How GESO Is Influencing Scholarship

... The Yale union battles, whatever their outcome, have already left a lasting imprint that goes deeper than the leaflets and counterleaflets piling up in New Haven. In a small way, the conflict has left its mark on scholarship itself.

Several of the graduate-student union's most visible organizers in the mid-1990s -- an era marked by a bitterly contested grade strike -- are now junior professors of history, political science, and American studies at other campuses across the country.

Those young scholars bonded at Yale a decade ago in part because of their mutual frustration with then-fashionable academic leftists "who were willing to analyze power but not willing to build social movements," says Corey Robin, an assistant professor of political science at City University of New York's Brooklyn College who spent much of the 1990s as a GESO organizer.

During the past three years, a number of Yale graduate-school labor veterans have published several acclaimed books on economic and political conflict. All of them say that, in one way or another, their scholarly projects have been profoundly affected by their bruising experiences at Yale.

Skeptical at First

Mr. Robin, who is perhaps the most prominent of the GESO veterans, published his first book last fall. In Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford University Press), he explores how theorists from Montesquieu to Judith Shklar have understood the roles played by anxiety and terror in political life. Among the book's themes is that contemporary liberal and communitarian theorists have paid far too little attention to private-sector tyranny in the workplace.

When Mr. Robin arrived at Yale as a graduate student in 1990, he initially found the nascent union movement tedious and misguided. He attended a GESO event during his first week on campus. "They were going on about how Yale is a feudal institution where everyone had to rely on the patronage of the faculty," he recalls. "And I sort of raised my hand and said, What's so bad about that?"

Within a year, however, Mr. Robin grew much more sympathetic to the union's arguments. In particular, he was angered by the manner in which the university established a policy that required graduate students to complete their doctorates within six years. "There was no grandfather clause," he says. "I had friends who were in their seventh year, who were suddenly not allowed to register or to use the library."

Mr. Robin was only in his first year, and at some remove from the rules' impact. But he was bothered by what he saw as the university's imperiousness. "I'm not a lazy person," he says. "I certainly believe in getting work done and all the rest of it. But there was something about this whole chunk-'em-in-chunk-'em-out philosophy that I really did find noxious."

New Vantage Point

At a rally that spring, Mr. Robin came to see Yale's student-union activists as "people who actually had a view of the university that was quite close to my own."

Mr. Robin had conceived of writing a dissertation on fear before he joined the union, but the eventual project was heavily shaped by his own labor activism. Battling with the university administration, he says, "gave me a real vantage point for reading these theorists, or certain passages that no one had ever really glossed. And the focus on the workplace would absolutely never have been in the book had it not been for this."

In Mr. Robin's view of events, the university successfully intimidated once-sympathetic professors into withdrawing any support for the union, especially during the hugely controversial grade strike of December 1995 and January 1996. Almost all of the union's work stoppages, including last month's, have been simple "classroom strikes" -- that is, the participants declined to teach their classes. But in early 1996, the union used its own version of the nuclear option, refusing to calculate and submit fall-semester grades for the undergraduates they taught. At that point, some faculty members who had been sympathetic began to turn against the union -- in certain cases, Mr. Robin says, because they feared that the administration would withhold perks and privileges from professors seen as too friendly to the union. (Tom Conroy, a spokesman for the university, says, "It is completely untrue that any faculty member or any student has been mistreated in any way because of their personal position or opinion regarding graduate-student unionization.")

Mr. Robin grew interested in more flagrant forms of workplace tyranny, such as factories' restrictions on when workers may use the bathroom. Such old-fashioned bullying, Mr. Robin argues, is barely explored in contemporary political theory. "Anybody who spent a day in a typical American workplace -- all those sort of Foucauldian ideas about diffuse administrative power, all of that stuff would just fly out the window."

"This is as old-regime as it gets," Mr. Robin says. "To my mind, the sheer intimacy of the supervisor and supervised, and the kind of real coercive authority there ... Jeremy Bentham's panopticon would be a paradise compared to this."

Mr. Robin, who writes frequently for political magazines such as the Boston Review and The Nation, is now at work on two books. In collaboration with Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University, he is writing a study of how the government and civil society interacted to create an atmosphere of repression during the McCarthy period. The second, more ambitious project will explore themes and continuities in counterrevolutionary movements in the West during the last 300 years....