Strangest Fortune Ever?

"The night life is for you."

No Hugs

The final question of the evening came from Andre -----, a student senator and a graduate student, who asked, “Why do you feel entitled to hug everyone?”
- Washington Square News. 9/28/2006 (surname witheld to protect the innocent.)

This song is about John Sexton. It is dedicated to andre, but he holds no culpability in it. For that, blame me and the ghost of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes.

"No Hugs"
To the Tune of "No Scrubs, of course."

John Sexton tells a lot of lies
and he's a union buster
always talkin' about what he wants
no negotiations, just impasse
so (no)
I don't want your embrace
no I don't wanna give you mine
and no I don't wanna meet you nowhere
no I don't want none of your slime and no
Chorus:

I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me
I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me

Yeah your hugs freakin me
and your logic's kinda weak
and i know that you cannot approach me
cuz I'm teachin' my class and you treat me like trash
Sittin' in Bobst on your rich ass

So (no)
I don't want your embrace
no I don't wanna give you mine
and no I don't wanna meet you nowhere
especially at an innapropriate time and no

I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me
I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me

If I'm on the picket line walking
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
If you thrive on megalomaniacal drama
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
Yeah we have a union but you show no love
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
Wanna quiet me with no contract
oh no I don't want no hugs
No hugs
No hugs
No No
No hugs
No no no no
No no
Chorus (until fade)

It's been a long time (since anything other than blockquotes, it seems.) I shouldn't have left you without a dope beat to step to.

My apologies. I've been busy with a combination of GSOC, coursework, and, our group research project on piracy. The current state of my piece of the project proposal is below:

"The University of Pirates and the Pirate University: Academic Knowledge Production, Intellectual Property, and Utopia,"

The neoliberal university's position as a site of knowledge production and relationship to the licensing of the products of publicly funded research as intellectual property to be farmed out, often, to partnerships with private corporations, means that for academic capitalism, production and "piracy" are now increasingly intertwined. I propose a project which understands the current predicaments of so-called cognitive capitalism, (see Nick Dyer Witheford's essay in the European Journal of Higher Arts Education : http://www.ejhae.elia-artschools.org/Issue2/1b-dyer.htm) intellectual property, and academic labor. I will rely specifically on theorizations of immaterial labor by autonomist marxists like Dyer Witheford, Negri, Lazzarato, Tiziana Terranova (particularly this interview with Marc Bousquet: http://www.metamute.org/en/Recomposing-the-University et alii, and on some case studies of recent struggles within and against the global university's logics of ownership and work. I will also look at attempts to envision a nomad space of knowledge production against and/or outside of the post Bayh-Dole patent machine - what Dyer Witheford theorizes as the pirate colonies on the margins of David Noble's digital diploma mills. (yarr.)

Clearly, it needs work, but i think it's headed in a productive direction.

I haven't had a good night's sleep all week and i'm not really sure why. I just toss and turn and never feel rested. And i have these bizarre, surreal, intimate dreams which have been haunting me for the last couple of nights and i don't really get where they're coming from and why now. And right now i'm exhausted and
feeling mildly unproductive, not to mention a bit hungry. My major accomplishment of the day was buying new shoes - which boast - instead of gapoing holes where the heel should be, strong rubber soles as yet uneroded by the seven miles I walk every day. Also I think I have a better sense of the organizing that has to happen in my department, so I feel good about that. Really, though, I kind of just want to find something soft right now and lie on it for a few days, but i have what looks to be a busy weekend followed by a busy week, so that's a pipe dream. I'd really like to get out of the city for a little while, to go somewhere where leaves change colors and fall air is actually crisp. One of those moments where learning to drive probably would have been a good idea. But I am thinking maybe i should wait until things are a little more settled, until Fall has fallen a bit more, until I've finished an incomplete or two. Argh.

No contract, No fucked up hugs at 5 in the morning.

Susan Valentine, GSOC spokeswoman and a fifth-year graduate student, asked Sexton if he thought it was wrong that graduate students at public universities can form unions. Private universities such as NYU are not required to recognize graduate student unions. GSOC was on strike for about six months to pressure the administration to recognize its union.

