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Where Have All the Tenured Radicals Gone?
Robert D. Johnston
Robert Johnston is assistant professor of history at Yale University and author of a forthcoming book on middle-class radicalism in Portland, Oregon.
When I arrived to teach in Yale’s history department in the fall of 1994, I was excited about a number of things. Not the least of them was the idea that I would be teaching in a department that honored politics, especially my kind of politics. The faculty exemplified a connection between scholarly inquiry and radical visions. David Montgomery, for instance, was a preeminent labor historian and a scholar who insisted on the primacy of class in human relationships. David Brion Davis had produced a stunning and eloquent critique of capitalist hegemony, in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Nancy Cott was among the leading feminist historians of our time.
These and many other professors had trained graduate students who had produced prodigious amounts of wonderful—and plenty of left-wing—scholarship. Indeed, as a relatively mild and gentle populist, I was wondering how soon it would be before I would be taken to task for being an insufficient leftist in the city that had housed one of the nodes of the Radical History Review collective.
I soon found that the graduate student union struggles at Yale had twisted the political environment in strange ways. No longer would I have to worry about being insufficiently leftist. Indeed, my tenured radical colleagues were almost all, with very few exceptions (David Montgomery being the primary one), viscerally opposed to GESO—the Graduate Students and Employees Organization.
This was primarily a matter of chatter until the end of the fall 1995 semester, when GESO staged its well-known grade strike (discussed fully in Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis). Then the rage against GESO truly poured out, led by my distinguished senior colleagues. It's not as if the history department was worse than others in this regard; indeed, in mild (and ineffectual) ways, history professors tried to contain some of the worst excesses of administrative hostility and vindictiveness toward union members. If anything, post-colonial literary critics were even more retrograde on the labor question than left-wing historians.
Why Does It Matter?
I want to explain here the opposition, hostility, or even apathy to union organizing in the places you'd least expect it. Regarding apathy, many of us found that we simply couldn't get those few senior faculty who were on "our side" to do much, if any, of the nitty-gritty grunt work of organizing, when it came to offering support for GESO and for the other Yale unions that went out on strike during the 1996 spring semester. Indeed, left-wing faculty sometimes had the most hostile reaction to the idea of graduate student unions. On one occasion, one of my senior colleagues—echoing sentiments I heard elsewhere numerous times—blurted out that "during the ’60s I was involved in real politics. I helped occupy the president's office at my college in order to bring the Vietnam War to an end. What these kids are doing now is simply the revolt of the pampered, pretending that they're exploited."
Beyond an insulting—and fairly constant—use of terms such as "kids," "children," and "juveniles" to describe thoughtful adult graduate students, it was clear that such a reaction indicated just how personally threatening graduate student unions were to senior faculty. What was it, then, that caused such good leftists, or at least liberals, to come to such conservative conclusions about the most pressing political matter on campus?
I am still not sure that I have the answer to this mainly political, but partly psychological, question. Material reality explains a good part of it: graduate students do most of the hard work of teaching, which otherwise regular faculty members would have to do. Or, if one prefers explanations based on power and status, it is readily apparent just how easily tenured professors at places like Yale get sucked into an extremely close identification with the institution. This goes well beyond the kind of loyalty that an institution needs in order to run effectively. Rather, it involves a sense that the tenured faculty own the institution and, as in most large-scale organizations, the most valuable kind of property is control. Graduate student unions interfere with the sense that tenured faculty know what is best for the institution—and can decide on what is best without the substantive input of those below them.
Many professors seemed to take genuine glee in watching the administration crush the grade strike, and the anti-union rhetoric at the Yale College faculty meeting where the strike was discussed was venomous. The senior administration (which consisted exclusively of regular Yale faculty members) firmly upheld the right—indeed, it was suggested, even the obligation—of faculty members to include reports of students' union activities in their letters of recommendation, even after the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and other professional associations rebuked this action as a violation of academic freedom.
Rarely did one hear outright anti-union sentiment; indeed, many of the anti-GESO faculty had been fairly prominent supporters of Local 34, the clerical and technical workers' union, during its strike for recognition in 1984-1985. Instead, the special nature of graduate student status was emphasized. Unions were for factory operatives or coal miners; graduate students were privileged would-be members of the elite. More respectfully, distinguished scholars discussed how important it was to create a semi-sacred cultural space outside of the dictates of both market and modern organization. Graduate education was one of the last places in our culture where a non-pecuniary apprenticeship mode of vocation could be preserved.
On the surface, these are compelling arguments, especially if one has already taken for granted that the general decision over these issues should be made by faculty members or administrators, not by the graduate students themselves. Yet, it was ironically GESO, with its strong stand against casualization, that was most effectively combating the real forces that were undermining "traditional" academic relationships. Even the most virulent anti-union senior faculty at Yale bemoan the replacement of full-time faculty positions with part-time work, but none of them has a plan to staunch the flow. One would at least think that if this was a genuine priority for them, they would be more willing to engage in a dialogue with the one institution at the university that has brought this fundamental issue to the table. That they didn't and don't is testament to a fundamental flaw in the way they look at the world.
Where to from Here?
As things look now, there will be more efforts to organize graduate students and adjunct professors in the near future. For those embarking on an organizing campaign, I share the following thoughts. Graduate student organizing will almost certainly not get anyone hit over the head by the "boss-man," but it can jeopardize student-faculty relationships, affect chances for academic jobs (although GESO activists have done remarkably well on the job market), and create personal and professional tensions in a variety of relationships. Graduate students, in all likelihood, will be on their own—or, as is increasingly likely, have the federal government and organized labor, but not the senior professoriate, on their side. (If forced to choose, though, I'd choose labor and the feds.) It should be noted that coming to grips with political isolation can be empowering. It undercuts one of the most detrimental qualities perhaps inherent in the hierarchical nature of graduate education: We (the tenured faculty) know better than you (the graduate students and non-tenured faculty) because we are older, have been around the block more, understand the world better, and because, in the end, we're smarter. Such paternalistic and patronizing assumptions are often, if not generally, untrue in the world of humanistic education, where each generation has to unshackle itself from its elders just as much as it has to learn the extremely valuable wisdom that our best sages should—with humility—hand down to us. And it's certainly untrue in the world of university politics, where the cold brute facts of power and institutional prestige operate just as coldly as in the real world.
So, where have all the tenured radicals gone? The radical impulses of the New Left generation survive, and it is certainly worth trying to bring them around during an organizing drive. But if, or rather when, they don't come around, it's time to cut bait. It’s better to speak their language—of democracy and equality—while making clear that you take these terms more seriously than they do, serious enough to make higher education institutions imbibe them.
http://www.socialpolicy.org/SU00/johnston.html<x-html>
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