Weapon of Class Instruction: "Educación En Las Calles, El Segundo Parte"

So Josh Eidelson dubbed GESO's ressurection Tuesday of the UOC's "Education In The Streets" action of March 6, 2003. The original action, concieved of by Abbey Hudson in a UOC "action committee" meeting just over a week before its actual execution, and later elaborated on and fleshed out by Abbey and several more of us at a meeting in Book Trader a day or two later, was in some ways the central and defining moment of not only the UOC's then brief but spirited seven month history, but of the three years or so of undergraduate student labor organizing since the end of the Students Against Sweatshops occupation of Beinecke plaza in April of 2000. I say this in part because of the logistics - EITS was the largest undergraduate-on-campus action since the SAS campaign, with some five hundred undergraduates and hundreds of strikers and community members -- in the middle of a blizzard, with three inches of snow shrouding Cornel West's 'fro. I was excited about it not only because of the numbers, but because of its multilayered symbolic power. Strikers were teaching students about their university, not so much a simple reversal as a new and counterhegemonic vision of the kind of university and city the movement could create - one in which workers are not "invisible" but central and constitutive of and to the production of knowledge, one in which those who produce the knowledge hoarded by post-Bayh-Dole Yale radically untether their work from the kinds of post-fordist capital accumulation embraced by university administrators and instead, together with service and clerical workers and hospital workers, redefine what universities do and who runs them. What was powerful about Education In the Streets, besides the blizzard, was that this new vision of the university wasn't only being expounded upon through speech, or even only performed, but, in fact, every student, teacher, worker, clergy member, organizer, community activist, and Ben Healey present was actively creating that new university where we stood. And we were building committee too.

The Better Way Village was supposed to be an inheritor of Education in The Streets, but didn't really function as such. It's creation wasn't a particularly organic process -- arising more by the default created by the decision to suspend the strike until August than anything else, and we didn't get the kind of undergraduate turnout we needed. Where Education in the streets was participatory and operated upon a constituent model, with its stregnth in the conversations held and the acts of teaching, learning, and communication, the BWV sometimes felt more like an empty showroom -- conversations happened, some of them powerful, but the action lacked the immediacy and vision of Education In The Streets or "Reclaim Our Campus" before it, with its messages to Levin strung from the trees outside Woodbridge Hall, video messages, cell phone blitzes, and Thomas Frampton in a huge purple wig.

GESO's revival of the classrooms in the street action both reproduced much of what was useful and powerful the first time around, while doing some things better. While the crowd was smaller, with only one union on strike (and, combined with the lack of a "hard picket" over which to guilt folks about crossing, thus a diminshed ability to turn out undergrads too, i'd imagine,) and the balmy weather detracted somewhat from one of the more mythic aspects of the original action, this time around, save for Jamie Kirchick and his band of spoiled, malicious idiots, who had two days earlier attacked an SJN ice cream social for prospective students by proclaiming that GESO kills babies and eats them, caused the tsunami, and killed all the Jews (i shit you not,) there seemed to be much more of a dialogue, a much more multivocal conversation happening this time around than last time, as the "audience" became students and teachers, asking incisive questions, contributing their own experiences of work and struggle at Yale, and transforming the action into less of a performance and more of what it was originally intended to be, which is fantastic and was amazing to be a part of. I spent the entire action at Dan Gilbert, Phillip Ziesche, and Michael Denning's class on "Teaching in The Corporate University," which I guess i'll be doing soon enough, and was amazed at the things people were bringing to the conversation and the kinds of solutions folks were proposing to the casualization of teaching and the corporatization of academic work.

If the "Classrooms In The Street" model becomes a recurring tactic/tradition of Yale labor struggles, that would be both really cool, and in many ways profoundly appropriate. Among many other things, the movement in New Haven has been a learning experience for all involved. Speaking for myself, it's taught me not only how to organize, but also how to look at universities and workers and migration and the intersections and contradictions of globalized knowledge production. And it's teaching Yale and New Haven every day that, well, this is what democracy looks like.