“I think it’s a different context,” Sexton said. “Let’s not get into this conversation here. The university has made its decision.”

Several GSOC members then responded by shouting, “We are the university!”

It's agapaic

"He looks like Paris Hilton."- GSOC member on John Sexton

Edit: fixed typo in title

The Harder They Come

Yale's endowment "skyrockets" 22.9 percent to $18 Billion.

"I'm happy that the largest employer in the region is financially healthy, but I believe that they need to take another look at their self-imposed spending rule and apply more money toward their daily operations," Local 35 President Bob Proto said.

Definitely the first time i can remember the YDN quoting union folks on the annual "Yale's even richer" article...

Recently, Pitchfork writers compiled what they felt were the 200 best songs of the 1960s, a daunting task if ever there were one, given the explosion of cultural production accompanying the ferment of social movements, spontaneous revolts, protracted struggles against regimes of racialized brutality, etc. It's a good list, bust there's some stuff that i find annoying. For instance, Charles Mingus gets on the list with "Solo Dancer" from The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, one of my all time favorite records, but everyone who's ever listened to that album knows that the best part is actually in "Group Dancers," when the kickass flutes come in. And while I'm glad that Jamaican ska and rocksteady songs like Desmond Dekker's incomparable "Israelites" and the more formulaic but nevertheless great "007 (Shanty Town)" make the list (the former in the top 10,) I can't help but wonder if they wouldn't have selected The Paragons' "The Tide Is High" had Blondie not covered it and think that The Skatalites' "Confucius" and Don Drummond's "Man in the Street" should feel a bit slighted. Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" is #3, and that seems about right to me. "God Only Knows" is #1, which i can understand - it's an amazing song and it would probably still give me chills every time i heard it if i had never heard that bizarre Mandy Moore/Michael Stipe cover at the beginning of Saved. My main gripe, for the moment, at least is that "Tracks of My Tears" only comes in at 87. It's not that I don't like Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," (#11) I just like "Tracks of My Tears" like twelve million times more, and it's certainly a better song than, say, Dick Dale's "Misirlou," which wouldn't factor in had it not been fetishized and resuscitated by Quentin Tarantino, much like John Travolta's career.

Alright, that was a thoroughly useless post. time to read about some communists.

Oh yes - Shana Tova, folks.

I don't post about New Haven-related stuff too much these days. I'm not there, and when alderpeople get cell phones or get indicted or what have you, it doesn't really affect me in the way it once did. Accept that as a disclaimer prefacing the rant below.

Recently Yale's Sprague Hall hosted a concert by the folk singer Judy Collins. This concert was open to the public because of the "generosity" of Yale University Secretary Linda Lorimer, whose corporate-tycoon husband Charles Ellis, of Greenwich Associates, in Greenwich, Connecticut (take note on that, Yale Administration circa fall 2001,) had intended the concert to be a private one for his wife alone. Paul Bass, the guy who wrote the "heartless hospital" and all manner of insightful stuff on the 2003 strikes, gushes.

Now, in part Bass is gushing because the sponsorship money for the concert was directed towards a reproductive health organization, which is great. If you're going to be as wealthy and powerful as Ellis and throw yourself a concert, you might as well make it open to the public and donate the money to a reproductive health charity. But I don't see how this makes up for all the ways in which the Yale Corporation, on which both Ellis and Lorimer sit, has continuosly sought to silence the voices of folks who live outside of - and/or work within Yale's iron gates. Sprague Hall itself was, after all, one of the buildings Yale threatened to subcontract in an attempt to demoralize Local 35 members. Recall, if you will, that during the reverend W. David Lee's campaign for a seat on the Yale Corporation in 2001-2002, the Conroy-Klasky axis of spin pointed to Ellis to deflect charges from the Lee campaign that no Yale trustees actually lived in New Haven, Ellis's mansion in Greenwich and business in Greenwich named Greenwich Associates notwithstanding. Now, i'm glad that Ellis and Lorimer are so philanthropic, and I have to desire here to engage in ploemics against them, Paul Bass, or Judy Collins. Nevertheless, I have to ask whether a few hours of Judy Collins and a couple thousand bucks for reproductive health is a palatable substitute for the voice of organized New Haven communities in the way Yale does business.

