Another Move

Three years ago tonight David Lee told us that Yale's triumphalist arrogance was a lie, that GESO had another move, 1199 had another move, Locals 34 and 35 had another move. John Sexton (Larry Summers) today told me that we were over. He's been saying that since September. As i said below, I told him that we weren't going anywhere and that it wasn't going to end until we have a contract. More importantly GSOC members turned up in droves to lobby state leaders in Albany and picketed NYU's fiasco of a reception en masse, making our continued strength and dedication to winning, and the material and political consequences of a continued refusal to bargain, known to the NYU administration, who could respond only with vile and ridiculous lies and megalomaniacal bravado. It was an incredible day. High points for me include Jon Corzine or his exact double ripping up his invitation and refusing to cross the picket line as the throng of GSOCers and our allies all but shut down NYU's reception, filling the cavernous Albany concourse with echoing thunderous chanting, the polyrhythmic clapping of the proliferation of musicians, the Republican assemblyman from Westbury who was totally on our side, the cutest baby ever, and the stregnth and determination folks showed today to win this strike and push the movement forward. At that meeting in the First & Summerfield church three years ago, Vinny O'Brien also spoke. Are you ready to rumble, he asked the assembled, which included a gaggle of UOCistas (Abbey was speaking, after all.) We were more than ready then, as now. And we're ready, and going, to win.

"You're like a karaoke machine that's been colonized by a union." - Rana Jaleel

Gauntlet of GSOC

Loud and proud at the reception.

Gauntlet of GSOC

Larry Summers

NYU negotiate now!

While lobbying, i ran into none other than john sexton. He told me that we needed to realize that the conversation about our second contract was over. I told him "you may think it's over, but we don't and this isn't going away, WE aren't going anywhere, until you negotiate!"

Picketing the reception part 2

raising your level of suckiness

In which motivational speech by high school jazz band teacher becomes organizing/life metaphor.

Organzing can suck somtimes. One can suck at organizing sometimes. 111 day strikes can suck.. They can also rock. They can suck and they can rock. That's a self conscious neil gaiman quotation. So if you know that the suck is going to be there, you just have to rock so hard as to raise the level of sucking from extreme sucking to less extreme sucking. That's kind of how union organizing works too.

Or, possibly it isn't. God damn it.

That new Broken Social Scene album really is quite good.

Octavia Butler, RIP

For more than 30 years, Seattle science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler dreamed up fantastic worlds and religions, made-up creatures and futuristic plots. Then, in her stylistic prose, she used them to tackle the social issues she was most passionate about.

"Parable of the Talents," a futuristic story about a utopian community ravaged by civil war, explored modern-day issues of intolerance, the growing gap between rich and poor, and environmentalism. In her first novel, "Kindred," she plunged into racial issues when a modern-day character was transported into the body of a pre-Civil War slave.

"What [Ms. Butler] was writing for the first time was a kind of woman's-eye view, a very smart woman's-eye view, of say, 'Brave New World' or '1984,' " said writer Harlan Ellison, Ms. Butler's friend and mentor.

seven ones clash

this is the 111th day of the strike and the 1111th post on this blog, thus necessitating the failed reference to Culture's roots reggae masterpiece Two Sevens Clash in the title of this post.

In 2002 Forbes ranked NYU trustee and Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone as the 313th richest man in the world, with $750 Million to his name. In 2005, Langone was worth $1.2 billion, but had fallen to #548. The rich are getting richer. Meanwhile, graduate teachers at the university on whose board Langone is an officer have been on strike for nearly sixteen weeks. that's some good governance.

Had to re-reread the first chapter of The Cultural Front for class this morning for the first time in years. This reminded me that at some point I really want to read Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio. But it also got me thinking again about the relationships between social movements and cultural production, and the ways in which this strike might help to make possible new ways of organizing and thinking about academic work, in solidarity with a broader workers' movement and towards new understandings and politics of universities and of culture itself. That's one of the reasons I'm in this fight, i guess. Another is that these plutocrats really have no business running a university, let alone exploiting workers through their sundry other ventures (Home Depots, poison pills, and (anyone surprised?) Greenwich freaking Associates of Greenwich freaking Connecticut. (The specter of Charles Ellis, apparently, is haunting the neoliberal university.) And then there's that whole thing about how we want a contract. Hey hey hey. Right now, and how Sexton and Lew and Mills and McLaughlin are now officially blacklisting 18 graduate teachers for refusing to allow their union to be thrown in the garbage heap by imperial fiat. Two weeks from today is day 125. Today i am feeling like we can stay out as long as we need to, like we can keep building and escalating (and no, that is not phallic imagery,) and we can win this strike no matter how intransigent they are being right now or how long it takes us.

birds of a feather

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand no confidence votes.

