Freudian typo in an otherwise predictable YDN editorial:

What is clear, though, is that the hospital violated did not act in good faith to uphold the agreement it signed nearly a year ago, an agreement which was designed to let them procede in building the then-contested cancer center.

The Times reports on the parking production assistants campaign.

And the Washington Square News loses any claim to objectivity when its opinion editors blog like this on its official website. What a joke. I hope that the WSN and their "good friend" John Beckman will be very happy together. The rest of us are going to keep fighting for a just university.

Facilis Descensus Averno

Insert the est if you want.

I'm in the midst of a protracted crisis, so blogging's been slim. And it'll continue to be so, because I need to finish Orientalism by 2 PM tomorrow. And i'm once again unhappy with the blog, and unhappy with grad school, and unhappy with, well, let's stop the narcissism there.

Heroes was good yesterday. And Veronica Mars had its best climax episode since season 1, although from what i understand this may be the end. Also the OC finale was lame. But I don't watch the OC. Ok, maybe I did. Shut the fuck up.

CFP

A CFP for a conference folks in my department are organizing (more later):

Call For Papers: Humanities or Human Resources? The Future of Ethnic
Studies and Labor in the Corporate University
New York UniversityApril 13, 2007

As corporate models of management and decision-making take hold of more and
more colleges and universities, a growing number of students, faculty and staff
are facing threats to ethnic studies programs, assaults on the integrity of
academic decision-making, and the casualization of the university labor force.
This conference will engage the debates surrounding what has been termed the
corporate university, especially those debates that address questions of race,
gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and class.

We conceive of the corporate/university relationship as multi-directional;
that is, the corporate/neoliberal university is not simply where corporate
values and cultures end up in an otherwise autonomous academy. Instead, the
corporate/university relationship has effects in multiple public and private
spaces, and on different individuals, ideas, and communities. How do
struggles over departmentalization, bureacratization, downsizing, access, and
equity relate to the university's location in global networks of capital
accumulation and production? In what ways can a critical intervention in
those processes enact a resistance that does not follow corporate valuations of
people as "human resources"?

We envision this conference to be a platform for academics, faculty,
students, and staff to begin these conversations in the hopes that we can
generate imaginative practices and take them back to our home institutions for
further use and engagement. We welcome proposals for papers or panels that focus
on the issues surrounding the corporate university. Please send a 300-word
abstract, 250-word biographical statement and contact information to corporate.conference@gmail.com by March 5, 2007.
Notifications will be made by March 15.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:
• the policing of Middle Eastern studies and other area
studies programs
• disability and ability issues on campus
• faculty hiring policies; student admissions
• top-down and bottom-up curricular changes
• living wage and staff/adjunct/teaching assistant
unionization campaigns and institutional responses
• trends in Ethnic Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, and
American Studies
• university-neighborhood relations; real estate and
gentrification

Now That's What I Call Journalism! (Vol 99.3374)

Also, NYU: Poisoning NYC, one park at a time.

On hold

After thursday comes and the midweek crush of work ebbs a bit, I'll post a response to Alek's latest comment and resume other blogging. Until then, best pop song ever?

Wow. (And the Herald used to be the decent one.)

Worse, the article quotes the three employees — Walter Bailey, Kristie Lavorgna and Ann Terranova — without mentioning that they are a part of the organized anti-union campaign, called “Just Us.” Bailey, in particular, is often quoted in the media representing the anti-union side. The reporter presents her subjects as if she encountered them almost by chance. Rather, the reporter told me in a phone interview, is that she got the names of the three workers from Vin Petrini, the hospital’s senior vice president for public affairs. In other words, the Herald called the hospital’s PR officer and got the names of three hand-picked anti-union activists, and then proceeded to quote them knowingly without including their credentials.

To be clear, the problem here is not that the reporter quoted Bailey, Lavorgna and Terranova, but that their backgrounds are misrepresented. It would be equally wrong to quote a union organizer without mentioning her affiliation. If I interviewed a spokesman for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, I would identify that person as such, and not equate his opinion with that of the average voter.

