Respect our *&%*&ing Majority/The Prison Notebooks

At noon yesterday, hundreds of NYU graduate students came together to reaffirm the majority support of our bargaining unit for a new contract. We were joined by undergraduates, by faculty, by folks from Yale and Penn and Columbia and Rutgers and CUNY, and by really adorable newborn babies. We heard from chemists, economists, creative writers (Holly, who made me cry), historians, John Wilhelm (who also made me cry,) NYC comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., the president-elect of the AAUP (Cary Nelson), and UAW secretary-treasurer Elisabeth Bunn, who assured everyone that as soon as we win here at NYU, we're all going to get on a bus up to New Haven. Many people found this powerful. I guess I kind of took that as a given. Mike Palm read a letter of support for our union to the NYU administration from both of New York's U.S. senators.

When the speakers finished, we marched out of Judson Church and across Washington Square Park, where SH from English and Stuart Acuff from the AFL-CIO spoke. Acuff put our fight in a global context, and SH talked about why she was getting arrested, and then we filed out into the street and blocked traffic and chanted and cheered. The police officers arrested us and loaded us into two wagons and a bus and drove us onto the west side highway and underneath the Battery and then to the driveway into One Police Plaza where we sat in the bus and wagons for over an hour in handcuffs waiting to be moved into pens. It was hot in the busses and the handcuffs were uncomfortable, athough the arresting officers were actually really sympathetic and loosened people's cuffs if they were too tight. Eventually we were moved into pens separated by gender. All the men - or folks the cops decided were men - were moved into one big holding cell, while the women were moved into cells with two or three or four people. We sang and drummed a little. Matt V. and I whistled a duet of "Blue Train." Every time someone was released, we applauded loudly. Then we deided that the police were keeping us longer for every time we clapped. We kept clapping anyway.

I was one of the last people to be released, at around 8:20 in the evening. (The arrest came at arround 1:30 PM.) GSOCers waited on the curb outside One Police Plaza and welcomed all the released folks as they were led out by their arresting officers. When the final arrestee was released, about ten minutes after I got out, we all went out to dinner together.

The action seems at this point to have been extremely successful. The administration is on the defensive again. We are sending loud and clear the message to John Sexton and the University Leadership Team that our strike is not going to go away. We are not dwindling. We are not waning. We are growing. And we're going to keep growing, and keep fighting until we win a just and democratic university.

57 Teaching Assistants Arrested at N.Y.U. Sit-In for Union Rights
Trying to Raise The Stakes at NYU
A More Activist AAUP?
A Great Day For GSOC
NYU Grad Student Strike
GSOC Protests, 57 Arrested.