One Year Later

A year ago today, hundreds of NYU graduate teachers and researchers struck for a second contract in the face of the NYU administration's attempts to obliterate our union. Our strategy was flawed, we had no real organizing culture within the union, and I'll refrain from further criticisms because this probably isn't the space for them, but I have many. It was a crazy, frustrating, moment. Sometimes total collapse seemed not only imminent but inevitable. So , this is not going to be a panegyric. Neither will it be a eulogy for the strike or for our movement either at NYU or across the academy, because both are very much alive and both remain relevant and crucial.

Yet the year which began on November 9 2005, when hundreds picketed in the rain, joined by contingent academics from across the northeast, and the undergrads did a banner drop, and I was getting up at 5:30 every morning, walking to the village from Sunset Park and getting to the picket lines by 8 for the entirety of November and much of December, was sometimes incredibly exciting - this despite the frustrations and difficulties of both the quotidian and the overarching aspects of the fight.

But more importantly, though the strike really ended in late May, the struggle to build a strong academic labor movement at NYU, the struggle to win a second contract, to imagine alternatives to the neoliberal university continues even as i write this. There may very well be future strikes on this campus. I don't know what will happen. I do know that November 9th marks the anniversary of an important moment in the history of this university and of the academic labor movement, and thus merits commemoration here, and that many, many GSOC members are committed to building from the struggles and sacrifices of the last year and continuing to work to transform the university into an institution oriented not around the dictates of enterprise and patent office, but social and thus global justice.