Change comes slow to Yale academics

"The academy," explains Marianne Lafrance, a professor in the Women's and Gender Studies department, "is by definition a very conservative place." As a result, disciplines such as African-American Studies or Women's and Gender Studies have come about only through external pressure reinforcing academic interest.

While Yale has for some time had both Af-Am and Women's Studies, their status has been constantly changing. Part of the problem is an inflexible division Yale makes between programs and departments. Programs, such as American Studies, are evolving areas of study that are highly interdisciplinary. Unlike full departments, they have limited funding and no tenure-track faculty of their own.

Last February, tension reached a head when the Af-Am Program Chair, Hazel Carby, resigned in response to comments made by University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, which Carby interpreted as being personally insulting to her and to Yale's Af-Am program. Those comments, coupled with delays in departmental status for her program, compelled Carby to resign.

It turned out, however, that the Yale Corporation had already been considering departmental status for Af-Am Studies and that Carby had not been notified. The status was approved at a Yale Corporation meeting, and Carby decided to return to Yale when her leave of absence ended after the fall. The delay, explained Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, had been a result of a need to clarify the criteria for departmental status.

This clarification made, other programs started to consider whether they might make the jump to departmental status, including Women's and Gender Studies. In the interim, though, the program's lack of resources has been cushioned by Arthur Kramer, SY '49, who donated $1 million toward the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies this April. Although Larry Kramer, BR '57, a famous AIDS activist and playwright, had originally tried to endow professorships in gay studies, this plan represented a compromise between Yale's academic interests and the Kramers' political ones. Money from the Kramer initiative will help support the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies, which brings visiting professors each year.

Similar questions of status also surround graduate students. While some graduate students maintain that as teaching assistants, they are employees, the Administration and others argue that they are simply students receiving stipends. The Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) has been trying for some time to unionize graduate students, and recent victories for New York University graduate students before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have given GESO hope. Also last year, the NLRB, in a settlement following threats against students by professors and administrators during a 1996 grade strike, required Yale to place notices around campus affirming the right of "employees" to unionize.

But even if students have the right to unionize, will they? Yale certainly hopes not. "The NLRB, in applying federal labor law, should not conclude or rule that graduate students are employees," Office of Public Affairs Director Thomas Conroy maintains. "That has been the University's position ever since the issue arose [in 1995] and that has not changed." And some graduate students agree. Although the majority of graduate students do not belong to GESO, the organization maintains that this is the result of official opposition to their efforts.

This January, History Professor Paul Kennedy announced that he would not teach his lecture class again if there was the possibility of his TAs going on strike. Kennedy maintains that this is not a threat to students' right to unionize, but simply an exercise of free speech. He notes that during the 1996 grade strike, undergraduates were upset, and even hurt in applying to graduate school, because of withheld grades.

In past years, the history department has suffered a severe shortage of teaching assistants, forcing popular classes—including John Gaddis' Cold War and Jonathan Spence's History of Modern China—to be capped, usually excluding freshmen and sophomores. Although solutions have been proposed, no major change came about this year.

Tenure has also been a source of contention. Students frequently protest the lack of diversity throughout the tenured faculty, and diversity is one of the goals cited in Yale's recent reaccredidation report. This year, Yale attended a conference at MIT where universities made a commitment to tenure more women in science. Yale agreed to work toward "equity for, and full participation by, women faculty." That such a small rhetorical shift represents progress demonstrates just how geologic the pace of change can be at Yale.

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