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.
Does anyone else find it odd that Mike Palm will be the only person selected to speak at this evening's mtg who is a bonafide GSAS student representative? Rodney King's from Wagner and Kimberly Moran's from the medical school. Christine Scott-Hayward, while indeed as GSAS student (Law & Society, I believe), is slated to moderate -- not speak, per se. All the others are admins and faculty.
ReplyDelete(BTW, my point here isn't meant to be snarky; I'm sincerely puzzled by the panel's constitution! Is this *really* a GSAS town hall event???)
Oh, i think snark is more than warranted.
ReplyDeleteAfter the GAC propsal first got NYU-directed to us all just after the deadlines came down, everyone in GSOC was asking the same question: "Who the hell is Rodney Washington?" Tonight, I suppose we'll have the chance to find out, and to ask him exactly why he's helping the ULT bust our union. My sernse is that they only asked Mike to be on this thing (before telling him what it would really be about) to make it look like less of a fraud, since he's pretty much the only person up there with any legitimate grounds to represent the concerns of graduate teachers and researchers.
i think a craw is somewhere in the throat. sort of like a gullet.
ReplyDelete(i might be capable of comments on things other than hair and literary-anatomy. ask me again once i'm done with this lab report.)
-k
so why craw-fish/crayfish/crawdad?
ReplyDelete