Manhattan bridge 11 am

Hello finance capital/ol

dear nyu wellness exchange

:Zach's Blog:
I'm fine. thank you for asking.

a little demoralized, a lot stressed, but, you know, 83 days.

Striking is not a passing mood, a sign of weakness or something you can convince yourself not to feel. It is a labor struggle that can affect you physically and emotionally and economically. It can be ended with collective bargaining. The most important step toward ending the strike — and usually the easiest — is sitting down at the bargaining table.

From the email:

Depression is not a passing mood, a sign of weakness or something you can
convince yourself not to feel. It is a health disorder that can affect you
physically and emotionally. It can be treated with counseling, medication, or a
combination of both. The most important step toward treating depression — and
sometimes the most difficult — is asking for help.

I'm not really sure what i'm going for here, but i clearly went for it.

day 82

Trent Lott's house can be wiped off the map by freak hurricanes and still the white huse is trying to muzzle NASA scientists from discussing the implications of recent work on climate change. Yesterday it was in the high fifties here in New York, which, in the middle of January, is kind of scary, particularly since we've only really had just afew truly cold days all month and even most of these haven't dipped too far below freezing. I'll stop talking about the weather cause you don't need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.

For folks who haven't seen it yet, the letter written by the first three of the (now six) recipients of the lockout letters to Frank Hoppensteadt, Ph.D. Apologies for the absence of blockquotes - I'm writing this from a safari-running mac which doesnt seem to support Blogger's "WYSIWYG" tab, and i don't know the html for blockquoting.


January 26, 2006

Frank Hoppensteadt, Ph.D.
Senior Vice Provost for Planning
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Room 1232
New York University
New York, NY 10003

Dear Mr. Hoppensteadt:

Each of us has received a letter from your office dated January 23, 2006 stating that our stipends will be withdrawn for two semesters. Your letter requests that we inform you of " incorrect information or any particular considerations of which we should be aware" regarding this action.

We are not meeting our classes at the appointed times because, as members of GSOC/UAW Local 2110, we are on strike over the university's refusal to bargain in good faith with our union for a second contract.

The punitive measures you have taken can only be seen as retribution for our exercising our right to strike as graduate employees. You have not only denied our basic right to collective bargaining, you have now compounded the injustice by withdrawing our pay prospectively for two semesters, an action which would clearly be illegal were we covered by the National Labor Relations Act.

Your letter suggests that your actions "move forward with the steps outlined in President Sexton's November 28 letter." To the contrary, the penalty outlined in your January 23 letter increases the penalty threatened in the November 28 email. President Sexton's November threats, which were roundly condemned by members of the NYU community, by scholars from across the country and around the world, and by the labor movement, stipulated the loss of stipends for the spring 2006 semester for graduate employees who remained on strike after the December 5 (later postponed to December 7) deadline. It went on to say, "For those graduate assistants who return by December 5th and accept a teaching assignment for the spring, this acceptance comes with the commitment to meet their responsibilities without interruption throughout the spring semester. Absences not approved by the dean will result in suspension from assistantship assignments and loss of stipend for the following two consecutive semesters." We do not fall into this category - we have been on strike consistently since the beginning.

The proposed penalties - a prospective docking of pay for semesters in which we have not yet struck - are not only patently unjust, but have been implemented without any semblance of due process, ignoring even the inadequate process called for by the university's own internal rules.

We are committed teachers and look forward to returning to our classrooms when NYU recognizes our contribution to undergraduate education and demonstrates respect for the work that we do here by negotiating a second contract with our union.

Sincerely,

Danielle Carlo

Amy LeClair

Sarah Wolf

Before I run off to my cousin's bar mitzvah, ( I think the last one I was at was my brother's, almost nine years ago. This should be fun) I wanted to point out that the Nerds On Strike have posted Amy Leclair's speech from the rally Thursday and urge folks who couldn't make it to hop over there and read it.

Besides Amy's speech, I think my favorite moments from Thursday were Adam Green's speech, Asad's speech, Wilhelm's speech, and Roger Touissaint's statement (and I'm paraphrasing) that "We took on the governor and the mayor. You took on the president, and I salute you."

I've come to thoroughly enjoy screaming at very loud volumes, in my meager approximation of a Scott Marks imitation, until my voice starts cracking and shutting down a la the fast-food employee kid in The Simpsons. There's something kind of therapeutic about it.

Kind of like karaoke.

around the line in 80 days

Recalculation suggests that Phil Wheeler was right yesterday, and that today is in fact the 80th day of the strike, about halfway through the twelfth week. I was supposed to go to a film screening early this morning, but i was tired enough from all yesterday's sturm and drang that I wound up making it to campus half an hour late and concluding that it would be much more useful of me to join the picket line rather than to go and try to see the movie of which i'd already missed the first half-hour. It was freezing cold, and i was a bit frustrated with myself for not wearing more socks or another layer of shirtyness. (That was kind of a Buffy reference, i think.) There are two pictures from the march on the front page of the WSN today, one of the crowd in profile marching beneath the arch, and this one:


I talked to some reporters today for the first time since coming here. One was writing a story about NYU's changes to Washington Square Park, and i guess wanted a striker perspective, and another was writing an opinion piece about the strike. I'm not sure what her opinion is, but I feel like I was on message enough that even if she's secretly like Jamie Kirchick in disguise, which didn't seem likely - she seemed non-fascist, but you can never tell - I didn't give her much to go on and policed myself, i hope, adequately enough

Ask me about the strike, part 4.

