I have a bone to pick with the academic labor movement's discourse. Specifically, i'm a little perturbed by the discourse of corporatization as applied to the contemporary situation of universities in the global North, like NYU.
See, here's my beef: The corporatization of the university is a process which, I want to argue, is something that we should be talking about in the past tense to some extent, a process which we need to situate in between the late 1940s and mid to late 1960s as the moment at which the growth and importance of the corporation in the post WWII world and the GI Bill university become incredibly important in the logics of cold war mobilization, ergonomically inclined industrial psychology projects in the university seek to rationalize the homo economicus necessary for the kinds of work discipline demanded by the jobscape of the American Century's postwar boom, and the university-corporate nexus forms the site of the emergence and generation of the various models of international economic and socio-cultural development projects. Corporations acquire campuses and dub themselves think tanks, unversities streamline, Taylorize, and speed up. If my periodization is off, it is because i may be marking the emergence of some of these trends as far later than they actually are. So i should clarify by noting that i think there's a specific iteration of industrial psychology that emerges in these years, or perhaps the old strain, which dates back to the 1920s and has far earlier roots in the scientific management community, is vested with new attention or authority.
We also need to look at the politics of the relationships between institutions like universities and the spatial politics and built environment of the cities they occupy. See, for instance, Columbia's gymnasium project in Morningside Park, or the anger that erupts in the early 1970s over Yale's sometimes stealthy expansion in the previous two decades.
By the late 1960s, and particularly 1967-68, when there is across the globe a revolt against this corporate multiversity and its strong links to the Vietnam War and the policing of social movements, I want to argue that this corporatization comes into a state of crisis and the beginnings of something new start to emerge and attempt to replicate and replace it. In Yale's case, between 1968-1973, when the dollar is yanked free from the gold standard forever, the oil crisis erupts, and Local 35 is beaten bloody on college street outside the annual commencement ceremony while Hannah Arendt recieves an honorary doctorate, crucial shifts inaugurate the social relations of the deindustrializing city and its neocolonial relationship with the university. I tried to argue in my senior essay that there is a powerful link between this process and the fashioning of Richard Levin's enumerated global university, that this is when the neoliberalization of the univeristy begins in earnest, a process not merely about turning the university into a corporation, but about colonizing new realms of knowledge, about, particularly in the wake of the bayh-Dole act (1980) refashioning the university as a neoliberal instrument global inequality in the name of a politics of scarcity. At Yale, i was fortunate enough to be around the loudest evangelist for this new(er) reconsitiution of the university as a site of knowledge production in relation to the coloniality of power and knowledge, and also to get to work with and learn from federation folks doing innovative and awesome research on how this process worked -- whre the money went, how the board of trustees that controlled it functioned, and the crucially important place of international student workers in this new economy of the university.
I don't know enough yet about NYU's own history, but i suspect it is not different enough not to warrant a somewhat similar reperiodization. Ours is a movement against neoliberalism. Knowing this and being able to articulate it greatly enriches the possibilities for how we understand our struggle in a global context.
[acknowledgements to the researchers and organizers working on the Yale fight and to the GSOC people organzing for the strike, from whom i draw a great deal here.]
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