Sovereign Bank crushes Independence Bank

Streets of Fire

The No Spray coalition reports on carcinogenic pesticide spraying -- on my block.

Pesticide Spraying in New York City
City Again Sprays Crowded City Streets


he New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene sprayed the dangerous pesticide “Anvil” in sections of Brooklyn last month and continues to fog Staten Island, purportedly to kill mosquitoes which may or may not be carrying West Nile virus. City officials also ordered spraying in Queens and the Bronx.

The first spraying of the year in Brooklyn took place on the evening of August 21. The spray truck – now driven by unionized NYC workers wearing DOHMH insignias – recklessly spewed pesticides in a thick cloud down crowded 5th Avenue in Sunset Park and in the surrounding area in utter disregard of the hundreds of people walking the streets. The truck blasted pregnant women and many, many little children with the spray, and fogged people in dozens of restaurants – their doors wide open – without warning as they ate.

The City put up no signs in the neighborhoods announcing the spraying. They made no public warnings about the dangers of pesticides, the links between pesticides and asthma – which is epidemic throughout New York City -- childhood cancers, lymphomas, neurological disorders, chemical sensitivities . . . nothing. ¹

I Am Not Afraid Of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

The title of this post is a reference to several things.

1. The New Yo La Tengo album, which is really great - eclectic, engaging, energetic - everything Summer Sun wasn't. It's easily their best since I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One and definitely one of my favorite CDs of the year.

2.San Francisco hotel workers winning a pretty amazing contract after a two year long struggle involving a two-month long lockout, a two year-long boycott, and a bunch of strike votes..

3.The chemists who marched into the office of the NYU GSAS dean friday afternoon to protest their "cancelled" paychecks. (Bread and Roses beat me to posting, read the whole account at Nerds on Strike, linked above.

"he looks like a georgian terrorist."

for the record, the title for this posts quotes Frances S. Schwartz, esq. And the individual she's profiling is sometimes known as Barranca.

rolling the union on

Grad employees at Southern Illinois University Carbondale win recognition for their union, GA United (NEA.)

CARBONDALE, IL With a two to one show of force, Graduate Assistants
United-IEA/NEA of Southern Illinois University Carbondale wound up a
year-and-a-half long organizing campaign on Wednesday with a strong vote to
unionize. Over 400 graduate assistants took part in the vote with a final count
of 248 for representation and 112 opposed. Dozens of challenged ballots
insufficient to affect the outcome of the vote were also cast. The total voting
unit was 982 GAs although GAs at SIUC have ranged from 1,200 to 1,600 per
semester by recent counts provided by the university through Freedom of
Information Act requests by GA United.

Political Science Teaching Assistant Marinus van Kuilenburg co-chairs GA United
with Shelly McGrath, a Research Assistant in Sociology. Van Kuilenburg was
pleased with the turnout and strong support the vote represents.

"This is a great victory for the many grad employees who make this place work.
That is why this is good for SIUC," van Kuilenburg said.

Graduate employees at SIUC are hardworking, motivated and care greatly about the
work they do in service to our students. With the security of a collective
bargaining agreement and representation from the IEA/NEA, they will be able to
do even more.

McGrath said individual contacts were made over the last several semesters with
most of the eligible voters by a large core of union activists on campus and
through phone banks. "Through this campaign we found that GAs are tired of
onerous fee increases, stipends and basic benefits that lag behind peer
institutions, and less than desirable working conditions for many. We organized
to gain a voice and put to stop to the unilateral decisions that make a hard job
even harder."

While many of SIUC's graduate employees serve the university in non-academic
areas, this vote follows the organizing trend across Illinois and the nation by
contingent academic labor, now the majority of those teaching undergraduate
students at American colleges and universities.

Congratulations to the folks at SIUC as they head into bargaining their first contract.

The gigantic floating bioluminescent testicular object suspended above a stretch limousine outside Bowlmor Lanes, 13th and University, last night.

The space race

I don't know what's worse - the arrogant assumption that any available land in the east village should be an NYU dormitory, (what new dorm are they "losing?" it's a vacant lot!) or the mindblowingly disingenuous claim that there is some sort of link between community intransigence over NYU's attempt to illegally build a 26 story dorm based on a fraudulent sale of air rights, and NYPD/yuppie homocon attacks on queer/trans youth of color in the west village - i.e., the battle over the Christopher Street pier.