Today marked, depending on who is counting, (me or Phil Wheeler,) the 78th or 79th day of the strike. This strike is now officially longer than the one I wrote an 82-page senior thesis about. It's the longest ever TA strike at a private university in the U.S., possibly the longest at any university - i don't know the history of the strikes at the U.C. schools well enough to make this claim, though. We are fairly sure that it is also the only academic strike in the U.S. which has ever tried to bridge the semester gap. Rather than see this as daunting, i hope folks are finding it inspirational. Like the semi-situationalist banner said, back on day 1, "make history right now."

On Tuesday three GAs - including one person i went to college with - received letters notifying them that their stipends would be cut and that they would be barred from teaching for not one, as promised, but two full semesters, lest they return to work by today. They're staying out. So are the three folks who found out yesterday. These folks are all stand-alone instructors. Some of them are in departments in which lots of people are international students or have gone back to work. Others are in departments in which they were, from the beginning, the only people out. I'm sure there will be more letters in the future, as NYU carries out what seems a bit like a last-ditch effort to scare us back to work with the threat of extended retaliatory lockouts. I do not think this is a wise move on NYU's part. First off, even if they could break us with this, what they are doing is going to wind up dooming Sexton's whole "upwardly mobile University" agenda. This strike is being watched very closely, by union members in New York, by graduate employees across the country (and in Canada!) and certainly by faculty. The administration has now recieved hundreds of letters from professors across the country saying that they will be unable to reccommend prospective students to the university should the retaliatory threats be implemented. Now that these threats are not only being implemented, but doubled, I wonder if we can start conjecturing about what this says about the university's commitment to graduate education (not to mention undergraduate teaching.) Second, i do not think, particularly coming out of the discussions in the union over the past several days and today's massive demonstration of support from across the labor movement, that this is going to break us. Strikers were prepared for this eventuality coming into this semester, even if the threat has metastazized and violated the "contract" offered in President Sexton's infamous letter of November 28, to which the new letters deceptively refer. For comprehensive coverage of this, read the mother of all GSOC strike blogs, Nerds on Strike

The rally was pretty amazing. Amy, the sociologist who got a letter on tuesday, with the other five letter recipients standing behind her, spoke powerfully about why she decided to strike, what the letters represent, and why she's staying out. Christine Quinn and other city councilmembers promised to stand in the way of any NYU projects until Sexton is ready to resume negotiations with us. Adam Green said something about breaking out his old GESO t-shirt, apparently. Roger Toussaint led some very spirited chants.

I screamed through a pink fake megaphone until my voice pretty much completely gave out. That's happening to me more and mpore, and i'm feeling like i'm never going to have that singing career I've always dreamed of, and will be henceforth restricted to belting out "November Rain" (dedicated to all the strikers, of course) on karaoke machines from Avenue U to Moshulu Parkway for the rest of my life. While i'm skeptical of the rhetoric of sacrifice, that's one i'm willing to make.

Also on the personal side, It was great to see all the folks from the federation (all the busloads of GESO folks and Local 34 folks, especially Laurie and Beth, and Andrea,) and Rose, who i guess is now a former federation folk. And there was a UOC contingent (Thomas and Josh, to boot,) which made me happy. And Saqib was in town. And one of the Goldman Sachs cafeteria workers i met several years ago when i was an intern with Local 100 gave me a Unite-HERE pin.

I think that's all for now. I have some coursework to do.

A longer post on the lockouts/threats will follow soon. For now, I just want to say that the NYU administration is making another very large mistake. This will not break us. It's going to make us stronger, i think. And i'm not saying that to be triumphalist. I think we're going to win.

Also, Marxism and Literature is fucking amazing and i'm wondering why Michael made us read The Sociology of Culture in the Readings on Cultural Theory seminar instead.

Rally tomorrow, 4 PM.

The Harder They Come

here we go...

I'm going to go picket now.

Burning Down The House

Finally finished the minifield.

Marc Blucas needs to stop taking roles as a secret agent on a college campus. Dude is being type-cast. First Daughter is like Chasing Liberty meets Saved By The Bell: The College Years meets . Also "If things were different, I'd still follow you around all the time. Because I wanted to. Not because I had too." Can you say Stalker?

I got delayed from paper writing for about an hour this afternoon when my parent's apartment, to which i retreated a few days ago to get this thing done, filled up witth smoke, sending the CO alarm into the stratosphere. It seems the dryer was burining some lint up or something. Crazy.

hey hey hey, right now.