Equally urgent is the question of what role universities will play in our
society. Will scientific and medical advances be available to a broad section of
the public, or be restricted to a wealthy few? Will education be considered a
basic right for all, a public good, or a rare privilege? It is no accident, for
example, that corporatization of higher education has been accompanied by a rise
of private schooling and decreasing public commitment to fund education at all
levels.
Expanding corporate involvement and influence in research and the
devaluing of teaching through innovations like distance learning and on-line
courses both undermine the control of teachers and researchers, while
emphasizing the profit potential of our work. Yale is at the forefront of both
these trends.
The Patent and Trademark Act Amendments of 1980 (better known
as the Bayh-Dole Act) allowed universities, for the first time, to patent
discoveries that had been supported with public money. The result has been a
sharp increase in the number of patents issued to universities, more than two
thousand each year by the mid 1990s. Supporters of the legislation argue that it
has made a growing number of discoveries available to the public and encouraged
private investment in research at universities. But with the federal government
providing more than 60% of the funding for academic science research, it is hard
to escape the impression that Bayh-Dole has in fact made universities a conduit
for converting public money into private profit.

*****

The labor movement has two powerful lessons to offer academics: the
necessity of collective action to secure personal freedom and the importance of
respecting our work. Unionization encourages us to throw out the myth of the
cloistered scholar and the illusion that we can individually win our right to a
voice through hard work, brilliance, and a recognized, secure position within
the university (tenure). We realize that we will not secure academic
freedom
through personal dedication or bravery (although there is plenty of room for
these), but will have to reclaim it through organization and collective action.
By supporting each other and engaging with the entire community around us, we
help create space where academic debate can thrive and scholars can afford to
take risks in their work.

Even more importantly, unionization puts us back in touch with the truth
that intellectual work is indeed work and should be respected as such. How many
times have I heard (or even said) that what we do as academics is really mostly
fun, just sitting around reading books? Who among us has not had our moments of
thinking, “I can’t believe that they pay me for this!” But these kinds of
attitudes denigrate the very thing that is most valuable about the academy—the
opportunities it provides to do interesting and rewarding work in an atmosphere
of respect and dignity. These are precisely the things that are most endangered
within a capitalist economy. To downplay their value is to surrender to
evaluating our work in market-driven terms and to fail to appreciate the crucial
role universities play in safeguarding democracy. Worst of all, when we become
convinced about the worthlessness of our own work, we are unwilling to fight for
it and instead put ourselves more readily in the service of those in power.

Universities need to be public spaces where the needs of human beings come
before the pressures of the market. Although some faculty worry that
unionization could institutionalize the corporatization and casualization of the
academy, my experience in GESO has instead encouraged me to think about the
social importance of my teaching and research. For us to impart the
humanistic values and ideas that lie at the heart of education to our students,
we need to recover those ideas for ourselves.

-Anita Seth, "Unionizing for a More Democratic and Responsive University."

"Friends don't let friends get Friends haircuts." - Alice In Chains bassist, on Metallica's depillification, 1996.

happy birthday jessica.

It was a long day. I helped someone move. I got some work done. I went to the United Nations and saw John Sexton give an arrogant and hypocritical speech on"good governance" and I saw Amy and Asad ask him some very powerful and incisive questions that rather than answer, he chose to launch into an absurd anti-union tirade. (The UN panel facilitator for his part dismissed us as a 'local issue,' which was disgusting. We are an issue for a whole lot of locals. And, beneath the pun, the truth, that the casualization of academic work and the violations of international human rights law represented by the strike have implications which need to be understood in a way that doesn't fall prey to the kind of imperial parochialism one would think the United fucking Nations beyond.) On the subway tonight a drunk guy started calling me a motherfucker, said he didn't like me, and told me and Rana that he had a gun. then I had to explain to this huge drunk Russian guy how to get to Sheepshead Bay.

blood on my hands

On saturday morning, while trying to open my door to leave my apartment, i somehow missed the doornob and smashed my index finger against the door, breaking the skin just below my knuckle. Yesterday morning, while helpng to transport the Green Monster (the big bin we use to carry tables and drums and stuff) down to the picket line, i cut my other index finger. At least I'm symmetrical now, i thought at the time, as i tried to stop the bleeding.

This morning, while helping a friend move stuff into storage, i manage to cut fingers several more times. My theory is that, since i no longer play guitar and my calluses are all gone, i'm doing things with my fingers that wouldn't have used to result in cuts because i assume i still hve callused hands but no longer do and thus get cut where i don't expect to. Or, possibly, I'm getting clumsier in my old age.

Oh, and also

Larry Summers is out. Will John Sexton be next?

you never give me your money

ou only give me your funny faces
and in the middle of negotiations....


Wait a minute! What negotiations?