No, scratch that, the latter is far worse, because it ignores the immense social and political differences between a multi-billion dollar real estate behemoth like NYU and an amazing , bottom-up organization of working class and un/underemployed queer/trans street kids like FIERCE. The claim that NYU students are being discriminated against by Andrew Berman is problematic on at least three levels. 1)The neighborhood residents are suing NYU, not NYU students. There are already a number of NYU dorms in the area, and the question is not whether NYU is building a dorm there, at this point, as much as whether NYU's dorm will be a 13 story dorm or a 26 story dorm. 2)The power differential between NYU and the east village is significantly different than what the WSN editorial board represents it as being. NYU is the largest private landowner in the city and has been continuosuly buying up downtown property at a rapid pace, privatizing public space and taking housing units off the market. To claim that any opposition to this represents "anti-student" discrimination is apalling. 3)The link the article tries to make between NYU students in the east village and LGBT people in the west village collapses and glosses over the role of NYU in creating a downtown in which queer youth of color are apparently personae non gratae and the cenrality of racialized and gendered logics of spatiality and visuality at work in the struggle over the West Village as a space where queer youth of color are or are not welcome and the relative class privilege - and whiteness - of most NYU undergraduates. I don't mean to suggest that people who own property on east 12th street may not in some cases be yuppie NIMBYers, but under no circumstances does that somehow make what NYU is doing any less indefensible or allow indignant WSN editors to colonize queer youth's struggles for social justice as a means to sidestep questions of privilege and power in understanding the dynamics of urban development and gentrification.

edit:A little clarification:

I don't mean to suggest that all NYU undergrads are rich or white. Many aren't. Many of them are fighting for tuition reform. Nor am I unaware of NYU's celebrated "queer friendly" status, or in any position to refute this designation. But i do think that organizations like FIERCE force those of us who regularly interact with either end of the village to confront the way it has been (re)racialized as a gentrified, opulent space in recent decade, and whom the architects of the new village have sought to displace, and why. And whatever investment NYU has in it's "edgy progressive" reputation, we would be remiss to ignore NYUs role in crafting the west village so invested in policing and obliterating the spaces of queer youth of color...

I welcome critical perspectives on this, as always.

Someone found this blog using the search terms "how to stop students from peeing on the bathroom floor."

All I can say to that is, "welcome to Yale."

re: "failure"

Mac lowered his voice. He moved close and put his hand on London's knee. "Listen," he said. "I guess we're goin' to lose this strike... But we're getting the stiffs used to working together; getting bigger and bigger bunches working together all the time, see? It doesn't make any difference if we lose. Here's nearly a thousand men who've learned how to strike. When we get a whole slough of men working together, maybe-maybe Torgas Valley, most of it, won't be owned by three men. Maybe a guy can get an apple for himself without going to jail for it, see? Maybe they won't dump apples in the river to keep up the price. When guys like you and me need an apple to keep our god damn bowels open, see? you've got to look at the whole thing, London, not just this little strike."
London was staring painfully at Mac's mouth, as though he tried to see the words as they came out. "That's kind of reva-revolution, aint it?"
-John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle, 1936, p. 290. As quoted in Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party, 1990. p. 42

Not everything works for me - of course it makes a difference if we lose. This, as Healey notes, is where the TUUL/CP erred in the early '30s, striking for striking's sake rather than actually trying to build worker power from below. And I feel obligated to point of the ways in which the masculinist rhetoric disrupts and renders problematic the possibilities for solidarity. But still, there's something here I find really helpful in terms of thinking about what we do now.

Dorothy Healey passed away last month. I may write something more about her when I'm done with incompletes and things are a little less crazy. For those readers not familiar with Healey's life and work, here's the Washington Post and Mike Davis in the Nation. But I highly recommend reading the book.

a funny thing happeend on the way to the library

Walking up Chrystie Street from the bridge yesterday I passed by a park full of naked people wearing white hats. I'm not sure what they were doing. Far be it for me to condemn publicly nudity, given the frequency with which I'm told I used to (I don't actually remember this) jokingly propose that the UOC run around chasing Richard Levin with our extremities exposed, or do unclothed building occupations or whatever, more the product of ADD/romanticization of the situationists than any actual desire to do any of these things (well, naked, at least.) I'd be interested to learn why these folks were doing what they were doing - was it part of taht art parade in soho? Was that dude who photographs public nudity doing a photoshoot? Was it something political?

