the right to choose their own organization, their means of representation. That is the freedom of association right. And so, it doesn’t really matter what I think about unionism as faculty, what the deans think about unionism as management. It is neither of our decisions, right? It is legally up to the workers. That is something they fundamentally ideologically refuse to accept. Secondly, what the dean, and you know, the dean’s letter is written by the lawyers, right? I mean, these are responses that are written by the lawyers, but they say, she says, “Well, we just, we don’t really think that that particular union is really in the best interest of the students. And we just question the motivation of that union, and whether that union can best represent the interests of our students.” And I think this reflects a couple of things. Again, first of all, what she thinks of the union is irrelevant. It’s not her decision. Secondly, I think it’s a very kind of parental attitude, that somehow these students are kids, and not adults, and can’t make their own informed decisions. And third, I think it’s a very elitist position. Because in fact, what the dean explicitly said before the election, which is also dubious, you know, both ethically and legally, in the letters that they sent out before the election. They said, “Well, you know, this local 33 of UNITE HERE.” UNITE HERE, you should know that they represent people like laundry workers, food service workers, hotel workers, manufacturing workers, textiles, people who aren’t like you, you are people getting PhDs. And would you really want to be in a union where you support those other kinds of people? And this was flat out said by both deans. And so obviously, it’s just completely insulting, completely patronizing and profoundly elitist. Because here, the graduate students are actually saying, “Yes, not only do we accept the notion of collective solidarity and representation for ourselves, but yeah, we are in it with this other union.”

Will Brehm 26:31
And has the National Labor Relations Board ruled on this review?

Jennifer Klein 26:35
Yeah. And this is the thing. Yale has lost at least to these stages. Okay. So, you know, they lost in the Columbia decision, which said, graduate teachers at private universities are covered by the act, they lost the hearing in the fall, which said that the elections could go forward. The graduate students won the elections. So, Yale has lost at three stages now. And so, the obligation is now to negotiate a contract. And they are refusing to do that. What they have decided to do is appeal to the national level, because this was decided by a regional board. And so, by appealing to the national NLRB, this becomes a stalling move that is both cynical and opportunistic, because what their gamble is that Donald Trump will reappoint the National Labor Relations Board to tip more towards corporations, and hopefully just toss out the whole ruling. And so here we have all these American universities that have been trying to stand up to the Trump agenda when it comes to immigration, detention of visa holders in airports, protecting foreign scholars and students, the attacks on civil liberties. And yet, here’s at Yale University, which is deciding that they’re actually going to put themselves on the side, politically, of Donald Trump.

Will Brehm 28:10
I’m just shocked to think that Yale has lost in every turn and is now waiting for an anti-union labor board to be created at the national level. It’s just astounding.

Jennifer Klein 28:26
The university could have so easily stepped forward, done the right thing, made the university look good, recognize the talents of all of us, and the contributions that everybody on the university campus makes to the mission and the status of the university, taking the high road, and it actually would have cost them an awful lot less money. As I said, I mean, they are spending a huge amount of money to do this. It’s profoundly irrational. But again, to come back to, sort of the class questions that are here. I think that you know, one of the things that is sort of fascinating, that we should pay attention to, is the way in which administrations like Yale want to fracture the kind of labor that’s done on a university campus, ideologically and politically. So, while they may be willing to say that, oh, the people who do clerical work, maintenance work, office work, security staff, food service, that this is labor, and although universities may seek to actually contract some of it out, or deny their own role as employers, they do recognize it as labor. But when it comes to the jobs of teachers, researchers, archivists, computer engineers and graders, suddenly, these occupations are no longer work. They are supervisory, or they are learning. And so, they act like they can just separate this. And so, you know, basically they say, well, faculty, you know, you are managerial, even though, again, what decisions do we really have control over. We actually don’t have control over those kinds of decisions. And then by the same logic, graduate students who research, or grade or teach are learners and so I think it arrogantly on the part of the university administrators and patronizingly imply that unionism is really only for those who do onerous, or non-thinking or routine or degraded labor. But, you know, again, we don’t have much faculty governance, and I think that what we should, and we’re not management. So, what we should recognize is that even as faculty, we learn from the people we work with, from students, from librarians, from archivists, from staff who actually know their jobs well, and more importantly, that all labor done by everyone within the campus enhances its mission intact, right? Can the university really do what it does without the intersecting labors of all these people? And so, I think, you know, for us, we should take a look, in truth all jobs require self-initiative, they require judgment, they require initiative and self-reliance. And so, all work should be dignified. And I think that we, in the academy, can be the people who bring back the ability to say that.

Will Brehm 32:13
Is there anything that FreshEd listeners could do to support the efforts of the Yale graduate students but also all of the other graduate students and contingent faculty at other universities in America trying to unionize as well?

Jennifer Klein 32:26
Yes. So, the fast began on April 25. They created a beautiful shelter occupation site. And you know what I realized when the graduate students did this was, you know, Beinecke Plaza was a totally empty space, right there is no tables there, nowhere to sit and eat lunch or talk. It was just a through space from one part of the university to another. And it’s granite, and it’s gray. And they put up this beautiful shelter and green turf and orange chairs and couches and people stop and talk to them about ideas and politics. And unions then and they meet with students, and they meet with foreign scholars. And so, they’ve actually turned it to a public space where the work of the university can be done. And university’s attitude is, well, they want to dismantle it, arrest the people. And you know, have it be private, surveilled and police space. So, the first eight fasters went for two weeks, which was unbelievable. I mean, it was so moving. And now other students have stepped in, and people have been participating. The university is playing this game of refusing to recognize them. We now have a solidarity statement that we are asking people around the world to sign. It has been signed by major leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States, including the chair and co-chairs of the Democratic National Committee, our senators, Van Jones, and then musicians like Tom Morello and Melissa Etheridge. And so, you know, again, it shows that Peter Salovey, the president and university and Yale are, they are on the wrong side of mainstream American liberalism. So, I will send you the link because we would love as many people as possible around the world to sign this solidarity statement. Secondly, you can write directly to Lynn Cooley, the Dean of Graduate Arts and Sciences School and to Dean Tamar Gendler and express your support for the union and ask the university to live up to the law. That’s what we’re asking them to do is adhere to the law, engage in contract negotiation. Finally, on that larger issue, you raise of contingent employment, we need to be the ones who really start to critique the casualization of occupations. And that this involves us too. It isn’t just in, you know, offices and hospitals, and dental offices and places like that. The corporate university has become a major engine, not only of casualized employment, but poverty. I mean, if you look at the major cities of the United States, where you used to have manufacturing, the largest employers now are university complexes and their medical hospital complexes. And, so, in the top cities with the most amount of poverty, those are the major employers. So, universities have become these key enterprises of the low wage experience and economic insecurity, as well as racial discrimination. So, we should rebuild labor solidarity, we should recognize the ways that labor unions have been key vehicles of economic security. They’ve been vehicles that since the 1970s, women and African Americans and immigrants have been able to use to gain opportunity, raise their wages, become part of American life. And we should recognize that they are vehicles for democratic participation. If we’re going to rebuild a democratic society, we need the institutions in which people can articulate alternatives. Imagine a better world and do it together collectively.

Will Brehm:  36:27
Well, Jennifer Klein, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, we’re going to keep our eye on Yale and see what happens in the next few weeks and months.

Jennifer Klein 36:35
Great. Thank you. And there are graduate teachers at New York University and Columbia that are also trying to persevere against a very aggressive assault to deny them. What are their rights?

Coming soon