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: