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.