Looking for examples of Sexton hyperbole, eh? How about "the union is a virus" or "the union can either die a quick death or a slow death" or "We are witnessing a palpable decline in the public’s appetite for nuance, complexity and critical thinking, which in turn has spawned a virulent secular dogmatism and an alarming devolution in both the substance and style of public discourse," not only a hyperbolic jeremiad, but a hypocritical one as well? How about when he publicly claimed that only six people were on strike during the spring of 2006? (Though that's more of a flat out lie than an exaggeration.) What about "None of the striking graduate students will have their ability to continue their own studies affected. In all cases, their tuition and health benefits will remain in place, and where the suspension of stipend would create economic hardship, loans will be provided to students upon their request." (Not true, though again not hyperbolic so much as simply mendacious.) "There was a time during the summer when GSOC and the union might have emerged as the collective bargaining representative of our graduate assistants." (Ditto.) "We are a community of principle and reason, and all of us, no matter what our views, have a part in advancing that ideal." (What principle? principal investment? This seems hyperbolic in that it vastly overstates NYU's commitment to a model of the university long since, in any case, expired.)

How is this not hyperbolic?

Edited for snark reduction and clarification

Because every substantial post must be accompanied filler, here, belatedly, are some of my favorite albums released last year, in no particular order and including reissues and compilations.

Ann Peebles, Original Funk Soul Sister Peebles is an amazing singer, backed by what is basically Al Green's rhythm section, and the songs are unbelievable. I have "Trouble, Heartache, and Sadness," and "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down" playing on my Ipod frequently.

The Honey Cone, Soulful Sugar. Other Music claims this was released in 2001, but i'd never seen it before this fall, so i am including it here. The Honey Cone performed Holland-Dozier-Holland's post-motown stuff, which was harder and more politicized and feminist than their earlier work. Kanye West samples "Innocent Til Proven Guilty" on Common's "Testify" but the original is far superior, and there's better stuff 0n the first disc, like "Girls It Ain't Easy," "When Will It End," "Are You Man Enough, Are You Strong Enough" and a very good cover of "Son of a Preacher Man."

plus:

Ghostface, Fishscale, which I really don't need to say anything about , because you can just go read what Sasha Frere-Jones or one of the many critics who writes about music far better than this blogger has to say about this record, which is necessarily thus overrated but still very, very good.

Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass. I don't have that much to say about this record I haven't said here before, but it's pretty great.

Lily Allen, Alright Still. I am a sucker for witty homages to Jamaican music, or british appropriations thereof, and this is smart, funny stuff. Except for Alfie, which just makes me sort of uncomfortable.

Destroyer: Destroyer's Rubies. This is the first record to make me really appreciate Dan Bejar, though i think i have probably said that here before too. Helped me survive last spring.

Peter Bjorn and John, Writers Block. I still think it sounds like what the Go-Betweens would have sounded like if they'd been Swedish hipsters in 2006 rather than obscure Australian indie rockers in the mid 1980s. But I'm a moron.

Darstellung

Last week, Alek used my discussion of Yale University's dissertation boot camp to put the academic labor movement on the carpet - if i might steal a wrestling metaphor from Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.

I bring this up in the spirit of respectful disagreement because -- without speaking for anyone else -- I personally have felt rather alienated by the tendency of academic labor activists to stretch for accusation opportunities. I believe it weakens the overall argument regarding casualized labor, and buttresses the view of graduate student unionists as polemical, hyper-jargon-obsessed reactionaries. Personally, I don't hold that view, since in my experience graduate student unionists are people who have invested a great deal of time and energy in thinking about their role in education and the future of the Academy, and are committed to acting to make the Academy better. But when something like this "boot camp" comes along that, for everything I can see, _does_ in fact make things better for graduate students, tearing it apart on principle calls that commitment into question. It makes people (including me, at times) wonder whether graduate student unionists are more committed to the ideology than to the change.

There are plenty of jargon obsessed reactionary grad students out there. Some of them visited this blog rather frequently last February. My frustration with the academic labor movement's discourse has more to do with the move which pops up every now and then to collapse though metaphor the struggles of casualized academics with those of migrant farmworkers or other migrant workers in unstable and often extralegal sectors of the service economy. My problem with this gesture is that rather than highlighting the instability of casualized academic work and the erosion/ negation of job security in the university, it places non-academic workers in the silent position of equivalent value, of placeholder, as silent bearers of abjected meaning, and elides the very real differences between academics and other workers in the University-Hospital city. This makes academics look like spoiled brats drunk on white privilege.

But, and this will come as a surprise to no one who reads this blog, more nuanced, democratic, and egalitarian solidarities are not only possible between the academic labor movement and other workers' struggles, but are one of the former's greatest hopes. Similarly, I think movements for educational and economic justice in this country need to engage in a deeper critique of the corporatization of and labor politics within and involving colleges and universities. As i noted here:

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.