All right, I'm a dork. Anyway. I was holdng off on this because it hadn't been reported anywhere but now it's been sent out over the GSOC Journal e-mail and presumably that means it's public knowledge. If not, folks should contact me and i'll remove this post until such a time as is appropriate. The two major strike developments from last week, other than the victory on the blacklist duration, are (1) that the 8 original blacklistees are now officially cut off and not getting paid, and (2) that nine strikers from the English department recieved the Frank Hoppensteadt, PhD letter informing them that they are going to be blacklisted for the remainder of the semester. Everyone is holding strong (one striker was walking around on Friday with a laminated photocopy of the letter, with salient passages highlighted, safety-pinned to her chest) and the leveraging of new penalties has clearly not had the desired effect. There has been no new rush among strikers to return to work. By and large, the folks who are out are staying out. I tell you all this, dear readers, to suggest that now would be a good time, indeed, this is a crucial moment, to donate to the GSOC strike fund if you have not already done so.

The Best Thing I Learned in College Was STRIKE!

Didn't see this earlier, but the December GESO Voice has an article written by David Hyussen on the NYU strike,

On November 28, NYU’s president, John Sexton, issued an ultimatum that
threatened strikers with the removal of stipends and blacklisting from future
teaching positions if they did not return to the classroom by December 5. In
response, thousands of professors from around the country wrote to express their
outrage. As Yale’s Matthew Frye Jacobson wrote, “in boldly
advancing the
union-busting corporate values which you see as so essential to the running
of
the new, multi-billion dollar university, you imperil the intellectual
enterprise which is that institution’s very reason for being.”

as well as the text of the support resolution that the membership passed in support of us. I like Professor Jacobson's invocation of the multiple meanings of "enterprise." The GESO folks are also doing really interesting stuff around upper-year teaching assignments, International Students' rights, and are continuing with their divestment campaign around Yale's Farallon entanglements in the private prison corporation CCA.

Having recently been Yale-baited by one of the anonymous posters on this blog, I will say that the reason I write about the Yale fight is because I regard the struggles taking place in New Haven as inexorably linked with those happening around Washington Square Park and in Morningside Heights, among other places. The campaign to win union recognition for Yale's graduate teachers and hospital workers is the same fight as ours. When we win, they win.

The Yale fight is a struggle to which I feel deeply indebted. It's where i learned how to organize. It's where most of my union experience comes from, besides the time i spent with Local 100 and in Boston. It's a struggle in which many people i care about deeply are or have been enmeshed.

We at NYU are on strike because our university's future is at stake, but that isn't all that's at stake. This strike is having and will continue to have repercussions across the U.S. academy, and aside from the college where my Dad once taught and on whose campus i lived for the first three years of my life, and the one where my mom taught and at which i disrupted a midterm exam at the age of 1 by continuously attempting to shush my mother while she sat silently at her desk and her students tried to finish their tests, Yale and NYU are the only schools i have any experience with. They're very different places, but they are linked by anti-union, corporate ideologue administrations bent on imposing admittedly divergent iterations of a neoliberal poetics of university management onto increasingly casualized labor forces of transient workers. At both of these universities, these same workers have refused and continue to refuse to endorse or submit to the imperial ambissions of these hardball economists and unconstitutional lawyers. We're not gonna take it anymore, as the song goes. But it isn't just about refusal. It's about "A Better Way," about a democratic, constituent, immanent (sorry) vision for how universities can be reorganized and what kind of work they/we can do. That vision is embedded and being created every day in the streets of Greenwich Village right now, which is why it's so important that GSOC be a democratic, open union which places antiracist struggles for social justice at the forefront of its organizing.



The title of this post was inspired by a picket sign worn by some Yale American Studies folks during the second 2003 strike. The New Haven Advocate was nice enough to take a picture:

i think i just set a record for fastest ever subway trip between Boerum Hill and Sunset Park at 4 in the morning on a Sunday. I would like to thank the Coney Island-bound D Train and the 95th street-bound R train. You like me, you really like me.

Picketing mort zuckerman

cien

Today was the one hundredth day of the strike. Sitting in the union office today and making sogns for tomorrow, i started thinking about just how long it has been since November 9th. This strike has completely transformed my experience of graduate school, and I am one of the few folks who'd been through this before, and (thought I) knew what to expect, so one can imagine the effect it's had on folks who're actually striking their work (I having none to strike this semester or last) and who didn't have the opportunity to do their undergraduate degree at a university with more strikes in the last 65 years than Reggie Jackson.

The strike has been long. It has been difficult. I am stressed out. I am sick. I am angry. I am apprehensive.

