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.