What's In A Name

For folks who are just jumping on now -- or who never had the, uh, misfortune of reading my last last blog, I now present an explanation of why this blog is named the way it's named.

In early February of 2004, Yale University president Richard Levin announced that he would serve on a comission headed by Bob Kerrey, ex-democratinc senator and current neo-liberal president of The New School University. Or The New School: A University, as it is now calling itself. The panel, appointed by the president under pressure from critics of the war and neocolonial occupation of Iraq, was charged with investigating what the deal was with the apparently evanescent Weapons of Mass Destruction. Many of us involved in the movement to transform Yale from imperial capitalist to socially just and responsible site of learning and teaching responded to the news that Levin would be serving on a panel designed to exculpate George W. Bush DC '68 with a great deal of skepticism. When challenged, Levin informed us that we lacked open minds. But we should have seen it coming - and indeed some of us had. We knew that for years the Yale administrators had referred to workers attempting to form unions as "terrorists," sometimes bluntly and sometimes in more graceful phrasing but to the same end. We were not suprised when the president made a recess appointment to the National Labor Relations Board who proved the decisive vote in overturning the "NYU decision" precedent, though we were surprised by the total reversal of that decision's findings, that graduate student teachers and researchers performed work central to the economic and ideological functions of the university.

In a university so implicated in the machinery of capital and imperial war, and in which labor organizing had been repeatedly branded as terrorist, the workers themselves, it seemed to me, were weapons of class instruction (playing on the dual meanings of class as a site of teaching and as a form of categorization and heirarchy.) I then proceeded to milk this for way more than it was worth. Case in point. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.