some further thoughts on academic capitalism, or, concerning "faculty democracy."

I've said before that I don't think the discourse of corporatization is sufficient to address the predicament in which universities and academic workers, graduate teachers and researchers, clerical workers, service and maintenance workers, and tenured faculty, now find themselves. There is always a need to look deeper at what kinds of transactions and interactions are always taking place in order to constitute the neoliberal academe and to historicize the developments which shaped these conditions and politics. I've been thinking about this for a while. I've been thinking about this recently particularly in relation to what Brenda said at the membership meeting last Wednesday, when she pointed out that faculty were heavily unionized before the 1980 Yeshiva ruling that ladder faculty constitute managers (wouldn't this mean we must be workers by default?) which stripped them of the right to form unions and to strike, and that the Yeshiva decision and its aftermath ultimately crushed faculty governance of U.S. universities and, together with the implementation of the Bayh-Dole act's provisions, (also in 1980) which allowed universities to license patents funded by the federal government to private corporations and make millions in the process, have led us to what Sexton terms "The Enterprise" and what Levin calls "The Global University:" an institution deeply implicated into neoliberal and neocolonial politics of intellectual copyright enforcement, structural adjustment programs and trade 'liberalization' compacts, and the exploitation of working people, natural resources, real estate capital, and imperial power across the globe and across the postindustrial cityscape, in which power is centralized in the hands of professional administrators with deep connections to such projects and very little accountability to faculty, students, workers, and other constituencies who are not university trustees, wealthy alumni, or sitting on mountains of federal funding grants or tax exemptions.

Organizing can and has begun to transform this dystopia, has begun to reshape the post-1980 university into a more democratic and just space. That's what Education In The Streets was about. Fuck, it's what the whole Yale fight is about. And, of course, it's what we are fighting for at NYU today. The last time GSOC won a contract, the adjuncts started organizing and won union recognition and now work under the protections and benefits of a union contract. Some of the faculty, while still trying to be supportive, don't think we can win and are trying to broker deals on our behalf to remove the reprisal threats if we go back to work. Any such deal without a guarantee of negotiations between GSOC and the University Leadership Team would be a loss for us as a union. Such a deal is also not really where we need to go at this point anyway. We are not losing this fight, we're still winning it. This is hard for the faculty to accept in part because they can't do what we are doing; they have been stripped of even that right. We need to win this because they need a voice too. We're the only people who can win this. Without this strike, there can be no faculty democracy. And I'm not just talking about the NYU organization.

That's pretty much what I said at the second membership meeting last night. I felt like I should write it down in case I want to flesh it out later for some kind of more detailed intervention or something. That sounds totally pretentious. All the arguments about Bayh-Dole/Yeshiva really come from the FHUE research team (including, indirectly, Lafer, who had left by the time I got to New Haven,) and all those organizing conversations I eavesdropped on in Koffee 2 while waiting for Alek or Julie to show up. I think they are worth thinking about some more, and I'm going to continue to do that and hope that I do so in ways that are as useful for other folks as the ways other folks have been thinking about them are for me.

The meetings themselves were both great - a very open, very honest, and very important conversation about where we are, where we need to go, and how we get there.