In case you haven't heard about it already, GSOC is having a huge rally on thursday. People from all over the labor movement are coming to stand with us and put our collective might to bear on the University Leadership Team to win a just contract and ensure the future of our union and a better way forward for NYU than the one it's currently on. This strike is a critical moment for the university as a global institution, for academic labor, and for workers' rights. This is a fight we need to win. Please stand with us.

If you can make it, Thursday at 4 PM, Bobst Library. (Washington Square South between Washinton Square East and LaGuardia Pl.) Please come.

Paper-writing at two thirty-seven in the morning (i'm almost done!) and surfing the web for something to disract me for a few seconds, I found instead something i thought I should share with those readers here who don't regularly read the Yale Daily News (which is to say, those of you who are lucky.) Josh Eidelson's "What's Left" column in today's edition begins with an incisive rejection/skewering of the David Horowitzian attempt to expropriate and police the terminology and political space of "academic freedom" as a weapon with which to marginalize and attack both individual faculty and departments and entire disciplines. That Horowitz and his ilk can continue to call their pogroms and witch-hunts and classroom COINTELPRO "academic freedom" seems to indicate a prfound failure on the part of neoliberalized universities to engage with the world outside their acid-washed walls or plexiglass turnstile panoptica.

Josh then turns away from Dinesh D'Souza's echo chamber towards the actually-existing classroom. He argues that the greatest threat to a free academe is the casualization of academic labor and laborers, and points out that as graduate employee unions fight for social justice in the academy, we have faced very concrete and frightening threats to our job security and our academic careers. "The most dangerous issue for transient teachers to discuss isn't the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians; it's the economic relationships defining the universities that employ them."

Josh concludes:

That mission of light and truth is eroded when graduate teaching assistants
curtail political activity for fear of losing the support of their departments
or being forced out of them. It is eroded when adjunct professors stay quiet for
fear of sacrificing their careers. It's endangered at every university where
coercive anti-union campaigns and aggressive casualization pit intellectual
responsibilities against economic necessity. That includes NYU, where teaching
assistants remain on strike despite President John Sexton's threat to lock them
out of teaching work. It's threats like these, not tenured radicals, that
endanger academic freedom, and these are the struggles that should concern those
seeking to protect it.

The "academic freedom" argument for unionization has never been the one i've found most compelling, even though i agree with it 100%. When asked why I'm in this fight, I think more about the global politics of university capitalism, the casualization of work and neoliberalization of universities, and the opportunity and need for collective action to "tear down the walls," as the march from Fair Haven was titled, to create new kinds of (organic?) intellectuals and new ways of thinking about and/or destabilizing work, academic and otherwise, and about organizing together with workers across departments, across job classifications, and across industries and borders to constitute a very different sort of globalization from that which Carlos Zedillo dispenses upon up there on Prospect Street. Why Josh's column resonates so powerfully for me is that it forges a direct link between an argument i've generally thought of as something that gets other people excited (and is therefore good) and the stuff that moves me to put myself on the line.

So. Thursday. 4 PM. I''ll see you there.

quick link: Jackson Lewis

Confined Space links to an advertisement for a seminar NYU's newest union busting law firm is holding for corporations on "How To Stay Union Free." The scariest part, Jordan reminds us, is that Bush's OSHA nominee is one of these guys.

Highlights from the seminar:

Today's unions have "changed to win." Have you?
In 2005, unions including the
SEIU, UNITE HERE, UFCW, and Teamsters left the venerable AFL-CIO to form the new
Change To Win Federation. Faced with new competition, the AFL-CIO threw its
support to its remaining unions and bolstered union organizing. This radical
reform has already led to unprecedented union organizing victories.
It's a
whole new battle... and only those employers who know the strategy will emerge
from the fight union-free.
Attend "How To Stay Union Free" and learn:
How
competing unions are a new threat to you and your organization
How to fight
new organizing techniques including neutrality agreements, voluntary
recognition, and corporate campaigns
How you can make unions irrelevant to
your employees — before the organizing starts
How to develop a comprehensive
plan that starts working long before the union shows up
How to empower your
supervisors to exercise their union-free rights under the law
How to protect
your company's property rights when confronted with organizing
How to define
the communications agenda and put the union on the defensive

They're clearly scared by (or think it's profitable to scare enmployers by raising the specter of) the implications and early effects of the CTW/AFL split, which suggests to me that Wilhelm et al. were right, and Buffenbarger and others who argued that this was a desertion that would deal "Labor" (as if such a metonymy were ever approporiate) a critical blow were wrong.

I promise i'll actually post something substantive once I am finally done with all the work i have yet to finish from the fall semester. For now, I will confine myself to speaking only in cell phone photography and other visual media. And in the meantime, you can picket with GSOCers every weekday from 9-1. And please don't forget to donate to the strike fund.

Also, Richard Levin looks like a yuppie gargoyle. Discuss.

Moreover, I am
cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit
idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live
with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the
United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Brimingham. But your
statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the
conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you
would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that
deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is
unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even
more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community
with no alternative.