Like hundreds of others, I'm in this for the long haul. That means a contract, but it means much more than that. For me it means building a movement of casualized academics around the country organizing against the neoliberal university's divisions of labor and sundry other imperial projects. It means not only winning contracts at NYU, Columbia, Penn, Yale, etc., (contracts are a means to an end, a basic guarantee. I want more than that.) but charting a new path for academic workers and for universities, dedicated to and respectful of teaching, social justice, and critical inquiry. It means making universities like NYU into places where the work we do is valued rather than exploited, the end of the Global Enterprise and instead the possibility of an academe from below. Paraphrasing Durruti, we carry a new university in our hearts.

It's this, combined with profound admiration for the folks who are putting themselves on the line and engaged in this fight, with a deep sense of debt to thousands of folks in New Haven and Boston and NYC and across and outside the labor movement that will keep me, for one, fighting until we win.

be advised that all comments on this blog are now being moderated. I welcome moves toward productive conversation and discussion, but feel no obligation to showcase here hysterical hyperbole, self-serving, pretentious anti-union screed, or ad-hominem namecalling. Such comments may be subject to deletion.

i missed posting about the 3-year anniversary of 2/15/2003 by 42 minutes. I think 10 million people in the largest mass protest ever, 500,000 shutting down the east side of manhattan, deserves some kind of commemoration, but i'm exhausted. (Picketing all morning, then read 300 pages.) I've been sick all week with a nasty sore throat and a post-nasal drip and my ears feel all puffy and i don't know that standing outisde for four hours helped that much, but i actually feel better when i am outside than when i am inside. I wanted to post something more substantive about 2/15, but it isn't going to happen right now. I can barely see straight. I'll hopefully have something subtantial tomorrow or soon thereafter up here.

i haven't had a date on Valentine's day since 1999.

i kick so much ass.

I did manage to sit through a pretty awesome two and a half hour meeting in which a rather brilliant comment was made about "Dave"'s resemblance to Wilford Brimley.

And i took some time off from Capitalism and Slavery to decompress a little bit with folks after the meeting. So that was good.

Question: They brought in who as a mediator?

This post brought to you by the letters P, F, and E.

academic labor media whore

I have a confession to make. It's not something I'm proud of. When I told BC, she shook her head in disgust.

I still read the Yale Daily News. Frequently.

Ok, I don't read all the articles, and I really do it just to keep tabs on what the UOC, the Undergraduate Organizing Committe a bunch of folks (of which Alek and I are the only two who regularly blog, at least, to the best of my knowledge. Josh and Julie and Thomas blog too, of course but they came into the picture about a month later) started just over three and a half years ago out of the ashes of three successive preceding incarnations of Yale Undergrad student labor organizing, is doing, and because i want to know what's up with the Hospital fight and the Best Practices stuff (I did say i would have to come back and get arrested if there was another strike, and there already was one since the article was written, but it didn't involve any mass arrests...) and because I want to keep up with GESO and having three to four organizers and a researcher down here at any one point just isn't doing it for me and I need that incisive, unbiased, informed - oh wait, i mean lazy, distorted, vicious, parochial, and ignorant perspective which only the paper that gave the woman who wrote this a journalism career can provide.

At any rate, I was reading this morning, feeling rather pathetic, as usual, immediately prior to sitting down to figure out a presentation, when I read this article about a finacial aid action organizined by the aforementioned UOC. As someone who has picketed on many a New haven sidewalk and likely will at some point again, barring the Best Practices stuff magically resolving GESO and the Hospital and the investments stuff and so forth, I want to ask the Yale and New Haven police departments (Yale has its own cops who can arrest anyone, regardless of whether or not they are anywhere near the campus. Recently they have been aggressively policing the working class and poor African American neighborhoods north and west of the university) when, exactly, picketing on a sidewalk became grounds for arrest. Am I missing something? (Chorus of anonyms, that was a rhetorical question.)

2. We need a contract

David Montgomery weighs in on the strike.

“President Sexton seized upon this ruling to put an end to NYU’s collective
bargaining agreement with the union chosen by its assistants,” Montgomery said.
“[His] justification negates the original purpose of the Wagner Act and rests on
the absurd assumption that a person cannot be both a student and an employee.”

And Adam Green, who, it seems, really does speak in paragraphs:

“The category of graduate workers at universities didn’t exist in
significant numbers at universities back in the 1930s,” Green said. “They
certainly do exist as a category today, and they’ll become more and more
important in terms of doing the labor of teaching if the current evolution in
how instruction is parceled out at universities continues along the lines that
it has.”

“I think in this instance it’s clear that the Wagner Act was meant to be
redefined expansively in correspondence to the expansion of the economy
generally,” Green said. “The NYU administration clearly feels differently, and I
think what needs to be thought about is where that aligns this university and
this institution in terms of the larger sense of what’s ethical in relation to
the treatment of workers specifically on this campus and, more generally, within
American society as a whole.”

