I participated in the strike moratorium in March as only one of thousands of non-Yale faculty who have been saddened and angered by the university's responses to the current labor disputes. No doubt, many of the unsympathetic Yale faculty and administrators viewed our presence and our remarks there as further evidence of the outsider's unfamiliarity with the fragile web of affinities and obligations that binds together a vibrant college community with an Ivy League pedigree. And yet this insider perception is one of the reasons why we were there. From the outside, the Yale strikes of this year exposed a sharp contradiction-between Yale's select academic ethos of intellectual largesse and entitlement and its cruel neocorporate appetite for trimming labor costs to the bone. To varying degrees, this disparity affects all of our institutions, public as well as private, because it is intrinsic to the political economy of prestige that underpins higher education. The Yale strikes attracted so much attention because they came at a time when many consider it no longer possible to ignore such contradictions. Needless to say, the strikes were an affront to that part of the academic mentality which considers it bad taste to view our campuses as sites of wage labor and union organizing. While it has become rote to bemoan the impact on liberal education of the tendency toward market rationalization and technocratic planning, few within academe are in the habit of making links between the corporatization of the modern university and corresponding shifts in its labor infrastructure. The Yale strikes have changed all of that, and now mark a turning point. On the face of it, Yale's responses to Locals 34 and 35 and to GESO appear to reflect its status as the largest employer in town. An uncommonly wealthy institution (fiscally constituted as a corporation) is exploiting its near-monopoly position within the labor market of a severely depressed city and region. Taking advantage of the hard times, Yale has manipulated (or manufactured) its own fiscal crisis to accelerate a lowwage revolution among its clerical, service, and maintenance workers, demanding wage cuts of up to $4 per hour, laying off workers for up to twenty weeks out of every year, slashing benefits, and reserving the unlimited right to fill any openings with outside subcontractors. These are by now familiar hallmarks of an aggressive corporate strategy to win a nonunion workplace through casual contracting. In addition, Yale's ability