-"Letter From a Birmingham Jail"

Opening my copy of barbarian virtues for the first time in four years (since seth fein's class) i found notes from the second meeting of the attempt to restart slac. I was keeping the queue. I think this was the first time i ever heard the term social contract in a non-rousseauian sense. Katie did the reportback from the convention, and i remember feeling like it was a very strange idea.

Not anarchist enough for me or something. So little about that year made sense except in retrospect, except for the town hall meeting full of graduate student unionists and marching down college street to the medical center on april 24th and understanding maybe for the first time how powerful organizing could be (maybe because it came at such a frustrating and difficult moment for me). That was a long time ago. Four years. Right now, i mostly feel stressed out, overwhelmed with work and feeling like i'm not being useful enough to the organizing or a particularly good graduate student. But i guess I need to carry that memory of the afternoon sun shining down on thousands of people, clamorous voices echoing against dead, acid-aged granite, and all of us together committing ourselves to the struggle for the future of new haven and the future of the university.

Still panoptical

Panopticon

Clinton Jencks, 1918-2005

Clinton Jencks, the Mine, Mill and Smelter (IUMMSW) rep who helped lead the 1950-51 Empire Zinc Strike "Salt of the Earth" strike, (and, basically, like many of the strikers portrayed "himself" in the movie,) passed on last month. Go watch Salt of The Earth. It's pretty much the best movie ever. And for more on Jencks, Juan Chacon (the president of the local), and the organizers who made up the women's auxiliary and led the strike to victory, read this book.

'Salt of the Earth' labor leader dead
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- The
U.S. labor movement lost an iconic figure with the death of union organizer
Clinton Jencks. He was 87.
Jencks died Dec. 14 of natural causes in San
Diego, the Los Angeles Times said Friday.
His fight to unionize New Mexico
mineworkers in a McCarthy-era strike more than 50 years ago was chronicled in
the classic motion picture "Salt of the Earth."
Beginning in 1950, Jencks
led a 15-month strike near Bayard, N.M., against Empire Zinc Co. by the
Amalgamated Bayard District Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. The largely
Latino strikers wanted to be paid what white miners were paid. When Empire got
an injunction barring the men from picketing, their wives and children took
their place. Then, when they were also arrested and jailed, the families made so
much noise in jail that the sheriff let them go.
Eventually, Jencks and his
workers won.
But payback was swift: Jencks was convicted of perjury in 1954
and sentenced to five years in prison for supposedly lying about being a
Communist. Three years later the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
Jencks went on to earn an economics doctorate and teach from 1964 until his
retirement in 1988

Bob Dylan is "relevant"

There must be some [kind of] way out of here
said the juggler
to the thief
there's too much confusion
i can't get no relief
businessmen they drink my wine
plowmen dig my earth
none of them along the line
know what any of it is worth

"No reason to get excited,"
the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us
who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that,
and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now,
the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the [cold] distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

*phrases in brackets represent words added by Jimi Hendrix.

More like 119 University Place

Mike Cohen from the English department guestblogs at Michael Berube's blog (too many "blog"s in this sentence) on the strike and economic instrumentalization of academe...

The muddled interconnections between corporate capitalism and education may simply be more nakedly displayed at NYU than at other places. Universities tend to cloak their bad labor practices under the veneer of the cultural and intellectual prestige they command within society, and NYU, let’s face it, lacks the prestige of, say, Yale. Grad students have wised up to the rules of the game here: you can’t make everything economically determined and then deploy the language of liberal idealism when it suits you—ideologies always fail through their internal contradictions, and NYU’s rhetoric is pretty easy to decode. We know we’re here for an economic purpose; I’m fine with that—after all, I love the work. But I’m going to gain the best advantage I can, and that means unionization. GSOC has made life better for NYU’s grad students, and I will never trust an administration that has threatened me the way this one has. (Given the magically rising cost of tuition and the massive leveraging it now takes an undergrad to get a degree here, it won’t be long before they wise up too—many of them already have.)

The word is out about NYU, but it didn’t have much of a reputation to damage. But strikes are meant to cause economic damage, and economic statements are the ones NYU understands. So, two months in and we’re still on strike, and we’ll stay on strike until we get a contract. That’s just the way things work around here.

My computer seems to have a virus

no mas muertes

Every year, thanks to the Right's increasing militarization of the U.S. Mexico border (something Bush has vowed to continue even as he tries to persuade the Tom Tancredos to accept guestworker programs which give migrants very little rights but look like Walmart's dreams come true) and the racialized policing of the migrants who try to cross to find work or escape violence and persecution elsewhere or a combination of some or all of these, hundreds of people die in the Sonora desert of southern Arizona. No More Deaths is a movement which practices "civil initiative," providing migrants with water, food, and medical care, and fights for justice on the border. On July 9 of this past year, two activists, Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss, were arrested for trying to bring three people to a hospital for emergency medical care from a camp outside a small town called Arivaca. I almost went to this camp when i was visiting Julie and Lauren and Amelia in Tucson a year and a half ago, but it was monsoon season, and there was a monsoon, and we were in a minivan with bad tires, so we couldn't make it. Anyway. Daniel and Shanti are facing the possibility of 15 years in prison. As they continue to attempt to get the cases thrown out, No More Deaths is asking for people to contact Arizona's U.S. Attorney, Paul Charlton (here's the action toolkit,) donate funds, and take other actions to defend the principle that it cannot be a crime to provide humanitarian aid.

