Weapons of Class Instruction V

 

I see this richard levin/he rules like chairman mao/he'll legislate you into oblivion/if you don't silently bow/with his friends on the labor board/he'll milk you like a cow/from the comfort of his luxury home (to the tune of ballad of a thin man)

I walked up to Columbia hoping to find someone wearing a GSEU pin with whom i could rant about the Bush regime's experiment in catastrophic nostalgia, but had no such luck.  So instead i sat on the steps i used to always sit on in hiughschool when feeling depressed and self absorbed and i thought about how the capitalists and the state crush and repress social movements, the site at which, some thirty six years ago, the New York Police Department brutally beat students protesting Columbia's gentrification tactics in Morningside Heights and in the scientific and research apparatus fueling the Indochina wars and the development of new tactics of state repression in the turbid streets of America's racialized urban spaces being, of course, a prime location for such thoughts.  The decision means that elections at not only Brown University, but also Columbia, Penn, and Tufts will probably be thrown out.  This excellent Steve Greenhouse-Karen Arenson article asserts that even the already recognized union at NYU is now in danger of dissolution should the administration simply refuse to bargain after the current contract ends.  Phil Wheeler's comments are heartening, and i doubt that this is the end for the academic labor movement, both because of the sheer partisanship of this decision and because GESO, for one, was organizing for a decade prior to the NYU decision, (and TA Solidarity existed three years prior, and the aforementioned TAO activity was scaring provosts left and right by January of 1972) and no matter how "magnificent" the Sheldon Steinbachs and Richard Levins and Ruth Simmonses and Lee Bollingers and Judith Rodins may be feeling right now, i hope that GESO and GSEU and GET-UP and GSOC's members keep fighting for the vision of the university that we built in the streets fourteen months ago, because it's too important to let a bunch of fascists destroy it. 

Just lemme know where to stand during the mass arrest.  Or who ya want me to organize.