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.