A brief history of academic controversy at Yale

JULIA TIERNAN/YH GESO members file into their semi-annual meeting at Center Church earlier this year.

By Darby Saxbe

Ah, the ivory towers of the Ivy League...it's easy to think of the pursuit of books and study as a refuge from political maelstroms raging in the real world. However, Yale has erupted in recent years with a number of controversies surrounding academic issues.

If your art history TA mentions GESO next year, she's not talking about that white stuff you use to prepare your canvas. GESO, the Graduate Employee Student Organization, has been trying for several years to organize graduate students into a union, but have met with strong opposition from Yale administrators. The crux of the matter: are graduate students employees or students? GESO members claim that graduate teaching assistants handle the bulk of Yale's undergraduate teaching load, but are not adequately paid for their work and do not receive sufficient health or dental insurance. Yale argues that graduate students are apprentices, and that their teaching duties are part of their educational experience. The tension between GESO and Yale culminated in a strike in December of 1996, in which TAs refused to turn in grades for their undergraduate students. Yale administrators denied spring teaching appointments to those students who had participated in the strike. As a result, the Modern Language Association, the nation's largest organization of professional academics, voted to censure Yale, and the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the University for their treatment of graduate students who participated in the strike. Yale appealed the decision. After a long trial, the NLRB dismissed charges against Yale, but left the larger question of whether graduate students are employees unanswered. If you are curious about the strike and its fallout, check out "Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis," a recently published book of essays inspired by the GESO debate.

Your TAs are not the only teachers at Yale who might have a bone to pick with the University. Yale's tenure process has been a source of recent controversy. Many colleges and universities fill tenured positions by drawing from their own junior faculty. Yale, however, conducts a national search, without giving special preference to its own professors. Yale can claim to have a truly top-notch faculty, but turnover is high among non-tenured teachers, who constitute the majority of the teaching staff. A number of popular professors, among them Diane Kunz of International Studies and Lee Wandel of the history department, left Yale after failing to get tenure. When a national study reported that minorities comprised just six percent and women 11 percent of tenured faculty at Yale—the lowest in the Ivy League—an undergraduate group called the Tenure Action Committee formed to examine the issue.

Last year's most talked-about academic controversy at Yale was sparked by Larry Kramer, BR '57. Kramer, a playwright and founder of Act-Up, an AIDS activist group, spent his four years at Yale as a suicidal, closeted homosexual. Hoping to help current gay students feel accepted at Yale, he offered the University millions of dollars to endow two permanent professorships in gay studies. The Yale Administration, arguing that gay studies was not a sufficiently well-established academic field, turned down the large gift. The ensuing brouhaha recalled a 1991 situation in which Lee Bass, SM '79, offered Yale $20 million to fund a program in Western Civilization. Yale refused the gift because Bass asked to choose his own professors.

Although Kramer's hopes of funding a gay studies department were not realized, a number of new academic tracks have recently become instituted. A proposal to establish an environmental engineering program within the engineering department is currently under consideration; a one-year biomedical engineering program was established two years ago; an interdisciplinary major called Ethnicity, Race and Migration was introduced last year. The program, which will bring together faculty from departments including history, political science, ociology, anthropology and economics, will be offered as a second major comprised of 12 term courses and a senior essay. It was adopted after students and faculty rallied to expand the Ethnic Studies concentration within the American Studies major.

If you think of the classroom as an island of calm in tempestuous world, think again. Many of Yale's hottest debates have been waged over how and what you will study in the next four years. At Yale, academics are at the heart of a maelstrom of change.

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