Academics Seek Security, ​“Joy”

Alex Kolokotronis had planned on spending the rest of his semester researching and writing on the history of labor organizing among New Haven Public Schools teachers.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, throwing his — and hundreds of his peers’ — carefully laid dissertation plans off track.

So he started organizing himself, for a universal one-year extension of funding for all grad student workers, and for an academy that prioritizes ​“security, joy, and flourishing” for students and teachers alike.

Kolokotronis is a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University and one of the leaders of Concerned and Organized Graduate Students (COGS) at Yale.

He joined Yale College Council President Kahlil Greene and Yale Lecturer in Middle East History Lauren Banko on a recent episode of WNHH Radio’s ​“Pandemic Organizing” program to talk about the interdepartmental advocacy that Yale undergraduates, graduate students, and non-tenure track faculty have turned to in the month since the start of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Kolokotronis and COGS have focused their Covid-19 organizing efforts so far on petitioning the university to grant all Yale PhD students a one-year extension of guaranteed funding.

That lifeline is necessary, the group has argued, in order to help graduate student workers weather what is quickly shaping up to be an indefinite future of canceled academic conferences, scuttled research and fieldwork opportunities, frenzied transitions from in-person to online teaching, and hiring freezes at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country.

“We’ve been very insistent across the board, from first years on up, that we’re all affected and we all need a universal one-year extension,” he said.

“We see this moment as potentially a death knell to a lot of the departments that we’re in, and we can’t have that happen. … We do not need a sort of doubling down on balanced budget ideologies and frameworks, when we know that the money is there.”

Lynne Cooley, the dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, told the Independent via email that the school has already announced that most current PhD students are eligible for up to 12 months of extended time with funding to replace time lost due to the pandemic. She said the school has also created post-graduate employment opportunities for students graduating in May.

“Our priority is to help current graduate students recover from the many setbacks they have encountered as the pandemic unfolded, and to get them back on track to finish their research and graduate.”

“Instructional faculty serve a key role in the educational mission of the University,” Yale Provost Scott Strobel told the Independent in an email statement. ​“I was pleased to receive an extensive list of exception requests from Dean Gendler in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which I was happy to grant. I understand that renewal letters will be sent over the next days and weeks. Additional requests are still being developed by the various professional schools. Upon receipt, we will look closely at the requests and give special attention to those that involve current instructional faculty whose contracts conclude this June.”

And Tamar Gendler, the dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told the Independent in a statement, ​“We are glad to support every instructional faculty member who had been a part of our curricular planning prior to COVID-19.”

Kolokotronis is no stranger to community organizing inside and outside of the Ivory Tower.

In 2017, he participated in UNITE HERE Local 33’s push for a graduate student-teacher union at Yale.

Last fall, he helped the Downtown Wooster Square Community Management Team navigate participatory budgeting best practices when deciding how to spend its annual Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) grant dollars. He has also helped push for a local coalition in support of a Green New Deal.

Before coming to Yale, he worked for the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives and for Make the Road New York.

The focus of his dissertation at Yale is on New Haven education and labor history, and on what lessons can be drawn from longtime teacher-run school experiments like that which took place for decades at High School in the Community.

Kolokotronis (pictured) said that, soon after the university formally canceled in-person classes for the rest of the semester in mid-March and then granted junior faculty an extension on their tenure clock, graduate student workers and non-tenure track faculty started advocating for the same.

Much of that organizing work at the graduate level has taken place in the form of department-level petition letters and then a graduate school-wide open letter calling for universal extension, he said.

“More than just gathering signatures and gathering testimonies, we really saw this as an opportunity to link people across departments,” he said. ​“We saw the open letter and petition as an organizing tool.”

So far, he said, over 710 graduate students have signed the letter, as have 20 faculty members. And 120 graduate student workers have provided personal testimonies regarding how deep and destabilizing an impact the pandemic has had on their studies, teaching, research, work, and home lives.

He said the organizing so far has led to upwards of 30 department-level letters of support and eight faculty-level votes of support for their petition.

The group also led a #StudentsAgainstSurplus virtual town hall on April 17 in which a host of undergraduates, graduates, and non-tenure track faculty shared how the pandemic has affected them so far.

And they’ve taken to social media with the hashtag, #UniversalExtension.

On April 20, the Graduate Student Assembly formally endorsed the universal extension efforts.

“What we’re really saying is that Yale needs to take the lead in supporting us, in supporting the surrounding community, and needs to set a leading example for what institutions with vast resources should be doing in this time of the pandemic,” he said.

He said that his own research plans to interview New Haven teachers union organizers and go through local labor archives have been all but scratched because of social distancing mandates, archive closures, and the unique vulnerabilities of people over 60 years old to suffering the most adverse harms of the virus. Kolokotronis said many people he planned to interview are in that age bracket.

“Online learning is not in any way comparable to learning at school,” said Greene (pictured). He said it’s hard for him and his undergraduate peers to stay focused when online all of the time. It’s hard to separate work time from leisure time when confined indoors, on a computer, nearly all the time. And, he said, there are ​“huge, huge, huge inequities in students’ home lives,” making a consistent online teaching and learning experience among everyone in the classroom — students and teachers alike — virtually impossible.

Kolokotronis and Banko said that the university’s response so far has been to promise case-by-case evaluations of which graduate student workers and which non-tenure track faculty, who often operate on single-year contracts, should get funding extensions and which should not.

“Yale is operating in what seems to be almost austerity measures,” said Banko (pictured), ​“which is a slap in the face to a lot of us who are really struggling and know the money is there to help us.”

“We’re not calling for any kind of full-scale revolution or uprising against the system at Yale,” she continued. ​“We’re calling for a very exceptional one-year extension of certain things, including non-tenure track contracts.”

She described the call, among graduate student workers and non-tenure track faculty alike, as for Yale to provide ​“exceptional help for exceptional times.”

And yet, Kolokotronis said, he hopes the organizing groundwork laid during this pandemic results in even longer-lasting structural changes that extend beyond Covid-19.

“We really want to see a university, an academia, a system of education that really places importance on our research,” he said. That supports it and does not insist on bureaucratic hoops that ​“amplify insecurity and real abandonment.”

“We really want to see an academy that has enough jobs,” he continued. ​“We want an academy where teaching is supported,” where students and teachers thrive, where there is ​“actual community rather than petty jockying.”

We want an academy defined by ​“security, joy, and flourishing.”

“The ethos that is behind a universal extension is not only are we all in this together, but we’re more resilient when we’re in things together. We’re more creative when we’re in things together. And, frankly, we all have more joy when we’re in things together.”

Learn more about COGS at Yale here and here.

Previous articles about political organizing during the pandemic. Series logo by Amanda Valaitis.

• Earth Day Rally Connects Coronavirus To Climate Change
• YNHH Workers Win Covid-19 Pay Bump
• Pride Center Pivots Towards Virtual Support
• Can Covid Spawn Public Health ​“New Deal”?
• One Year Later, Protesters Pack Zoom
• Pandemic Prison Protests Pioneered
• ​“Food Garage” Feeds Families During Covid
• Pro-Immigrant Crew Tackles Covid Crisis
• Mutual Aid Teams Tackle Covid-19 Challenge