"then bring the ruckus"

Finally, my labors as unsanctioned troubador of the academic labor movement have been recognized. Oh, wait. Maybe not.

Nobody noticed its strike after the first few weeks, so GSOC adopted a new tactic in its valiant struggle for recognition: point out the fascist power structure at NYU whenever the university or its administrators do anything. This strategy is at its ugliest when GSOC members personally attack NYU President John Sexton.

"Nerds wonder why Sexton’s high-priced lawyers have not told him that hugging people without their permission...could constitute sexual harassment," wrote "Bread and Roses" on the blog Nerds on Strike.

There’s even a song about his hugs circulating Facebook and pro-strike blogs.

"I don’t want no hugs/when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy," it says.

Hugs are a symbol of patriarchy, uh-huh. At this point, GSOC members sound a lot like Dennis, the famous anarcho-syndicalist peasant from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

"Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed," says Dennis, after King Arthur politely asks about the local feudal lord.

I can’t imagine how painful it must be to reach out to students, as Sexton does regularly, and have those efforts tossed back in your face by a handful of whining malcontents. He’s a nice guy; he gives hugs. Don’t be an asshole because you disagree with his administrative decisions. Sexton could walk into the street and toss $100 bills in the air; someone from GSOC would shrilly denounce him for flaunting his personal wealth.

I wouldn’t be surprised if GSOC members attacked NYU for purchasing wind-generated energy. The ivory towers enslaved wind; Sexton expects the breeze to do his dirty work. And why’s this autocratic patriarchy have to put petroleum out of work? Even if wind energy is cleaner and cheaper than petroleum energy, NYU is only doing it to improve their image — and distract attention from the real issue threatening international survival: Graduate student labor recognition.

That’s the thing: While I don’t know its members personally, as an organization, GSOC acts like an ass. It refuses to recognize that it’s just not that popular.

And I’m not alone in this opinion. I haven’t heard GSOC mentioned positively in months. I recently witnessed an expression of disgust on the face of a former GSOC supporter after I described its role in the St. Anne’s Committee lawsuit. You guys lost, miserably, and your new tactics won’t change that.

But if you’re really living in fear of guerrilla-hugs from Sexton, feel free to move on to another university. Plenty of seniors (this one included) would love to take your place next year.

Immmediately after reading this, and in the midst of a blogging crisis, (should I keep writing this thing if all it is is fodder for anti-union ideologues?) I sent in this response:

As the author of that song, I want to point out the presence of the word "when." The statement is conditional. Sexton's hugs are patriarchical when he employs them to stifle questions about his leadership, when he offers them in lieu of a meaningful dialogue with graduate employees, or while referring to us as a "virus" and vowing to extirpate us from his fiefdom. The song is satire. The problem is very real. I'm sorry you don't like us, Mr. Devlin, but this isn't a popularity contest, it's a struggle for worker justice and for a university not subjugated to the whims of megalomaniac administrators who boast about hugging undergraduates in the wee hours of the morning at public fora. I'm not moving on to another university because I'm committed to making this one better, and because, you will soon find, I suspect, should you decide to pursue a PhD, that the problems GSOC has identified in the structure of teaching and research at NYU are in fact systemic across the US academy and must be confronted everywhere.
Z

For some reason, when posting it, the editor (who may or may not be the same person as the columnist) changed "extirpate" to "extricate," which makes no sense, and changed fora to the singular, which seems like nitpicking to me, but what can you do. I perhaps should have also added that this blog is not a "strike blog" in the sense that it is in any way sanctioned by or the responsibility of the leadership of GSOC, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, or the People's Front of Judea. It is disingenuous to claim that GSOC and GSOC members somehow bear collective responsibility for "No Hugs" or anything else on this blog, including this entry. It's also problematic to argue, as the columnist seems to, that there really is nothing wrong with a university president telling a room full of students and employees that he gets phone calls from undergraduates very early in the morning and then meets them and hugs them. But, for arguments' sake, let's assume that's all on the up and up and is not in itself innapropriate - the real problem with the hugs is then threefold. First, there is the assumption by sexton that he has the right to hug, that a body is necessarily huggable and his office as president empowers him to hug even should members of the NYU community not want to be classified among the potentially huggable. This was the gist of the question asked at the forum. Second, there is the way in which the hug performs a certain liberal corporatist (no pun intended) politics of conflict resolution, trivializes the hugged's objections and instantiates peace sans equal rights or justice (to borrow a framework from Peter Tosh.) "You want a contract? Tough, here's a hug instead." Sorry, not good enough. Third (and extremely tertiary) is the way that said hug as a gesture of pacification then constructs Sexton as "nice guy" and the unwilling, the refuser of hugs, as pathological.

Finally, I want to argue that the neoliberal university 's ever increasing involvements in finance capital, real estate speculation, biopiracy, and the casualization of academic labor constitute something to be worried about and to organize against. The U.S. academy is in a very real crisis now precisely for this reason. In so arguing I am not claiming the primacy of graduate student unionization over other struggles, but instead calling for a perspective which understands the entanglements of the "global university" or "enterprise university" or whatever you want to call it in a more nuanced and delicate way than "universities are liberal oases that do good things full of ridiculous people who are way too radical," which i take to be the gist of Devlin's objection.

I will apologize for the title of this post, inspired by my listening to 36 Chambers on the way to campus this morning. Additionally I want to reccomend that everyone track down Eccentric Soul: The Mighty Mike Lenaburg, a complation of music from the Phoenix, Arizona soul scene from the mid '60s through 1980, and also check out The New York Sound: From The East Coast to the Future, which is a compilation of NY boogie music in the years surrounding the rise of hip hop. You can get both from other music.

As always, I and I alone am solely responsible for everything in this entry and on this site , except for comments and block quotes. Ok, back to work.