As promised, here's more on Yale's would-be graduate student union's role in the reparations scam.

Last August, three Yale doctoral candidates published "Yale, Slavery, and Abolition," a report aimed at exposing Yale's historic ties to slavery and institutionalized racism. That report, which received international attention (including coverage in The New York Times and London's Independent), was published by the Amistad Committee, a Connecticut-based group that was organized during the mid-nineteenth century to free the Africans who had mutinied aboard the Amistad.

Thinkcurrent.com did a good job of covering the various reactions the report triggered. The New Haven community demanded money. Students at Yale agitated to change the names of buildings bearing the names of former slaveowners. Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who is leading the reparations charge, called for Yale to announce its intention to "affirmatively address the practices and policies that have resulted from this." DiversityInc.com quoted Molefi Kete Asanti, a professor of African-American studies at Temple, calling for Yale "to finally ante up and provide scholarships for African-American students who qualify to get into Yale."

Last December, The Yale Daily News broke a story exposing glaring inaccuracies in the report and questioning the motives of its authors. It seems that "Yale, Slavery, and Abolition" was sponsored (financed, promoted, distributed) by the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, which represents Yale's unions. It was written by leading members of GESO (Yale's Graduate Employees and Student Organization), Antony Dugdale (philosophy), J.J. Fueser (American Studies), and J. Celso de Castro Alves (history); Dugdale's work on the project was paid for as part of his full-time job for the union Local 34. The web site www.yaleslavery.org was also designed by a union employee and paid for with union money. The errors in the report are legion, the report's release was timed to coincide with GESO's push for recognition, and the conclusion that the report was part of a calculated attempt to shore up support for questionable causes by smearing Yale is inescapable.

Such was the substance of the Daily's editorial: "At best, 'Yale, Slavery and Abolition' is a well-intentioned work marred by unnecessary antagonism and the appearance of impropriety. At worst, it represents the co-opting of the darkest chapters of American history for present-day political gain. We hope that the report, both in spite of its failings and because of them, provokes an incisive, morally rigorous debate over Yale's relationship to slavery. We also hope that it produces a campuswide examination of the use and abuse of scholarship, especially in a year when Yale and its unions will often be at odds." Amen. You can read more about the errors in the report in the April 2002 edition of The Yale Standard.

The specific absurdities of GESO's actions aside, the episode speaks loudly to the more general ethical and institutional problems posed by the push for grad student unions (at private universities, and at some of the better-heeled public ones). It's not just that grad students repeatedly discredit themselves with their union activity, but that grad student union activity is a symptom of a more general, and more disturbing, impoverishment within graduate student culture.

That impoverishment comes in part from the misery of pursuing advanced study in fields where there are no academic jobs (this is the plight of the humanities doctoral candidate, whose chances of landing a decent tenure track job are miniscule, and whose degree will be all but worthless outside of academe). It's hard to concentrate on your studies when you know there is a very good chance you are spending your twenties barrelling down a blind professional alley. Union activity ministers to this discontent by providing an outlet for it and a measure of momentary material gain--but it does so without addressing its cause, which is not the oppression of grad students in the present moment, but the anticipatory betrayal they feel at the likelihood that they will not be able to find a decent job. In this sense, grad student unions are an extremely conservative approach to a problem that has less to do with the working conditions of TAs than with the imminent disappearance of certain fields of academic study.

The impoverishment of graduate student culture is intellectual, too, and grows out of academe's pretensions to radicalism (pretensions that scholars such as Russell Jacoby have shown are very safely and effectively frozen within the bureaucratic structure of academic life). Among other things, what we have in GESO's slave report is a prime example of what happens when a political agenda becomes the driving force behind research and scholarship. In the academic humanities today, the scholarship that is considered most necessary and valuable is that which is motivated by political goals. But it is a real and pressing question whether genuine scholarship is even possible within a system that is increasingly coming to require intellectuals to take an activist stance, and that arguably spends more time training its students to see the world through radical, protesting eyes than to master their discipline and think for themselves.