So, I actually went to high school with Dan Strauss. I haven't seen him in like five years. I ask folks to do what you can to support No More Deaths because I don't want him or anyone else in this movement to have to go to jail for doing work that is profoundly important and which must continue.

the 1971 Yale Strike

My undergraduate senior essay, "The 1971 Yale Strike: Imperial Power, Workers’ Struggle, and Urban Renewal in the Globalization of the University" can now be read in its entirety online in pdf form (footnotes, cartoons, foibles, and all,) at the Yale Alumnae/i For Social Justice "Yale History" page. You can also read Josh Eidelson's term paper on the Local 34 drive.

Skyline from the manhattan bridge, facing southwest

My great uncle

View from sunset park.

So what you're saying is...

...that Friends really is an accurate representation of the gentrified yuppie LES life? I've been suggesting that this may be the case since high school, but nevertheless I'm finding this article more than a little bizarre. I'm sure it's doing wonders for Piper Perabo's career though.

I had serious apprehensions about moving back to NYC after college and staying here for grad school. In the former case i didn't really have anywhere else to go and I thought I'd be able to find work faster in New York. Ha. My reservations about staying here were all about gentrification and the way this city is so good at atomizing people and ripping them apart, unless, that is, you want to build an isolated incestuous sitcom "life serial" (to swipe a phrase from the Buffy) instead of a broader and more responsive relationship with the city you live in (and, in my case, where you grew up.) There are days when i wish i'd gone to the west coast or midwest or found some way to stay in New Haven or spent some time "someplace that's else." But, on the other hand, with the strike, i feel like there's an opportunity to find/build a relationship with this city which i feel like i haven't had since high school or maybe since i was doing the internship almost four years ago with Local 100. (HERE, not TWU, in case anyone was wondering.) So hopefully we can all figure out a way to help make new York something more than a yuppified Giulianified amusement park that poor folks can't afford to live in but have to migrate several hours to every day in order to work low-wage, contingent jobs for massively powerful corporations like Domino Sugar and garment sweatshops and New York University.

Fun.

what do you think? (some insomnia-fueled solidarity forever verses)

It is we who grade the papers
teach the sections, yes its true
we do our advisors' research
and we also lead reviews
and until we get a contract
we will shut down NYU
for the union makes us strong

Sexton tries to hug us,
but we tell him "No way, John"
He tells us that it's over
that our union is all gone
but we know while we stand together
we can roll the union on
and the union makes us strong

EDIT: changed a line in the second verse to make it slightly less cheesy.

And here's another verse

Dean Catherine Stimpson,
define responsibility
but know that such pedantry
has a bad effect on me
we're the ones who'll save this
university
for the union makes us strong

2nd Edit: The first verse above is obviously a blatant rip-off, err, homage, to the first of four verses written about the 1984 Clerical & Technical workers' strike at Yale. Local 34 members produced their own songbook. Maybe i'll post the verses they wrote later. I just wanted to give credit where credit was due. Any suckiness in the verses above are due to my own crapulence.

Always Racist. Always

Oh, Walmart.

Wal-Mart stirred outrage yesterday when its Web site suggested that
shoppers who wanted to buy a "Planet of the Apes" DVD would be interested in
biopics of famous black Americans like Martin Luther King Jr.
The giant
retailer blamed a computer glitch for the "offensive" recommendations - and said
it was overhauling its online operations until a fix could be made.
"We are
heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to
correct the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said. "We are deeply
sorry that this happened."
When visitors to Walmart.com plug in the name of
a movie they want, the site also pulls up the name of several other "similar
items" they might like.
For instance, a shopper who enters "Million Dollar
Baby" is offered other 2004 hits like "The Aviator" and "Ray."
But in the
case of "Planet of the Apes," consumers who clicked on the DVD of the original
TV series - a cult classic in which the Earth is ruled by gorillas - were routed
to four movies about King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and
singer Tina Turner.
New Yorkers were disturbed.
"They are making a
statement relating apes to black movies?" wondered Denise Brown, 36, of East New
York, Brooklyn. "'Planet of the Apes' was a science fiction movie. What does
Martin Luther King have to do with that?"
"It's outrageous. I've never heard
of anything like that," the Rev. Al Sharpton said when he was told of the
pairings.
"They need to straighten it out, and if they do not clarify what
happened, we need to take some action."

Update: here's more from the Washington Post.

..."and you're history!:" Buffy vs. The University

Being a semi-procrastinatory interlude from paper writing, in which i dispense on Buffy and academe.

