“Courting arrest?” By this point I was shouting so loudly I could probably have been heard in New Haven without the benefit of a telephone line. “This is what I’m sending you to one of the best universities in the world for, to spend your time in jail?”
“It’s a question of justice,” he explained. “For the workers of the university.”
“What about justice for me?” I demanded. “Do you know how much I’m paying to send you to Yale?”
My son interrupted my fulminations with a pointed reminder. “You taught us to admire Mahatma Gandhi,” he said. “So why be angry about a simple act of civil disobedience?” Ah, the devastating logic of the young. That silenced me for a minute. “All right,” I said. “What’s this all about?”
Allegedly, Yale doesn’t pay its workers enough, doesn’t offer decent pensions, doesn’t allow graduate-student teaching assistants to unionize. More than half of Yale’s clerical and technical employees retire with benefits of less than $200 monthly; 85 percent got less than $400 a month, and this after decades of service. An assistant registrar at the prestigious law school retired in 2000 after 29 years with a total pension of $798 a month. “It isn’t fair, Daddy,” my son said. “So we’re going to do something about it.” The “something” was to break the law by demonstrating peacefully on College Street, at the heart of the campus. Since the demonstration would be without a permit, that act of civil disobedience would lead to arrest. Jail, my son assured me, was not in the cards, though a fine of $88 was.
“I’m not paying that” was on the tip of my tongue, but I stopped myself. I had told my sons that college was a place where you learned as much, if not more, outside the classroom as inside it. It was the place to grow up, to discover who you were, to understand what mattered to you. If my son was prepared to lay himself and his personal freedom on the line for something he believed in, was it right for me as his father to discourage him? “You do realize, of course,” I finally said, sounding even older than I felt, “that if you and your friends succeed in your protest, I’ll simply end up paying even higher fees to cover the university’s additional costs.”
“But you shouldn’t have to, Daddy,” he argued. “In the last 20 years, Yale’s fees have risen nearly three times the rate of inflation, and twice the rate of family-income growth. They just haven’t passed any of it on to their workers.” I gave up. As Clemenceau once memorably put it, not to be a socialist at 20 was proof of want of a heart; to be a socialist at 30 was proof of want of a head. My son was only 18. I simply had to let him grow out of it.
On the appointed day, several hundred demonstrators converged on College Street–students, employees, retirees and union members. The police, notified in advance, were there in strength, some on horseback. In many other countries around the world, the most likely result would have been a pitched battle, stones being flung, a riot breaking out and an implacable uniformed phalanx responding with batons or tear gas or worse. But this was America. Both sides were orderly, even well behaved. The demonstrators clasped hands as they illegally blocked the street, inviting arrest. Student “witnesses” lined the sidewalk carrying placards that proclaimed, stand up for change at yale. Lively music boomed from a quickly rigged public-address system. Pedestrians were given flags to wave. A New York Times journalist saw the event as being “a cross between a voter-registration drive and an arts and crafts fair.”
Instead of the police wading in, clad in riot gear, the Yalie Gandhians lined up voluntarily at impromptu booths set up nearby, where police supervisors (aided by New Haven city clerks on overtime) issued their arrest notices. The protesters had even filled in “pre-arrest forms,” so that their processing could be speeded up. You stood in line, handed in your form, got “arrested” and slapped with a $88 infraction notice, then made room for the next demonstrator. A police loudspeaker blared: “Please wait in line until the officer who will place you under arrest arrives.” Mahatma Gandhi would not have known what to make of it.
Eight hundred protesters were arrested, the highest number in New Haven since the civil-rights demonstrations of the 1960s. My son was not among them; he ended up wielding a placard as a “witness,” and so did not break the law. The reason was simple. When the pre-arrest forms had to be filled out, each potential jailbird had to produce an identity card. My son, the zealous idealist, had sadly forgotten his.
