This is part of a roundtable on the COVID-19 pandemic and the work of history.
Many graduate students at Yale have babies; the benefits, after all, are exceptional. We’re guaranteed a paid semester of parental leave, health insurance for our child, and a childcare subsidy. Students often speak of the “$200 baby,” referring to the standard hospital bill for a birth—a remarkable deal in a country where the average delivery costs $4,500 with insurance.
As a prospective parent, I felt obligated to make the most of these benefits; but as a scholar of reproduction and eugenics, the insurance package gave me pause. Why so many allowances for having kids? It wasn’t just institutional benevolence, since other parts of the graduate healthcare plan are notoriously ungenerous. I found in myself a primary source: What was the university reproducing through its support of my reproduction? Was it positive eugenics, wherein reproduction by the right people equates to more cultural and material wealth, and therefore worth the investment in an otherwise austere culture? How far did this generosity extend? Would Yale be as liberal if I requested a hysterectomy?1
Whatever it was, it was far from secure. When the pandemic hit, university administration failed to guarantee how long our health benefits would last and whether they would continue if the university schedule was further disrupted. They told us extending our fellowships in the wake of coronavirus would cost too many millions (a clue that something was amiss, since these are people who deal in billions). We were advised to take out personal loans and exhaust our savings, which would serve as a more reliable “rainy-day fund” than the corporation’s surplus.2
Like the “brick wall” Sara Ahmed invokes in her study of institutional diversity work, Yale’s value system revealed itself, not as a metaphorical obstacle, but as a material barrier, “something real that blocks movement, or that stops a progression.”3 The wall blocked clarity over my reproductive future: whether I would have the material resources to care for my family and the capacity to continue my work. Evidently, reproducing the endowment is more reliable—less disruptive—than investing in students or research. The crisis transformed prospective donors and the creators of prestigious research into mere dependents; more promise was to be found in growing market returns, the proliferation of debt, and fossil fuels.4
In pushing against the wall, Yale graduate students have encountered the archives of the university’s reproductive priorities. I’m encouraged by activists’ demands to re-envision care work and rethink what is required to create academic work in the wake of the crisis. We must re-envision the value of humans in the university now that we’re missing their contributions so deeply—now that the wall is both more apprehendable and more vulnerable.
- Key works that shaped my line of questioning were Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
- Peter Salovey, “Yale in the months ahead,” Yale News, April 21, 2020.
- Sarah Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Sara Ahmed, “Practical Phenomenology,” feministkilljoys, June 4, 2014.
- David Dayen, “Yale University under the Spotlight for Its Investment in Puerto Rican Debt,” The Intercept, Feb. 20, 2018; Amy Whyte, “Yale Activists Want Divestment. David Swensen Isn’t Budging,” Institutional Investor, Feb. 21, 2020.