In season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the eponymous (is that the correct usage?)protagonist, having, the previous spring, blown up her high school in order to kill the gigantic snake demon into which the mayor of Sunnydale transformed himself, begins college at the (obviously fictional) UC Sunnydale. In her first days of college, Buffy has to deal with feelings of inadequacy as a student, gets yelled out of a lecture hall by a sexist cultural studies professor on her first day of classes, and must fend off the soul-sucking advances of a demon roomate, who doesn't pee on floors, but does listen to copious amounts of Celine Dion and attempts to siphon off Buffy's life force while she sleeps. A couple of months into the semester, Buffy starts dating her Psychology TA, a strapping young grad student from Iowa named Riley Finn, who is secretly not only a graduate student but a steroidally-enhanced commando secret agent working for the shadowy military initiative operating beneath the campus, which is attempting to control, breed, and harness Sunnydale's demonic population for covert military uses.

No one bats an eye over the fact that Riley is dating Buffy while he is grading her work. The writers at times seem unsure of whether he is a graduate student or simply an older undergraduate - he refers to himself as a "psychology major," but Buffy observes in a later episode, "you know, there's nothing more dangerous than a psych grad student". Later, after he says something ridiculously cheesy to Professor Walsh, she refers to Riley as a "college boy in love." The list goes on, but let's operate under the presumption that, despite the fact than in many psych departments (as is the case at NYU,) undergrads are TAed by other undergrads, while PhD students tend to TA Masters courses, Riley is a graduate student.

Riley and his buds know all the ins and outs about which undergrads on campus are dating each other and which upperclassmen prove to be total man-skanks. They live in frat-houses-cum-secret-government laboratories and hold frat parties at which undergrad bands play. Now, i have never attended a large state university like the fictional UC Sunnydale, and I don't really know what grad student life is like there, but i kind of doubt that a teaching assistant would tell one of his undergraduates he barely knows about the sexual habits of another undergrad, much less know anything about said habits. But then again, I'm not a TA yet, and won't be ever if i don't finish these damn papers. Nevertheless, this is one of the few things over the course of the series that the writers simply get wrong. I posit that graduate students are something of a semi-subaltern category in Buffy who can be integrated into the show's representative schema of university life only as older undergrads with secret lives who occasionally grade papers and dress up in camoulflage. This is not the same kind of subalternity as that occupied, say, by the high school lunchlady in the Season 3 episode "Earshot," in which said food service employee only becomes visible and audible when she attempts to murder all the students by pouring rat poison in the Jello mixture, chases down Xander with a butcher's knife, and is beaten senseless by Buffy. Instead, following Kathy Newman's analysis of 90210 and other texts, Buffy constructs TAs as potential objects of romantic attachment and also calculating and dissimulating, posessing hybrid and shifting identities, suspended between graduations, and between the university and the military-industrial complex which sits, quite literally, beneath it.

(We will skip over entirely Maggie Walsh, our tenured(?) psych professor/murderous mad military scientist,whose secret project is to create "Adam," a hybrid subject, of sorts, assembled from computers (complete with floppy disk drives) and the body parts of humans, vampires, and demonic entities.)

Newman links representations in Marathon Man to the early years of the explosion of casualization of teaching. She then turns to the college years of Beverly Hills 90210, exploring the politics of social and sexual reproduction in the academy between Brandon, Dylan, et. al. and their shady/sketchy TAs during the early years of GESO's organizing campaign. "Beware graduate students - they might study something useless, kill you, or seduce your children." ("Poor, Hungry, and Desperate? Or Privileged, Histrionic, and Demanding? In Search of the True Meaning of 'Ph. D.'" Kathy M. Newman. Social Text, No. 49, The Yale Strike Dossier. (Winter, 1996), pp. 97-131.)

The fourth season of Buffy began airing in the fall of 1999 and ended in the fall of 2000. (Riley's story, in which, feeling taken for granted by an otherwise occupied Vampire Slayer, the now ex-graduate student, ex-commando becomes addicted to dangerous intercourse with the undead and leaves Sunnydale to hunt monsters in South America, concluded midway through the fifth season, in an episode which aired in December of 2000.) These years were tumultous and crucial in the shifting dynamics of academic capitalism and the social construction of graduate employees. They saw new arrangements of casualization - adjunctization, "postdoc"ization, etc., and renewed organizing at several private universities and a series of National Labor Relations Board decisions which ultimately granted workers at NYU and other private universities the status of "worker" and the right to Wagner act protections concerning organizing and bargaining. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's deft exploration of the logics and contradictions of secondary schooling through metaphor and parody has been repeatedly noted by critics and scholars, but the deep skepticism in the post-high school years over the politics, entanglements, and assumptions of contemporary universities demands deeper inquiry.

Like many, i've been saddened by the reports from the Sago mine in West Virginia. Jordan Barab has a post which everyone needs to read. Barab refutes the company's assertion that the disaster was caused by a lightning bolt and instead locates the blame in the Republican-corporate assault on Occupational Safety and Health enforcement.

My thoughts are with the families and friends of the workers who didn't make it, and with the survivors of the landslide in Indonesia.

that whole strike thing.

Today marks eight weeks. 56 days.

Donate to the GSOC Strike Fund

Folks have asked me about how to contribute to the striker hardship fund. You can now do so online. Thanks for whatever you can contribute.