And finally, Matt Osypowski, who began Wednesday night's town hall meeting by asking Provost McLaughlin how the GAC grievance procedure could possibly protect blacklisted strikers like him outlines why he's on strike:

So if it’s not the Prada habit, then what’s my problem? Why am I, as
Alessandro Miglio put it, whining to daddy? (“Grad students deserve punishment,”
Feb. 6) Part of the answer is that I don’t consider any administrator on this
campus to be my “daddy.” Their jobs are to facilitate the greater work of the
institution — the process of learning, teaching, working and researching to
which we are all committed in one way or another. This is my third year teaching
college classes. Last semester, I taught 30 students in two stand-alone courses,
each paying a lot of money to learn from me and from my colleagues. I am a
fiction writer hired to teach essay-writing to freshmen — this is not practice
for a future career, this is the real deal. I perform the work for which this
university is paid.

Still, the language of morality and professional pride is not enough to
keep me marching around an inflatable rat. NYU has said previously that we are
students earning degrees of “incalculable value.” That’s true. It’s impossible
to calculate the value of a degree, either financial or otherwise, and the truth
is that the value varies greatly from one field to the next, from one individual
to the next. What I can tell you is that most of us on strike come from
departments that don’t promise six-figure careers. Most of us will spend our
lives in academia, doing the work we’re doing now for many years to come. There
are fewer and fewer cushy tenure-track positions available for an ever-growing
number of qualified candidates. Every year, universities like this one farm out
more of their courses to adjuncts, TAs and other part-time instructors — at NYU,
the numbers are now over 75 percent.

I’m deeply invested in the working conditions of those who teach at
universities, now and for decades to come. I believe we deserve a living wage,
that collective bargaining is what gave us that living wage and is the only
thing that can protect it, and that our rights as workers are worth fighting
hard for when they’re denied. If I was willing to sell out my moral convictions
and my sense of social responsibility for a paycheck, I’d be making a hell of a
lot more than $19,000 a year.

propter nivem

There's 2 feet of snow outside, which makes me happy, but i haven't gotten nearly enough done this weekend and i have all this work to do for tomorrow and I went into Manhattan for a meeting at the union office which wound up not happening because of the awesomely inclement weather conditions, and apparently I was the only (detatched?) idiot big enough to actually show up. Oh well.

Point of Clarification:Big enough of an idiot, i mean.

This is Frank PhD.

http://www.eas.asu.edu/~sserc/people/fchoppen/

If anyone was curious...

possibly the best use of organizer jargon in a conversation about dating ever.

"Dude, why are you being such a 3?"
-JCG.

State street and flatbush ave

On Strike For Respect!

At one point late in the GSC Community Meeting Wednesday night, Dean Katherine Stimpson inserted herself onto the line for the microphone and proceeded to lecture the assembled striking graduate teachers and researchers on the nature of respect and the need for mutual respect in the Graduate School of Arts and Science. (This reminded me of the clause in the Yale Undergraduate Relations based upon which Thomas Frampton orchestrated the filing of 77 undergraduate complaints against President Richard Levin during the buildup to the 2003 strikes, in which we charged that Levin had, by curbing free speech rights and concducting vicious campaigns against the unions, violated the requirement that faculty and administrators preserve "mutual respect and charitable relations".) Anyway, Dean Stimpson was met with incredulity at the ignorance and arrogance she displayed in presuming to lecture hundreds of strikers who have been threatened, patronized, insulted, and referred to by our univeristy president as a "virus" on appropriate decorum. And rightly so. What she said was absolutely ridiculous, given the ways in which the administration has conducted itself since this summer. But it seems to me that on one matter, at least, Dean Stimpson is correct. What's at stake here is all about respect.

re·spect:

1.A feeling of appreciative, often deferential regard; esteem. See Synonyms at regard.
2.The state of being regarded with honor or esteem.
3.Willingness to show consideration or appreciation.
[Dictionary.com]


Graduate teachers at NYU work hard. Folks regularly work over 4o hours a week for low pay and with no job security. We're casualized, transient academics who've come to grad school because we care about the future of teaching, of the university, of cities, of the planet, because we care about social justice and we care about our students. The administration's rhetoric and actions since I have been here have vacillated between constructting us as bawling infants and as vicious and deluded terrorist viruses determined to destroy all that is holy/profitable. The administration has threatened us with the specter of deportation. They've insulted us on a daily basis, discounting the work that we do. They've tried to sew fractious divisions between us and our faculty, between us and our colleagues, between us and our students. They've blacklisted us from our work and then had the temerity to offer us loans in case their lockout should place us in financial hardship. They have refused to speak to us as the organized agent of graduate teachers, instead attemting to slur us by constantly associating us with base and dirty "auto workers" (gasp!) who cannot possibly have any place in academe. They've attempted to exclude us from all decisionmaking about the future of our work and our departments. They've turned our universities into neoliberal playgrounds/investment machines, and turned our classrooms into precarious and exploitative sites of flexible accumulation.

