update

here's the flawed NYT article on the NYU developments. The Times seems to think that the administration's refusal to negotiate, combined with the language of the "Brown Decision," means that GSOC-UAW is somehow starting over from square one. This is wrong for several reasons, the first being that the contract doesn't expire for another two months. But really, the Times is wrong because recognition does not a union make, because as long as graduate employees are willing to fight casualization and collectively build towards a new vision of academic production, whether or not a bunch of corporate shills lends us their imprimatur, while creating difficult obstacles, is not what is going to make or break organizing drives by academic workers. GSOC was organizing for three years before the NYU decision, GESO for over 10. GSOC's current position demonstrates the willingness of the Bush administration and the officers of the imperial university to sacrifice any pretense of democracy, collegiality, and intellectual freedoms in order to crush insurgent articulations of what teaching means, how academic work is ordered, subaltern understandings of what Slick Rick called "The Work of The University." The power to stop them and realize these immanent new forms remains ours.

(Notice, though, how they pledge to follow the Yale model - try to buy us off with steady stipend increases while openly vowing to create a company union.)