3.a little bit louder

Asad has a fantastic post on the strike, dealing particularly with the ramifications of the new policies for language and literature teachers as advancing rather than molliating casualization and thinking about the strike's relationship to the humanities. In the process, he gets Bordieuian:

Here I might return to the theme of "collegiality." The picket line, with
its chanting, drumming, singing - in short, its performativity - is by its
nature often carnivalesque: not only the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the
very habitus, or social and bodily disposition, of university life is suspended
by it. The result is an unleashing of pent-up energies and frustrations of many
kinds, including elements that exceed the basis of the conflict, such as the
offensive nature of the university's communications with graduate assistants.
This is why the defense of collegiality has become an important high ground to
the administration: harping on it allows the picket line's symbolic excess to be
depicted as a form of reactive immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also
seen to be a form of belatedness: Sexton's euphemistic corporate terminology of
an "Enterprise University" and "University Leadership Team" leaves no room such
"dated" practices as strikes and protests, and the supposedly expired sixties
radicalism from which they are thought to stem. Just as the domain of the
humanities is linked to anachronistic countercultural protest, so then is the
social practice of picketing. On both counts, we're both too young and too old,
past our sell-by date before we grow up. This argumentative tack, however,
allows for the obfuscation of the original conflict. Even so, analyzed as a
cultural form, the picket line performs an important function: it inscribes and
instantiates the strike both to observers and in the minds and bodies of those
striking. As Louis Althusser might have said, it "interpellates" (roughly,
allows the self-recognition of) those who take part, and thus functions as a
radicalizing action. Insofar as it refuses collegial dialogue and substitutes
the implacable presence of the bodies of strikers, picketing only belongs more
purely to the category of action.

I find Asad's description of the picket line as a performative and carnivalesque space which deconstructs and disrupts the quotidian dynamics of academic labor explooitation compelling. The radical possibilities implicit in this kind of interruption were, after all, what fueled actions like this one, which I return to again and again because it was such a formative moment for me in how I think about what we are fighting for and how universities work (and how we can build new configurations of knowledge production and create new conversations and new ways of having them which challenge the neoliberal frameworks of University Leadership Teams and Roland Betts-led 15 Billion Dollar corporations. What is particularly interesting to me about Asad's argument is the move it makes to look at the polemicisists and polemics of collegiality as profoundly reactionary in a way which invites useful scrutiny of what's at stake in the idyllic phantasm of the university's proud (tacitly imperial) pastness and tradition and ownership of a bright, rich future raised by the Sextons and Stimpys and their analogues elsewhere.

We need to understand the strike as more than simple refusal to work and disruption of "business as usual." What new kinds of arrangements of academic labor, what radical reimagining of the university does the strike produce, and how do we create that new university "from the ashes of the Old Campus?" (As Ralph Chaplin might have put it were he still alive and had he not become a raving anticommunist in his later years.) These are questions our organizing will have to answer somehow. I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Call Me Alan Lomax.

Dredging up some old classics- first, Alyssa's briliant "New Haven Pie," then, my vastly inferior "Sucker PhDs." Both written just over two years ago. (Hey Alyssa, if you want me to tale this down,please let me know.)

New Haven Pie
Not such a long time ago
I can still remember
When the unions, they first made me smile
And I learned that if he had the chance
Slick Rick would screw them in a flash
And that left me conflicted for a while
But if March snowstorms made me shiver
Levin's letters made me quiver
Flat lies on the doorstep
They made me take one more step
I know that there were times I cried
And days I really had to try
But Meg's words touched me deep inside
The day Yale's honor died

So... Bye, bye to this Rick Levin guy
He's a craven in new Haven, and nobody will cry
And the Federation will raise their glasses up high
Singing "For the Social Contract we'll strive!
To make New Haven come alive!"

The Daily wrote the book on strikes
Chased down UOCers on their bikes
To find out what they thought we'd know
Now do you believe in recognition?
Will you raise a sign, sign our petition?
And will you teach Woodbridge not to act so slow?
And we all know I love leftist guys
Whether organizers or in PR guise
'Cause they do their jobs so well
I love helping them give Levin hell
I was a lonely freshman liberal
Prime UOC organizing material
And Zach helped show me what was real
The day Yale's honor died

I started singing... Bye, bye to ONHSA's clever disguise
There are problems in New Haven and I want to know why
And the good old boys can stop telling me their lies
This'll be the day that they die
And for the real story I'll try

Now for decades Yale's been in a snit
Organized working people give them fits
But that's not how it used to be
When kids from Hillhouse went to school here
And Bulldog victories raised townie cheers
(All this came long 'fore you and me)
But while Yale improved itself all around
Manufacturing left this town
Redevelopment failed
And town-gown relations ailed
And while Rae wrote his book called City
Life for his subjects wasn't pretty
And he must not have felt so witty
The day Yale's honor died
We were singing...

Why, why, can't our school even try?
This is lame, I'm quite ashmed, some days it just makes me cry
When pensions and benefits are only pie in the sky
Why do they even bother with lies?
Why do they even bother with lies?

