Yale vs. AFL-CIO

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, June 12, 1996

In its way Memorial Day Commencement at Yale may have been the most notable. Under its newly elected leader John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO decided to use Yale's stalled contract negotiations with its local employees' union to make a point with national resonance for the 1990's. Under Sweeney, indeed, the AFL-CIO has been becoming more pugnacious as its membership drops.

The whole thing, the employees' strikes, and now the big Commencement demonstration, must have made many at Yale feel somewhat odd about the role in which they had been cast.

Not for decades has Yale been anything approaching a bastion of free-market economics. Since the 1930's, Yale has been pretty orthodox Keynesian in its economic teaching, with considerable hospitality to Marxists of different kinds.

Today I would judge the climate at Yale to range from "soft socialism" on the Right through sterner versions of socialism as one moves left on the spectrum, until you reach the Humanities, where you find quite a few nostalgic revolutionaries. For example, the frequently avowed goal of the so-called "deconstructionists" — in literature, but also in law and philosophy of science — is to overthrow the "bourgeois" order in society.

Yet here on Memorial Day was Yale, in all the bourgeois splendor of its Commencement, the faculty in its grandeur of colorful gowns, the seniors in plainer but still proud gowns, the parents assembled in their blazers and fine dresses — parents, bourgeois, many of whom had spent about $30,000 per year ($120,000 for the package) to send a student to Yale. Under the elms, amid those neo-Gothic walls, and in the historic quadrangle of the Old Campus, they surely felt it all had been worth it.

Not a deconstructionist or Third World revolutionary was on the program. The music was definitely "Eurocentric."

Yet, for all that, there was the demonstration outside on the New Haven Common, featuring mild versions of revolutionary street theater. About 4,000 protesters showed up, some of them — electricians, miners — bused in from Pennsylvania and other distant points. They had a huge loudspeaker, intended to blast away at the decorum of the Commencement and penetrate the walls of the Old Campus.

Many of the protesters made a stab at Abbie Hoffman-style street theater. Some had painted faces, some blue or green hair. The amplifier blared loud rock music, slogans ("Contract, Contract, Contract" and "No Contract, No Peace"), and speeches by various labor leaders, organizers, rank and file workers, and, inevitably, Jesse Jackson.

The purpose of the street theater is to simulate revolution through disrespect for law, order, and authority. Serious street theater, like that preceding the French Revolution, burned effigies of surrogates for the King, then proceeded to burn effigies of the King himself. Mockery, noise, and pseudo-violence escalating toward violence are the signatures of revolutionary street theater. Public nudity and other extravagances may mock the social order targeted.

In New Haven, the protesters remained mild. The booming rock music was meant to be insulting, but no more than that. The painted faces, etc., were mere tokens of serious street theater. No one was injured. In the issue at hand, both the union and Yale have reasonable objectives.

Yale wants to "contract out" various services to non-union providers. Its students are demanding this as regards food services. This is the 1990's, and the old dining halls won't quite do. The students want vegetarian food, Thai food, specialty pizzas, and whatnot. Yale sees a way to save money through non-union labor, and clearly wants the union out somewhere down the line.

The union wants to protect the jobs of the workers, and, not incidentally, protect its own power by keeping the Yale workforce unionized as long as possible.

Yale and the union so far have been unable to reach an agreement on just what amount of phase out and just what amount of job protection will minimally satisfy each party.

But it must seem strange and ironic for Yale to find itself in a position little different from that of a... a... Capitalist. Little different from AT&T. Put away that Nation magazine and open your Wall Street Journal. Open your Forbes, by God.

Still, never fear. Yale will go right back on the next day of classes to lecturing its students about the evils of capitalism, the glories of the Third World, and the terrible lot of Victims in America.

I once had a taste of this delicious hypocrisy at a General Meeting of the Dartmouth faculty. The assembled professors were ablaze with anger at apartheid in South Africa. They wanted the College to divest pronto from Coca-Cola and various other villains who were doing business with that miscreant state.

Amid the hubub, some fool stood up and moved that Dartmouth demand that TIAA, the corporation that handles faculty pensions and makes money to do so in the Stock Market, divest from all companies making profits in South Africa.

This idea met with total silence among the divesters. Total silence. Not even a seconder. The wretch must have been jesting, someone said.

Well, as the Yale motto has it, Lux et Veritas, or, Light and Truth.

Yale vs. AFL-CIO

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