yet more lafer

here.

When President Sexton issued his threats, he was playing his final card —
there is nowhere for the administration to go from here. But this card is a
bluff. He played it with the hope of scaring GAs into abandoning the strike soon
enough that the threats don’t have to be carried out. When GSOC called Sexton’s
bluff by voting to stay on strike past his deadline, Sexton did the only thing
he could do: He moved the deadline back. It is no wonder that the administration
keeps grasping at any “alternative” strike-resolution proposal that allows it to
move its deadline back further and further. Its only strategy is to keep
replaying the same bluff. But in the process, Sexton is coming to look
increasingly like Libyan strongman Mouammar Qadaffi in an old Saturday Night
Live skit — “You cross this line, you die — OK, now, you cross this line, you
die!”
At the same time, the administration can’t afford to let the strike go
on forever. When a strike is truly weak, employers simply ignore the strikers.
This strike is too strong for that. A few hundred classes haven’t been taught,
and thousands of grades have gone unrecorded, which is an undigestible problem
for a university. The administration has come up with only temporary band-aid
solutions, like allowing undergraduates to take incomplete or pass/fail grades
for this semester. Were the administration to go further — using the midterm
grades for final grades, or letting students grade themselves — this would
undermine the academic integrity of the operation in a way that would likely
both ignite faculty protest and create suspicion about the meaning of an NYU
transcript.

Behind all its bluster, the administration is caught between a rock and
a hard place. I don’t know whether its threats of reprisals will succeed in
intimidating GSOC to abandon its demand for negotiations. But if even a minority
of the union’s 1,000 members stand fast, the university will have little choice
but to return to the negotiating table. For those who are now seeking some
resolution to the strike — almost everyone, that is — the best course of action
by far is to continue backing GSOC’s demand for recognition and negotiations.
Supporting GSOC at this critical moment is not only the morally right thing to
do — it is also, by far, the most realistic strategy for resolving the strike
any time soon, and on terms that preserve the bonds of community on campus and
NYU’s reputation in the outside world.

Extended thoughts on the strike and academic labor tomorrow, maybe.

Congrats to the undergrad activists who kicked Coca-Cola off the NYU campus...