Call It A ​“Moveable Fast”

Robin Canavan could smell dinner being prepared inside the Commons dining hall steps away. ​“Maybe,” she said with tinge of regret, ​“we should have had a cheeseburger right before.”

But cheeseburgers weren’t on the menu Wednesday afternoon for Canavan and seven other members of the newly formed union, Local 33 – UNITE HERE, which represents graduate student-teachers at Yale.

No food is on the menu. Until, they said, Yale agrees to negotiate with them on a first contract. The eight teaching fellows have launched a protest fast.

It took some preparation.

Starting over the weekend, the eight fellows switched their diet to solely fruits and veggies to prepare their stomachs. The day before, they had only liquids. On Tuesday around 5 p.m., the group ceremonially downed final cups of ​“victory juice,” a tasty green blend, and swore off food indefinitely. Until Yale is willing to negotiate the first collective bargaining agreement, the student-teachers won’t ingest anything but water, they declared.

No solid food, no juice nor vitamin packets and ​“no coffee, disturbingly enough,” said another faster, Charles Decker, who’s in the political science department.

A few participants said they had fasted in the past for a 24-hour period for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. But otherwise, they didn’t have experience with hunger strikes. Wheelchairs are ready for when physical movement becomes difficult.

But none of the four student-teachers the Independent interviewed said they were willing to risk hospitalization. If not eating endangers a student’s health, that individual will sub out and another union member will assume their place in renouncing meals — a moveable fast, if you will.

Local 33’s organizers decided to escalate their protests this week after Yale twice ignored deadlines that the union had set to initiate contract negotiations following a unionizing election victory in some academic departments. Yale maintains that the union’s so-called ​“micro-unit” strategy of winning elections in six hand-picked academic departments prevented most doctoral students from expressing their opinion. The university is now pleading its case before the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C., which has already ruled in favor of the union but could soon have a Trump-appointed union-buster in its two empty seats.

Until NLRB renders a decision, Yale said, any collective bargaining would be premature. In a written statement, the university called the fast ​“unwarranted by the circumstances.”

Hungry as they might have been, the fasting teaching fellows camped out on Beinecke Plaza Wednesday shot back at the university’s perceived foot-dragging

“Every time I speak out, Yale acts as if they can’t hear me or that they would prefer that I am invisible. So I am taking this action — this very physical action — to make sure my voice is heard,” Decker said. ​“If I have to wait a little while longer, I will, but I’m doing it without eating.”

On Wednesday afternoon, graduate students lounged about under a boat shed-like structure — dubbed ​“33 Wall Street,” or ​“Little House on the Plaza” — that had been assembled from wood and plastic sheeting that morning, just as incoming high school students and their parents arrived for Yale’s admit week, Bulldog Days.

During daylight hours in the plaza, the fasters sipped water from Nalgene bottles, chatted with their friends (about anything but food), and with dissertations to be written, caught up on their reading.

Aaron Greenberg, the union chair and a Wooster Square alder, leafed through an anthology of texts by Reinhold Niebuhr, a leftist theologian widely known for authoring the Serenity Prayer.

The fasters cycled through a check-in with Aliza Kreisman, a School of Nursing student, who monitored their weight and blood pressure. One day in, the fasters said they felt tired — a sluggishness that reminded Canavan, a union co-chair who studies geology and geophysics, of the exhaustion from pulling an all-nighter. When they moved, they walked slowly, preserving their limited stores of energy. Conversations meandered, as hunger interfered with concentration.

Around 3 p.m., two Yale officials emerged from Woodbridge Hall, which houses President Peter Salovey’s offices, and politely asked the protesters to clear out. Pilar Montalvo, the director of administrative affairs, pointed out that nobody had submitted a formal application online to use the area, known formally as Hewitt Quadrangle. ​“So that technically means you don’t have permission to be on the space,” she informed the group. ​“You’re not supposed to be building structures on [Beinecke Plaza or] Cross Campus, of course,” she added. (In the 1980s, anti-apartheid protesters built and occupied a shanty on Beinecke Plaza to protest Yale’s investments in South Africa. Eventually a conservative alumnus torched it.)

Montalvo then asked if the union members fasting were present. ​“Yes? You guys? You? No?” The graduate students glared at her in silence. She introduced Dr. Andrew Gotlin, the chief of student health, to offer some unsolicited advice.

Gotlin warned, ​“If you’re experiencing any symptoms, really after a couple days, including feeling weak or not being able to think clearly or feeling apathetic or depressed, those could be signs of dehydration and malnutrition. We encourage you to seek help, and we’re here to help you as well.”

“Any questions?” Montalvo queried.

The union members continued to stare the officials down.

“All right, more blank faces,” Montalvo said and walked off.

Greenberg later told the Independent that the union plans to defy the university and leave their structure up overnight. ​“We’re staying here. We have no intention of leaving,” he said. ​“I have every expectation that the university will sit down and negotiate with us, just as in the past — whether it’s admitting women to Yale College, negotiating with Local 34, changing the name of Calhoun College — the university has a long history of saying no before they say yes. And I feel like it’s their time to say yes. It is our time to finally, after 25 years of struggle, get to the table and negotiate our contract.”

Thursday morning, the structure remained in place.