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A Yale Strike Dossier examines the uneasy coexistence of labor unions and the administration of Yale University. Inspired by the strike during the winter of 1995–96 and creating a context in which that event can be discussed, this special issue of Social Text focuses on the relationship between the university and its teaching assistants and service workers.
The Yale Corporation, the university’s equivalent to a board of trustees, has been in conflict with its employees and their unions for decades. While partially blaming general economic trends for what they regard as the inhumane system at Yale, contributors to this collection explore the connection between big business and a large university as well as Yale’s choice to operate in a nontraditional, corporate style. An unprecedented collection of essays, this volume provides an in-depth discussion of the history and politics of Yale’s most visible campus conflict.

Contributors. Michael Bérubé, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robin D. G. Kelley, Duncan Kennedy, Cary Nelson, Kathy Newman, Corey Robin, Andrew Ross, Michelle Stephens, John Wilhelm, Rick Wolff

  "Rolfe's voice is one that many of us feared was buried forever.
        . . . He stands in the forefront of an entire 'lost generation' of left-wing
        writers who fused artistic craft with irrepressible political commitment."
        -- Alan Wald, author of The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected
        Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment
      "[Rolfe's] Spanish Civil War poems may be the best written by an
        American writer, and his McCarthy era poems brilliantly counteract the
        often apolitical, rather socially aseptic poetry of their time."
        -- Reginald Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly
      The radical journalist and poet Edwin Rolfe wrote eloquently of the hardships
        of the Great Depression, the experience of war, and McCarthy era witch-hunts.
        More than fifty of his best poems--some beautifully lyrical and some devastatingly
        satiric--are included in Trees Became Torches. Rolfe was widely
        known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans
        who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the
        1936-39 civil war.
 

This is the collected work of a major, versatile American poet passionately engaged with everything from the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War to his love for New York City and his wife. The editors argue that his long poem sequence, Denmark Vesey, stands as the most ambitious poem about African American history ever written by a white American. Wicked Times includes previously unpublished poems and the first detailed account of Kramer's life, along with photos and extensive explanatory notes.