And then they try to lecture us about respect?

We know all about respect. Over the 95 days of this strike we've formed a deep and powerful respect for each other, for other workers on campus and our colleagues at other universities whose continued support has been incredible, for faculty governance, academic job security, and the people in the city we live and work in who have supported us and stood with us in the freezing cold to help build a new, better kind of university without university leadership teams and apparently inebriated ex-feminists who think it's ok to lecture the people they are blacklisting about mutual respect. Respect is what they are trying to strip from us. It's what we are fighting for.

It's what we are going to win.

The Truth Is A Virus, pt 3/Hit the road, GAC

Three months ago, John Sexton told a graduate student in the English Department, that GSOC was "a virus" that had to be eradicated/extirpated from the social body of the NYU campus. In considering the implications of these words today, after the student recounted this exchange to the hundreds of GSOCers at the GAC town hall meeting, as Katherine Stimpson squirmed and then tried to lecture us on respect (that's another blog entry coming soon to a weapon of class instruction near you) i find myself referring again and again to the graffiti on the high school bulletin board in pump up the volume and the multiple, shifting, rhizomatic forms of organizing it implies.

The meeting was a victory for our side. It began with Matt and Holly, the two locked out creative writing teachers who are facing at least a 3 semester blacklist and the denial of tuition remission and health care benefits, blasting the GAC proposal's useless grievance procedure and the repression visited upon the strikers by the administration. While administrators spoke of a "third way" (one GSOCer pointed out the conspicuous lack of thirdness implicit and explicit in the GAC's comissioning and subservience to the President of the University while a faculty member in the same department has reminded folks that historically, when we talk about a "third way" what we are talking about is generally fascism,) GSOC members pointedly told Provost McLaughlin et al. that they could not be the ones to unilaterally decide whether we should have a union - in fact, that decision is and has always been ours and ours alone (we have built the wide foundation laid it skyward stone by stone) and that we did not need their voice mechanism, we have our own and we have been speaking volunes through it for 93 days now. Susan pointed out that the community which the meeting sought to poll on the GAC proposal was a community which we constitute and a community that had spoken resolutely in support of our union and to demand that the university leadership team negotiate. Provost McLaughlin, responding to Melissa's question about the "human toll" of the strike all but admitted just ow destructive the administration's union busting has been for graduate teachers and researchers here. We all know now who Rodney Washington is. The next question, i suppose, is "who the hell is Frank Hoffensteadt, PhD.?" Sarah Wolf (who's been locked out of her job teaching Spanish, asked this. She also asked if the administration really believed the line that there are only seven of us on strike. Here, flustered and irritated, "Dave" (as the moderator referred to him) resorted to fascist bravado, telling us to give him our names and departments and how we were "failing our responsibilities." Mike Palm took issue with this, and so did I, and i was next on line to the microphone, so what I had originally plotted out as a GESO-style calm and collected explication of exactly why the administration was never going to win this instead turned into a half-shouted attempt to redirect and reappropriate the discourse of responsibility away from the shrill anti-union propaganda of Dean Stimpy and Provost Dave towards a much larger understanding of what GSOCers are responsible for (the future of academic labor and the movement for another university) and who we are responsible to (our colleagues, our students, New Yorkers, union and non-union workers, our companer@s in New Haven and North Hampton, Berkeley and Urbana, Philly and Morningside Heights and Madison and Ann Arbor and in every adjunct cubicle in every university in this country, the labor movement,) and that the only way to fight casualization and corporatization/neoliberalization is through unions, through organizing. We need a strong, independent union because we can't trust the agents of casualization and posterchildren of the neoliberal university to disrupt their own agendas out of kindness. We have a responsibility to eachother. We have a responsibility to the seven folks thus far who have been locked out of their jobs for striking. That responsibility means fighting. It means doing everything we can to win this fight and a new contract and to work towards a better future for universities and the folks who work in them.

Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos.






Oh, and here's some Ralph Chaplin for you.

Solidarity Forever (1915)

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

It is we who plowed the praries;
built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations;
built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Yesterday was a long day, full of productive meetings and hundreds of pages of Peter Linebaugh and lots of depillification and conversations about my hair and possible enlistment in the armed forces, to which I've generally resorted to lame Gramsci quotations about manoevre and position.

