After weekend events, GESO debate rages on

On the heels of Provost Alison Richard's e-mail to the entire Yale student body attacking the Graduate Employees and Students Organization's (GESO) report on the status of teaching at Yale, GESO members set out to prove the report's fundamental claim that Yale exploits, or "casualizes," its labor. In a jam-packed weekend, GESO teamed up with Locals 34 and 35 for a rally on Fri., Apr. 16, and followed up with a series of panels on Sat., Apr. 17.

To Richard's eyes, the rally was poorly attended. But GESO Chair Curtis Mitchell, GRD '03, saw the event as a victory for the organization. "The rally brought two major gains," he explained. "First, it was a wake-up call to the Administration that casualization is a nationwide problem. Second, a lot of people there learned about GESO and its goals. The total number of grad students there was around 400. That means that 20 percent of the graduate student population stood in the rain for the rally. It was an amazing turnout."

The weekend's events marked GESO's latest efforts to drum up support for its cause. At the group's semi-annual membership meeting on Fri., Apr. 16, GESO decided to send a delegation to the Congress of Graduate Employee Unions to form a national campaign. According to Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) Chair Anthony Dugdale, GRD '99, the rally also received favorable attention from The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Public Radio.

By joining the national campaign, GESO hopes to push the Administration to give a detailed response to its demands. Mitchell hopes the Administration will publish a report similar to "Casual in Blue," GESO's report, to make explicit the University's perception of teaching at Yale. "I'd love for them to come up with a hard study of who's standing in front of the classroom," Dugdale agreed.

Yale, however, believes Richard's letter was a sufficient response to GESO. "The Provost wrote her letter because a number of members of the faculty urged her to set the record straight," University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, said.

Rather than counter GESO's numbers with numbers of its own, then, Yale has raised theoretical objections to the report. The University claims that since "Casual in Blue" calculates teaching hours from the point of view of the graduate student teaching, not from the point of view of the undergraduate being taught, it doesn't paint the right picture. "Students recognize that graduate students are used primarily as section leaders, doing from a student's perspective one classroom hour per week while the professor does two or three hours per week," Levin said.

But GESO wants harder data. "In general, the Administration's response has been to look at our statistics and say they are not a good portrayal of the undergraduate experience here. We don't have statistics regarding that," Mitchell said. "The report is about how Yale chooses to get education done. How is Yale choosing to do that work? Through part-time, temporary workers. Yale really can't dispute our numbers."

GESO's numbers, for their part, make up only a fraction of the graduate student population, and many grad students reject the organization's aims. "If GESO were recognized, it would take $40 out of the pocket of every grad student every year, whether you were studying in Teheran or living in Los Angeles," Michael Rubin, DC '94, GRD '00, said. According to him, "Casual in Blue" was simply a collection of manipulated statistics, and the only thing the organization will succeed in doing is making the University look bad. "GESO is just better than the University at public relations," Rubin said. "Administrators have seen it all before."

Dugdale is confident that despite the current situation, Yale will eventually address GESO's concerns. "It's inevitable that Yale will have to sit down and negotiate with us," he said. "I think that turning away from having professors teach classes is a problem throughout academia," Mitchell added. "Yale is in an unusual place of being able to lead
by example."

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