I keep thinking of the Ray Bradbury short story "Shadows and Light" about a town in Baja California where some fashion photographers from the US come to exploit indigenous folkiness and are rebuffed by an angry resident who drops trow whenever they try to pose the models anywhere and thus prevents the fashion photographers from reducing his life to exotic backdrop. Given the fraught history of gentrification on the LES, i wonder what kind of relationship to space is being suggested by a mass of nude white bodies standing around in a public park in what was fifteen years ago a working class neighborhood populated largely by people of color.

But I really don't know enough about what was going on to reach any conclusions, and I feel like I'm being extremely essentialist, so enough about this.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

The inevitable slew of "the strike is over" press has come, with Karen Arenson uncritically reproducing the NYU administration's talking points, from the "academic intervention" shibboleth to the ludicrous claim that there were only 12 people still striking labor at the end of last semester. Both the WSN and the NYT articles note that the struggle continues and that we are continuing to build and organize. Yet particularly galling, to me at least, and I do not now and have never here spoken for GSOC, is the claim made by the WSN's editorial that "Striking moved graduate students further from a union contract — not closer."

I would like to remind the Washington Square News that, prior to the strike, John Sexton was saying things like "the union can either die a quick death or a slow death." It was never the case that our tactics caused the administration to be less amenable to negotiating with us. The NYU administration saw an opportunity to get rid of our union when the NLRB issued the Brown decision and took it as soon as our contract expired. And while we might have adopted a different strategy, and have many options left before us as we move our struggle forward, making claims like this is simply indefensible, rooted solely in arrogant conjecture rather than any studied understanding of the events of the past year. Similarly the claim that the strike's "failure" (a term i'll return to in a moment) is somehow due to the fact that we didn't tell the WSN how many people were on strike in the spring to their satisfaction lacks any historical grounding or proof. It's self-important and just plain wrong. Given how fantastic the WSN's coverage of GSOC was in the fall, it's dissapointing to see opinion writing of such low quality.

Now on to the question of "failure."

We are back to work without a contract, and the demands of the six-month long strike remain unmet, hence the claim that the strike has failed. I think this is a problematic claim. Last year did not end in failure, but in GSOC emerging from the strike as a far stronger union, in many ways, than we had been going in. We had far better rank and file organizers. We had research. We had members who had been through a very difficult year and yet overwhelming committed their support to achieving a new contract. And while we have many challenges ahead - external and internal, as we strive to create a democratic, diverse union deeply committed to a just university, we need to understand the strike not as a singular tactic but within the context of the larger struggle to transform, to push through the neoliberal university
and achieve something better. Understood as such, I don't think we can term the strike a failure so prematurely. This, after all, is far from over.

I wish i had a hometown - moved around too much as a kid to feel any real proprietary sense of place for anywhere, whatever I may have said about New York at various points of my life. The Upper West certainly doesn't feel like home now. And really the only time it did was in early May, 2001. And maybe May-August 2000, that summer after high school when things were simultaneously lazy and lonely and pregnant with possibility - particularly before my job started and after it ended. Now it feels like a haunted strip mall. Like Scottsdale Arizona transposed 3,000 miles and with all the peole replaced by parents and siblings of people i went to high school with or their younger, high school-age cousins and every store is replaced by a commerce bank or Starbucks. The people my age I see around here are all either making exponentially more than anyone I know or have someone else who's payign their rent, or both. I'm up here because Thursday is my dad's 58th birthday and Lev's here for two days and I had to put in some family time. And now I need to make the long trek back to Sunset Park and classes start up again tomorrow and I feel pretty fucking ambivalent about that. And I am feeling what may very well be a profoundly reactionary yearning for a sense of rootedness and safety sorely lacking in a cityscape transfixed in the shifting geographies of capitalism and gentrification.

