GESO/GASO rhetoric: we've heard it before

BY MATTHEW FERRARO

GESO. GASO. GSA. The presence of these acronyms in the headlines of the Yale Daily News and the Yale Herald has become commonplace. Nearly every week, a major campus publication runs at least one article, if not more, detailing the latest skirmish that involves either the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), the proto-union of graduate school teaching assistants that seeks official union status, GASO, its unorganized group of critics, the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA), the officially recognized graduate student government organization, or the Yale Administration. Whe-ther GESO and the Grad school are sparring over a stipend situation involving an art graduate student or GASO is lambasting GESO again, the issue is often cast in black-and-white terms. Publically the debate devolved to a rhetorical struggle between two outspoken opponents, while the larger picture—the sentiments of the grad school population—remain unexpressed as long as it refrains from publicly casting its opinion one way or the other.

COURTESY GESO

While most of the press attention focuses on the day-to-day battles between these sides, a fundamental issue to which GESO dedicates a lot of its energy receives little attention. According to GESO Chair J.T. Way, GRD '05, the organization seeks to address what it sees as the pernicious increase in American universities' use of graduate students in place of tenured faculty members. By coordinating with other organizations across the country to lobby universities to expand the number of full-time professors, Way casts GESO as working "literally to save the integrity of higher education in this country."

COURTESY GASO

DESPITE SUCH LOFTY RHETORIC, some critics disagree with GESO's methods. Other students express distaste for GESO's aggressive recruitment efforts, a criticism that has been leveled against the group in the past. All these debates rage while the true sentiment of the majority of the graduate student body remains a mystery. Recent victories for unions at other private universities have invigorated interest in GESO here on campus, Way said, but GESO has yet to gain official union status, and the preceise number of GESO members remains unclear. However, Way claimed that Yale's TAs will "absolutely" be unionized in the near future.

While undergraduates most often hear about GESO when it scuffles with the Administration over stipends or similar day-to-day graduate student issues, the growing "casualization of teaching" nation-wide is just as central to GESO's mission, Way said. According to Way, the "casualization of teaching specifically means using casual teaching labor instead of full-time teaching labor." He went on to say that "it is the same thing that happens in every corporate environment. As universities which theoretically are not profit-oriented institutions have adopted more and more corporate methods of management, they've come to understand that they can downsize the workforce. They can rely on casual, part-time, unprotected labor to do the vast majority of the work that used to be done by people who had good jobs. We object to this trend." According to a study conducted by GESO called "Casual In Blue: Yale and the Academic Labor Market" posted on the group's website, "70 percent of the undergraduate teaching [at Yale] is performed by non-permanent teachers—graduate students and instructors not on the tenure track." The GESO website also cites another study released by the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU), with which GESO is affiliated. The study says that graduate teachers account for 18 percent of all teaching in institutions of higher learning.

WAY ABHORS THIS TREND. "I think that every person who works in, or cares about, higher education in this country can look at the figures that show how much the professorate has shrunk and come to the conclusion that universities should be hiring more faculty," he said. To combat this trend, GESO is sharing ideas and communicating with groups all across the country, groups that include "graduate students and post-docs and temporary faculty and even full-time faculty," Way said. "We can transform what's happening in the Academy." He also cited Yale as a "pace-setting" institution that would be able to pressure other universities if it were to hire more faculty.

FILE PHOTO GESO members file into a meeting on Fri., Aor 17, 1998. Grad students, faced with the decision about whether to unionize, must comtemplate the issues that matter most to them.

Some of GESO's detractors do not see the issue in the same light. John Gehman, GRD '02, who maintains the website of GASO—the anti-GESO student organization that prides itself on a very loose organizational structure and a meaningless acronym—sees GESO's push for more professorships as motivated by selfishness and a desire to create jobs that today's graduate students will occupy in the future.

By making it more expensive to hire unionized graduate students, GESO, along with similar organizations across the country, hopes to urge universities to hire more full professors instead. "This will create the jobs that [graduate students] understood to be their entitlement when entering graduate school," Gehman said. "It will also, quite obviously, reduce the number of graduate students accepted." Gehman went on to say that "GESO is not at all about protecting the traditional concept of higher education as they pretend, but is instead about manipulating the job market for one generation of graduate students. Their solution creates jobs for themselves, and reduces competition by cutting the number of graduate students behind them." Gehman also argued against GESO's emphasis on tenure. "Who is GESO to tell us that the tenure-track professorship is the only acceptable career path?" Gehman said. "They would cut the numbers of graduate students, regardless of the alternate ambitions that those graduate students may have had."

Gehman also believes that graduate students should have realized that employment opportunities were dim for post-doctoral students before they enrolled. He claims that if they came to graduate school thinking they were guaranteed a job afterward, they were making an ill-informed decision. "I believe their attempts to hold somebody other than themselves responsible for this is the core of the problem, but that's irrelevant to the solution," he said.

WAY ENTIRELY REJECTS THIS CRITICISM. REGARD-ing the first point, he contends that there would still be jobs for graduate students. In fact, there would be more jobs for them. "You can think about it logically. Why on earth would graduate students organize themselves out of a job?" Way said. He also responded, "People do not go to graduate school to make money hand over fist. They go to graduate school because they care deeply about what they study. If the argument is `you love what you do, therefore you don't deserve ever to make a decent living,' I disagree with that. If the argument is you knew the job market was lousy and therefore you shouldn't have come to graduate school, I think that's patently absurd."

IF THE FLOOD OF ARTICLES PRINTED IN UNIVERSITY publications is any indication, the GESO-GASO war of words will continue to run fast and furiously. But as of right now, the debate is inconclusive; the discourse is dominated by those who are most outspoken, and their views tend to represent the extremes. The media reports on those who are most vocal, yet average graduate student opinion remains a mystery. Gehman claims that GESO does not have the support of the majority of the students but "pretends to be the monopoly voice of graduate students anyway." Way responds, "These critics have no idea how many students GESO does or does not represent. [The critics] represent absolutely no one but themselves." He is emphatic that interest in GESO is increasing "exponentially" and membership rolls are growing "every hour." He insists that soon GESO will have the "super-majority" (70 percent) of graduate students desired before GESO appeals to the National Labor Relations Board for recognition as an official union. But Way declines to give a rough figure for the number of current GESO members. "Even if I did know, I wouldn't [divulge that number] to the press during a card-drive," he said. The key to the controversy lies with the "silent majority" of graduate students who have yet to decisively weigh in on the issue. Until evidence is made public, it is unlikely the debate will be resolved.

Graphics courtesy GESO and GASO websites.

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