Author: Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13:

On June 14, 1971, political philosopher Hannah Arendt crossed a picket line of striking Yale University food service, maintenance, physical plant, and custodial workers to receive an honorary degree at the university’s annual commencement exercises. In the throes of what was the longest strike in university history, university administrators were determined to project an air of normalcy to alumni and the families of graduates, even though the previous six weeks had been anything but. Instead, Arendt and her fellow laureates (among whom were the choreographer Martha Graham, Harvard presidentdesignate Derek Bok, and West German Chancellor and former labor leader Willy Brandt) were witness to a chaotic scene. New Haven police, led by a future mayor of the city, charged a picket line of Italian-American, Irish-American, Black, and Puerto-Rican strikers and their supporters. The picketers were attempting to disrupt the customary procession of graduates from the New Haven Green to Yale’s adjacent Old Campus, to bring home the university’s labor crisis to its donors, laureates, and alumni, and thus to bring the university to the table with a favorable settlement. In front of Yale’s faculty and graduates, and those who chose to cross picket lines to be honored, the police beat the strikers with batons and bloodied their skulls. A signal moment in a decade of long and bitter strikes at Yale, the display of violence by the New Haven city police was particularly significant not only because it suggested that the city police had been deputized as strikebreakers by a wealthy private university, but also because it was directed against striking employees of a university whose specific role in the city’s political economy had become increasingly important to critiques of New Haven’s urban renewal over the previous half-decade. The symbolism was rich: the police violence reflected the position of university administrators and city leaders to deny workers’ insistence on their indispensability to the university during one of its most important annual ceremonies, one which was also a performative enactment of Yale’s relationship to downtown New Haven’s most public of spaces. Workers had refused to disappear, and for this they had been beaten. This dissertation foregrounds those workers, their battles against university management, and the role their labor played in the transformation of the postwar research university in the 1960s and 1970s. I begin with the commencement melee, even though it chronologically follows the majority of the history this dissertation explores, because it remains perhaps the best remembered moment from the first four decades of the history of the union which has, in one form or another, represented Yale’s blue collar service employees since a CIO-backed organizing drive and one-day strike won recognition for the union in November, 1941. Union members still discuss the 1971 graduation action today. Even those who were not present may have heard stories from co-workers and family members of the day that the New Haven police attacked their picket line with billy clubs while hundreds of Yale graduates waited to march across the street and graduate. That signal moment was itself the product of a long history of defeat, rebellion, organizing, alliances, and solidarity which this dissertation attempts to recover and bring to the fore.