92 days into a strike i think we can all safely refer to as protracted, and everyone has their own thoughts about what we need to do and how we need to do it to win. This isn't the place to air those - too public, too visible, and i learned long ago not to say anything on a blog i wouldn't want an administrator to know (apologies to the campaign to re-elect Ben...) But it's good that these kinds of conversations are happening, good that the strike is continuing to expand and exert new forms of pressure to win here at NYU and restructure the ordering of academic accumulation across the country.

Appropriate to be reading Linebaugh's discussion of Bentham(s) in Bobst.

Tonight's the GAC meeting - NYU's company union/"prom committee", at which they'll expound upon the virtues of their "proposal" which would leave us without an independent grievance procedure or any independent organized means to fight for the rights and to improve the working conditions of graduate teachers and researchers. I find the GAC insulting. Their tone often seems to be an embarassed attempt to imitate the functionary paternalism of the ULT. These people will not fight for me. They will not fight for my department. They will not fight for the eight people who are being locked out. They will not fight for other academic workers at NYU and at other universities, much less for university service and clerical and medical workers and workers outside the academy. That they'll be covered by our contract when we win (at least, the few who are actually in our bargaining unit,) is sticking in some folks' craw. (what's a craw?) But tonight's not about them. It's about us. It's an opportunity to be heard and to demonstrate to the administration that we are strong, and that we aren't going anywhere, and that we won't tolerate what they are doing to our colleagues, our departments, our students, and to us. Picketing starts at 4, the event begins at 6.

Feeling like the hair thing may have been a mistake

This week is brought to you by peter linebaugh's the london hanged, paul kennedy, the gac prom committee town hall meeting, and me hopefully finding time to get a haircut.

an ecstasy of fumbling, part deux

Today started off with me heading up to my parents' apartment to try to find my copy of John Okada's No No Boy which I have to reread for class tomorrow. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be up there, and it isn't here in my apartment either, and I don't think i left it in New Haven or anything like that, so i'm somewhat at a loss. Thence began a concatenation of unfortunate failures and/or denials. With no No No Boy, I continued on my itinerary for the day to the place where i have gotten my last two or three haircuts (over the course of a year or so,) attempting to act on the repeated ministrations and admonitions of a high profile figure who will remain nameless who has repeatedly intimated that no one will ever date me if i don't get a haircut. Said individual is prone to hyperbole where my vices are concerned, and is, i think, totally wrong about the hair, but it is a bit out of control, and sometimes you just, as Tom Cruise/Booger put it, "gotta say 'what the fuck."

Unfortunately said establishment wouldn't have been able to take me for over an hour, and i wound up jumping on the sideway, massive coiffure still entirely intact, and heading down to campus to a) try to obtain another copy of No No Boy (at which i was unsuccesful after trying many bookstores) and watch the film History and Memory in the A/V library for the same class. I've seen snippets of the film which Naomi showed for her project in LW's Visuality in Violence seminar first semester of senior year, and it looked amazing. Unfortunately, the folks at the library wouldn't let me watch it, because i have administrative holds on my record from books I haven't returned and fees i haven't paid.

Ack.

There were little bits of serendipity - stealing my dad's ancient copies of One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization, Primitive Rebels, and Lenin and Philosophy, bumping into JL on St. Mark's, and seeing a friend from high school at St. Mark's Books while not finding No No Boy but impulse-buying Chakrabarty's Habitations of Modernity and Jacqueline Rose's Sexuality and the Field of Vision. But all in all, everything i set out to do today, except for lunch with my mom, was a qualified failure. Dammit.

Folks who haven't yet, and have an hour to kill, should really listen to the episode of WBAI's Global Movements, Urban Struggles on the GSOC strike, which is a great conversation with GSOC leaders Mike Palm and Jenny Shaw and Faculty Democracy members Molly Nolan and Timothy Mitchell and some of the best press coverage I've seen on the strike thus far, which may have something to do with the fact that it was put together by a GSOC member. Also noteworth is the excerpt at the beginning from Roger Toussaint's speech at the 1/26 rally.

I had this whole plan where i was going to get a hair cut today. Haven't left the apartment yet. Time to go take a shower and get moving.

The last couple of days have been intense and frustrating. I believe that, 88 days in the strike (we're a fucking piano, folks,) things are moving in the right direction on several fronts. I am quite certain that none of this is going to be anywhere remotely close to easy. I also feel like going to sleep at some point before 8:30 AM this morning might have, in retrospect, been a very good idea and that the city should really stop this whole "No R service between 59th street and Pacific Street on the weekend" bullshit. But I think there were a lot of things about yesterday to inspire confidence and to be excited about working on. And there were some things to be frustrated about, of course. ([redacted], you need to stop storming out of meetings. To paraphrase AMK, it just get [sic] less funny and more sad every time.) But I want to say how inspired I am by all the folks who've gotten the lockout letters from the administration and are holding their ground and refusing to let themselves and their colleagues be silenced or defeated by John Sexton's brutal, but also in some ways last-ditch effort to force us back to work. Like one of them said several months ago,

"Despite all the bastards, we're still on strike."