There is a stand-up comedian offering witticisms on a reified, binarized gender difference in masturbatory practice, my brother's collapsed in the other room, and I should really be getting home, but am enjoying the late-night internet access outside the panopticon. I really need to get wireless in the apartment, and I want to figure out ways this year to contribute something to my neighborhood other than a footprint for the increasinbg numbers of young white people i see at the 45th Street R station.

East 1st street and 2nd avenue

From The Villager's report on the lawsuit against the post office over the fraudulent sale of air rights for NYU's 26 story dorm to Hudson Companies:

"...If the Postal Service says it’s going to build a 50-story building and give
five stories to N.Y.U., you think they will take the Postal Service to court to
block it? N.Y.U. are the last ones I want to entrust with protecting our
neighborhood against overdevelopment. It would be like putting Enron in charge
of your 401K.”

That kind of morning

Labored Haze

Just in time for Labor Day, NYU President John Sexton has sent an email out to the entire "NYU Community" marking the holiday and the beginning of the semester. Appropriatelt enough for labor day itself, embraced as a less radical (or, indeed, entirely depoliticzed) alternative to the May 1st holiday, Sexton's Labor Day epode fails to mention work or workers in any meaninful way. Lost in his celebration of those who constitute the NYU community are those who perhaps don't "live the life of the mind" as much as do the work which enables others to do so - such as our brothers and sisters in UCATS and 32B-J, whom Sexton seems unwilling to place within the boundaries of the "community" he here lauds. But Sexton also doesn't deal with academic work - teaching or research - as work - difficult and sometimes, indeed often exploitative (understandable, given that he's the one doing the exploiting.) The rhetoric of "the life of the mind" as "vocation," upon which Sexton often relies, obscures and indeed ignores the economic realities of academic work in the neoliberal university. The work we do in our "class or laboratory or office" makes a great deal of money for the university, which we will see little of. Many of us will ultimately have little control over the products of said work. The celebration of the work of the university-including expansion ist projects like the 26-story megadorm and outsourced campuses in Shanghai and Paris-as entirely altruistic seems profoundly disingenuous. The complete lack of any meaningful mention of teaching demonstrates where Sexton's priorities lie. It is unsurprising that well-wishing on the occasion of a "Labor" holiday eschews mention fo the "disruptions" and drama of last year, but GSOC, as the chant goes, is here to stay, and neither we, nor the centrality of our work to the functioning of the university, can be made to vanish by verbal obfuscation or wishful thinking. We will continue to fight for a better university and to make Sexton's encomia to those who "assist the indigent in achieving justice" somewhat less ironic.

The entire text of Sexton's email is reproduced below:

