Yale hunger strike
Yale President Peter Salovey, in a letter to the Yale community, explained that Yale is not ready to recognize Local 33 as representing Yale graduate students because only 228 of the 2,600 Ph.D students in the Graduate School participated in the election to determine whether Yale teaching assistants would unionize. He noted that the Graduate Student Assembly, a democratically-elected body of gradaute students also opposed Local 33 decision to hold elections separately in each Yale department, rather than one general election across all departments, as was done at other schools in the past. Whatever the outcome of the Yale appeal to the NLRB in Washington, DC, the decision (of, primarily and most importantly, Humanities departments) to unionize and the willingness of their PhD’s to hunger strike point to a larger and more serious problem President Salovay needs to address.
Dealing with Local 33 and fighting unionization through the legal system is only part of the picture. The other, more important aspect of the on-going dispute is the state and the future of graduate education in the Humanities at Yale.
Should Yale establish new scholarships and financial assistance programs for PhD students in the Humanities? Should Yale fund more Research Fellowships for Humanities students working on their dissertations? Should Yale pay higher Teaching Assistant wages in the Humanities? Should Yale limit the number of years Humanities students should be allowed to stay enrolled as PhD students to 10? To 7? To 5? To 4? Should Yale cut the number of the incoming PhD students in the Humanities to reflect its ability (or lack thereof) to fund their training? Should Yale hire its own PhD students in their final years as Lecturers to teach undergraduate writing courses, freshmen seminars, etc? Should Yale otherwise subsidize the costs of its PhD students in the Humanities by offering free housing, meal plans, health care coverage, child care subsidies?
Just as Yale has risen to the challenge of improving its graduate education in the sciences and engineering, Yale must also demonstrate its commitment to the Humanities. And we must not allow the on-going dispute over graduate student unionization to distract us from this larger, more important goal.