Sit-down protests in the August swelter
The police made arrests to give freshmen shelter
The riot cops were moving fast
While we camped out on the grass
Betty T. tried to sneak on past
And to keep us on the sidelines to the last
And all the plans we'd made since June
Got carried out to chants (off-tune)
We were ready to advance
But we never got the chance
'Cause though they tried to deal and wield
By September Yale just had to yield
Do you recall what we concealed?

The day Yale's honor died
We started singing...
My, my, wasn't that a good try
When labor joins with neighbors then the management cries
And 'cause John Wilhelm helped us organize
Now GESO'll be recognized
And the hospital prioritized

And we got together in one place
To discuss wages, gender, free speech and race
After three days we started again
Marissa and Helena wrote some scripts
Noah and Josh called the press real quick
'Cause the Register isn't always labor's friend
And though Bruce tried to be quite sage
His promises hit the front page
No more equivocating
Their racist policies got done in
And as we celebrated that fight
A victory for what was right
I saw Levin cowering with fright
The day Yale's honor died

He was moaning why, why, am I this town's fall guy?
We're good neighbors, do some favors (at least sometimes we try)
So we're good old boys, why did their goodwill run dry?
Now out of Tweed their airplanes can fly! (Even if in poverty workers
die...)
I met a guy who did some press
All autumn long he made me guess
Although he never turned away
I went down to the office doors
Where I'd found justice, months before
And they said there that we wouldn't take it any more...
And in the streets, the workers chanted
Levin issued statements, then recanted
And with the contracts settled
Bank hearings we bedeviled
And the organizer I admired most, Meg Robertson, got a new post
She and her partner hit the coast
After Yale's honor died

I started singing... Bye, bye, now I'm not going to cry
We've got battles, can't get rattled, and we've tactics to try
And thanks to your committment, now I can organize
Fight for justice 'til the day that I die!

"New Haven Pie" was probably the best of the song rewrites we did, though "Forgot about Pay," "Strike Strike Baby," and Josh's take on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" were all pretty enjoyable. I especially love the line about the YDN chasing us down on bikes. That was hilarious. I conclude with "Sucker PhDs," which was my best contribution. I have redacted a couple names and changed a few particularly bad lines around, but left most of them intact.

RUN-UOC is BACK.
"Sucker Ph.Ds"
To the tune of Sucker MCs, from the album "RUN-DMC"

[RUN: Revolutionary Underground Network]
Two years ago
some friends of mine
asked me to stand up and organize
cause it is time to make a better day
yale's fascism is not ok
so we founded the UOC
and fought for justice in our city
Yale's gentrification is totally wack
Of light and truth there's a serious lack
they bled the workers down to the bone
And their bank will not give anybody a loan
Yale's money is its golden calf, workers starve, Yalecorp laughs
Champagne caviar, and bubble bath
That's the "life" that they lead
And those greedy CEOs are who they please
But they better move back cause we're on attack
Because there's nothin in the world, that could ever hold us back
I cold chill at the strike tent in a pissed off stance
And when I march through the streets I just wanna dance
Take off kid gloves, we attack from above
You capitalist pigs don't know the meaning of love

We rock this city from Morris Cove to The Hill
And [organize] the hospital with [EDITED]
Levin's cruisin for a bruisin',; he best move or step aside
I cannot even count all the many ways they lied
can't wait to see the looks on their faces
When they hear bout the class action suit cases
well it's been [five] years since i got in this fight
And all you sucker PhDs, you just ain't right
Because you're causin' all this strife, you're cheating us of life
You strut around town where such poverty is rife
showin off what you have, actin' like a fool
And everybody knows what things you do

Yeah you oppress me, and it ain't fun
You don't even care, like Linda MaSON!
We're all up in your face with steel toed boot and lace
We're buildin 'our committee put a movement on your case
You live Uptown in your cap and your gown
But we're cellular like Susan Crown!
You better start running now just as fast as you can
Get out of New Haven, take Mike Morand
You are out of time, your corporate crime
is passe like [Bob Culver] or like Meghan Clyne
Exploit black neighborhoods, and the brown
Try to deceive us but your scheme is found
Around your finger you think we're so tightly wound
You're just a sucker Ph.D you fascist clown

So UOC and if you're ready
The people rockin steady
Drive through Yale's lies like Mario Andretti! (Respect to Q-Tip)

[U.O.C.]

We're U.O.C. and you know that we
Do go to Yale University
And while organizin' we acquired the knowledge
One usually cannot receive in college
they have sinned, stole workers means
But we'll dethrone these capitalist fiends
They take their fill, rob us through guile
but they can't stop us - we're versatile
Behind closed doors you call us retards
But we're more like the parisian communards
This town you exploit is our home
You won't find that in any Doug Rae tome
We are sticking in this fight
So you had better start doing what's right
or come time, you'll throw a fit
when we bury you up to you neck in Shhhhhhh
You will quake when you hear our refrain
you'll jump around just like HOUSE of PAIN
[You think that you're a classes shop]
Your union busting ways have got to stop
Cause you have lost any semblance of sense
And things are about to get real intense.