The beginning of a new academic year offers a moment for reflection and anticipation. This year it is a joy to do that. We look forward to another outstanding year at NYU – a year in which our faculty will continue to advance the frontiers of knowledge through their research, a year in which our students will share in that process in and out of the classroom, and a year in which our entire University community will participate in the unique interplay of our University with the city and world in which it thrives. I welcome all of you to be a part of this great effort. NYU is honored to count you among its ranks. Each of you – new students, returning students, members of the faculty, devoted administrators – is a person of talent and achievement. Your ambition and skills could have carried you anywhere, but you have chosen to come here to make your contribution, and we are humbled by your decision. Together, we form a great assemblage of scholars and learners situated in the greatest city of our age. The important conversations and issues of the day – be they civic, academic, political, economic, or otherwise – course across our campus like electric current. As members of this wonderful community, we are privileged to live the life of the mind. And with this privilege comes responsibilities. Not just personal responsibilities– to fulfill the promise of our talent, to repay the efforts and sacrifices made by others that have brought us to this place in life – not even just communal responsibilities to the other members of the NYU community, but responsibilities to the world at large. Perhaps as never before, the world is in need of your talents, energy, and commitment. This year marks the fifth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 – events that reshaped the world and that were felt profoundly on this campus. Those events were shocking, not just for the extent of the violence, destruction, and hatred, but because they were so unexpected. The attack left us with so many new questions about the world we inhabit, which seemed much more dangerous and mysterious on September 12th than it had on September 10th. It is in the nature of universities and their scholars to pursue the seemingly incomprehensible, opaque, and inexplicable and, in so doing, to advance human knowledge. We accomplish this through a passion for ideas – even unpopular or idiosyncratic ideas – through a commitment to free speech and exchange, through a willingness to be open-minded, and through intellectual rigor. In the first moments on that September morning in 2001, we saw men and women (including many from our NYU community) act with breathtaking valor, compassion, and resiliency. When the smoke cleared and help was needed, the people of this city rushed in, not out. That was true of this campus as well – the NYU community manifested steadfastness and strength. It augurs well for our future, because the lesson learned in those days is that effort can make even the most daunting tasks possible, so long as we think creatively, act courageously, and commit wholeheartedly. When I look at the NYU community, I see that happening here. I see outstanding faculty turning their attention to new and enduring problems – like those working as part of our Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response who are exploring how cities respond to catastrophic events, or those in our economics department who are examining the most effective use of foreign aid in developing nations, or those in the law school who explore the balance between individual rights and national security, or those in the Steinhardt School seeking to understand how to improve teaching and learning in public schools or how behavior and HIV infection intersect, or those in the medical school that are leading the effort to improve child mental health in New York State or to create vaccines for HIV or cancer, or those in our dental and nursing colleges who are creating new roles for dentists and nurses in providing more comprehensive health care, or those in our social work school who seek ways to reduce domestic violence, or those in our Courant Institute who are attempting to better model our global climate. This list goes on in scores of other important and inspiring efforts. I see promising students charting courses for themselves – such as the increasing numbers who are majoring in Middle Eastern studies or are studying Arabic, who set aside thousands of hours each week to volunteer for community service, who assist the indigent in achieving justice, or who dedicate themselves to changing the future in our social entrepreneurship programs – that will enable them to grapple better with the most pressing issues of the day upon graduation. I see administrators and staff devote themselves, day in and day out, not only to ensuring that NYU’s research and educational missions are fulfilled, but also to addressing exigencies successfully, such as the admission of some 100 students displaced from the Gulf Coast by Katrina last fall. In this regard, I am delighted to welcome my colleague, Michael Alfano, to his new post as executive vice president. Together with Provost David McLaughlin and Sr. Vice President for Health Robert Berne, we have in place a talented team devoted to advancing our academic goals. Finally, I see a University – through the creation of new campuses and programs on new continents – seeking to ensure that the crucial opportunity for a global education is made available to every student in order to prepare him or her to live a life and make contributions in a global world. As the University begins classes this week, I can report that we are making great strides, setting the stage for the outstanding new academic year that lies before us: • The dramatic expansion of the arts and science faculty under the Partners Initiative has continued apace, with over 50 outstanding new faculty members joining us in just one year; at the same time, the other schools of the University each have had their own stories of success on this front. • We enjoyed a record year in admissions, we continued our major new initiatives to enhance student life, both in the residence halls and generally, and our students now are enjoying the benefits of the new 20,000-square-foot Wasserman Center for Career Development in the Palladium. • As a general matter, we have continued to upgrade the quality of the space in which we live and conduct our academic programs, with projects ranging from the new residence hall on 12th Street (for which ground has just been broken) to renovated space in several of our schools and new space (either recently occupied or soon to be completed) for several departments, including (just to name a few) biology, creative writing, economics, journalism, philosophy, and physics, to aggressive exploration – in collaboration with the Faculty Senators Council – of innovative programs to expand faculty housing. • We have just completed our most successful fundraising year ever: NYU raised $391 million during the academic year ending August 31, 2006, including, notably, $60 million for financial aid through our 175th anniversary initiative. • And, while all of this was transpiring at our Washington Square campus, we have also been advancing our global efforts: this fall we will open new study abroad programs in Paris and Shanghai, and we continue to look for opportunities and partners for major new international initiatives. I wish that each of us, as we walk to our class or laboratory or office, will reflect upon how we can help NYU contribute to crafting a future characterized by peace, justice, and prosperity. With all the intellectual energy and talent and creativity in our midst, I feel certain that trenchant questions and thoughtful answers will be forthcoming. I wish all of you a happy Labor Day Weekend, and a successful, safe, and healthy year.