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.