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.