Four years ago today, I was in Quebec City, breathing in the billowing clouds of tear geas, dodging canisters with Matthew and Justin, and, as thousands of people danced in the barricaded streets, trying to envision and solidify the connections between the fight against the FTAA and the fight in New Haven. Four years, as many more Michael Denning seminars, several bad papers, an Unfarallon Campaign, a senior essay, and a great deal of organizing later, i feel a great deal more confident about these links and solidarities, and thus i took three days out of my busy schedule to return to New Haven for the first time in seven months, but really, substantially, for the first time in the eleven months since i'd moved out of my apartment on Bishop Street, where I'd lived for the last two years of college and the entirety of the summer in between, in order to support, mostly as a body and occasional leafletter and carrier of massive felt-and-wire pencils, the striking graduate teachers of GESO, whose one week walkout together with Columbia's GSEU, is the sixth strike in the union's fifteen year history.

The first three days of the strike were powerful. The signs on the back of Rachel B.-D.'s dog, the post structuralist placards of art historians, the winding serpent of hundreds of people picketing in front of Sterling Memorial Library, demanding justice and fighting for the future of the academy, the thunderous words of Scott Marks outside Battel Chappel, in which Roland Betts had locked himself to avoid having to speak to the people who make the university with whose management he's entrusted work, TAs pushing baby carriages on picket lines and speaking about how Yale refuses to pay for life-saving HIV drugs and forces the state to foot the bill despite a budget several billion dollars greater than the Israeli Defense Forces have all made very clear the stakes of GESO's fight and the creativity and vision of the folks who are fighting it across the federation and the New Haven community. Yesterday, as we took to the streets of the bourgie-mall-ified upper west side, past the smoldering pit where Columbia Bagels used to be, the focus shifted to the right to organize academic workers on a national sclae, the fight against gentrifying landgrabs by tax exempt institutions bent on exploiting the Bayh-Dole act to reap massive windfalls at the expense of the same contingent workers whom they continue to argue are mere apprentices, and solidarity across the boundaries of state, union, and nation.

As i'm writing, Jesse Jackson is preparing to address TAs at NYU, where the first unionized TAs at a private US university have a contract expiration date in August - right about the time i show up on campus. Unless the threat of a strike is again enough to bring the NYU administration around before i get the chance, I'll be a part of that fight because a victory in New York will greatly increase not only my ability to survive a Ph.D. program in the third most expensive city in the country, but it'll also contribute, in a small way, to the fight at Columbia, and to the one at Yale, without which there might be no NYU fight and which, when GESO does win, may initiate a largescale erosion to administrative resistance to private university graduate teacher unionism, as one of the most vehement and powerful opponents steps out of the battlefield. I continue to feel odd about leaving New Haven (again) and a fight which has played such a formative role in my organizing and academic work, but i also know that i'm not abandoning the movement and that the most powerful way to help folks in New Haven win is to build stregnth where i am.

That said, i'm really glad that I made it up this week. Being around for the strike's first three days was, among other things a powerful kick in the ass to go out and rejoin the movement which has not only asked what other kinds of "global universities" might be possible, but has begun to create them in the streets of New Haven, New York, Porto Alegre, and across the planet.