The Rhetoric of Graduate Employee Unionization: Critical Rhetoric and the Yale Grade Strike

Abstract

In the fall of 1995, graduate student employees at Yale University withheld grades in the courses they taught to win recognition for their union. This essay offers a critical rhetorical analysis of the Yale Grade Strike. This essay argues that the labor identity constructed at Yale is predicated on the historical-material circumstances of graduate labor in the modern corporate university. The essay argues that critical rhetoric must focus on such material realities as the basis for developing an ongoing critique with the potential to work for social change.

Keywords:

• Critical Rhetoric
• Graduate Students
• Materiality
• Unions

This essay is based on the author's dissertation research conducted under the direction of Dr. Sandra Berkowitz, to whom he is grateful.

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Notes on contributors

Thomas A. Discenna

Thomas A. Discenna (Ph.D., Wayne State University, 2001) is an associate professor of communication in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.