It's been seven years to the day since Amadou Diallo was gunned down by four police officers in the vestibule of his building on Sedgewick Avenue in Soundville.

Even as the amount of high profile cases of racialized police brutality have declined with the exit of Giuliani and the lionization of the NYPD as 9/11 martyr, the role of the police as the neoliberal bourgeoisie's agents of gentrification at gunpoint has continued, and the widescale repression of thousands of people during the 2004 RNC "rent-a-city" occupation and subsequent sustained harassment and intimidation of Critical Mass bicyclists are perhaps some of the most visible illustrations of this. But of course, distinctly racialized assaults on immigrants and people of color have hardly dissapeared over the past four years as well, as the folks arrested in the SWAT attack on a Critical Resistance fundraising party can attest.

New York has not forgotten the Amadou Diallos and Abner Louimas and Patrick Dorismonds, but memory isn't enough. How can we build a city in which working class people of color and immigrants aren't targets, aren't palimpsests on which state violence can be written by billioaire politicians who call striking workers "selfish thugs" and their armed guard ready to make Mott Haven safe for yuppies and unaffordable for anyone else?

Thomas:

But to read Science Park at Yale as simply a uncomplicated contrast between
two diametrically opposed (but dialectically inseparable) realities – a
romantically recollected industrial past versus a privatized, antiseptic biotech
future – overlooks a third narrative we might also investigate on Winchester
Ave.

Exploring the factories themselves– the vast majority of which have still
yet to completely crumble or be converted – one encounters a plethora of ways
individuals have endeavored to subvert the space. Despite the barbed wire,
homeless residents of Science Park at Yale have managed to squat inside;
graffiti writers have painted colorful murals on the walls of the inside
courtyards; and young punk kids high on Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem scale
rooftops late at night to see the city stretch out before them.

Day 85 addendum

Something the WSN reported today, which i'd only heard rumors about until tonight, concerning two of the six locked-out teachers (soon to be more, in all likelihood.) Holly Lewis and Matt Osypowski, creative writing MFA students who teach in NYU's expository writing program, may lose not only their pay and their jobs, but also their tuition remission and their health care coverage. NYU is going to lock them out and send them a huge bill. They get to pay their employer tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being forced out on strike.

I'll end and call it a night by quoting Jenny from today's WSN

When I went on strike on Nov. 9, I did so anticipating that I could lose my
wages for the duration of the strike — despite the fact that NYU does not
consider my labor “work.” But the administration has not just decided to take
away our pay for as long as we are on strike, NYU’s draconian decision is to
blacklist GAs by firing them from their teaching positions and terminating their
pay for the following two semesters. NYU is punishing striking GAs in the future
for our decision to stand up to the administration today....
NYU’s attempts to bully and intimidate striking GAs and the
administration’s determination to keep us out of the classroom in future
semesters suggests that they don’t care about undergraduate education at all.
The administration’s indifference to undergraduate, graduate and faculty voices
at this university only serves to underscore the importance of our fight and the
reasons that the Graduate Student Organizing Committe must prevail.

the book i see more people reading in university libraries across the country is dick hebdige's Subculture; The Meaning of Style. Discuss.

I'm a useless organizer, i'm feeling profoundly alienated from American Studies, (although not so much my cohort anymore, which is nice) and I kind of want to go find a corner and cry a la Axl in "Sweet Child Of Miiiine" for fifteen minutes and then get myself together and do something useful. Instead I'm going to get up, go back to my table here in the panopticon, finish the last hundred pages of Limits to Capital, go home, go to sleep, wake up, read some Capital, think about why I'm in this fight, why I'm in graduate school, and what I need to be doing to help us win this fight.

Folks reading this can do any or all of the following things a)Donate to the strike fund. Six people are now locked out for a year. This is only the beginning of the repressive apparatus the administration is going to bring to bear on us as the strike continues, and while we are mobilizing to stay out and stay strong, we need your support. That doesn't just mean money. You can b)Contact the NYU administration and register your outrage.
John Sexton, President
Tel: (212) 998-2345
Fax: (212) 995-4790
john.sexton@nyu.edu
c) Come to our rallies and actions. I'll post dates and times when i know them.
d)give me a call sometime and help me stay sane

Pierre Hotel.

slim posts for now because i'm up to my proliferation of nostril hairs in Limits to Capital and still have to read the first hundred pages or so of Capital and also am supposed to be on the Upper East Side for weapons of class instruction-related program activities (by which i mean the strike) in exactly two minutes (i am currently in Sunset Park, having fallen back asleep after my alarm rang.)