Alek understands this as well as I do, I suspect. But when he asks, regarding the dissertation boot camp, whether my objections belie a commitment to ideology over change, I wonder how easy the two are to extricate from each other, whether "boot camp" as a means of improving graduate students lives can ever really be understood outside the context of an abyssmal job market created by ever-increasing labor casualization, efforts around the country to crack down on time to degree themselves inseparable from concerns over the management and disposition of casual teaching labor. As I said in my initial response to Alek's comment, my issue is less with the boot camp as such than as metaphor for a certain relationship between university administrators and the people who teach upwards of two thirds of their courses. But
I will vociferously defend the importance of understanding the salience and implications of this metaphor as part of a broader critique of the ways in which how universities work and what they do has real effects on the rest of the labor movement, on workers lives, and on the global economy.

I'm not sure if I managed to say what I was trying to say here, but regardless, I'm hungry and there's no food in the apartment, so this is what you get.

Capital, therefore, is not only the command over labour, as Adam Smith thought. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people [fremder Arbeit].

Capital, Volume 1. 672.

And, for good measure:

If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a school-master is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation.

Ibid., 644.

I'm assuming this inspired the naming of SAWSJ.

In addition to the recent link from Inside Higher Ed, which I read daily and for the most part find invaluable, despite occasionally oversimplified coverage of the strike last year and a proclivity for repeatedly giving column space to megalomaniacal NYU administrators, I've also apparently been added to Cliopatria's History Blogroll. Thanks, Cliopatria.

In the past few days I've been getting hits not only from around the country, but Taiwan, Madrid, Guangxi, Heidelberg, Cologne, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne. The internets is a truly wondrous contraption.

I still owe Alek that response, but it'll have to come after tomorrow, because I have the lion's share of Capital Volume 1 to read tonight and the first (G)HOD meeting. Woohoo.

Didn't Levin tell us that Schmoke wanted the painting to stay up?

Guardsmark Overruled.

The NLRB's controversial decision in 2005 to allow an employer ban against off-duty socializing (a death knell for unionization campaigns) has been thrown out in federal court.

From the American Rights at Work Email:

Workers' Rights Watch: Eye on the NLRB - February 5, 2007

The American pastime of happy hour appeared to be doomed when in July 2005, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a dangerous precedent-setting decision to allow employers to ban “off-duty fraternizing” among co-workers. In our outrage we publicized the ruling, which eventually sent shockwaves far beyond the labor law community. Professors, journalists, bloggers, privacy and workers’ rights advocates, lawyers, and workers themselves could all agree that the Republican majority of the Board went too far in its decision severely weakening the rights of free speech and association, and violating basic standards of privacy for America's workers.

Yet this ‘Big Brother’ ruling was just overturned by the DC Circuit Court, which ruled that an employer's ban on "fraternizing" was illegal because employees would construe it as a ban of union or concerted activity—and not just socializing—outside of work hours.*

While we should all meet up after work to celebrate this decision, it's a sad day when the when a higher court has to save workers' rights from destruction from the agency created to protect them.

Herrenvolk Plutocracy, or It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like GATTACA

The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected.

The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections and assistance for victims of sexual crimes. The amendment permits DNA collecting from anyone under criminal arrest by federal authorities, and also from illegal immigrants detained by federal agents.

Over the last year, the Justice Department has been conducting an internal review and consulting with other agencies to prepare regulations to carry out the law.

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

The law has strong support from crime victims’ organizations and some women’s groups, who say it will help law enforcement identify sexual predators and also detect dangerous criminals among illegal immigrants.

Shocking, I know, but today's WSN is actually pretty interesting. First, one editor/columnist has it out with NYU's model for becoming a global university: (which consrtis of - what else - buying real estate.)

I experienced NYU in London, so I can say with certainty that there was nothing global or multicultural about it. Students don't get the option to find a flat, so I was crammed into a British take on an NYU dorm with four other American women. It was really nice, and I got on well with my roommates, but that's beside my main gripe. We all went to classes in one central building - it was something like NYU High. This academic center was located in a really posh townhouse on gorgeous Georgian Bedford Square, but it wasn't an English university or even a simulacrum of an English university. It was very nice, but between living and learning with American NYU students, my horizons were hardly expanded.

To me, this system feels like colonization: NYU goes abroad to share its ideas with the locals, and NYU students do their part for university PR while failing to be tainted by another culture that could turn them against their alma mater. I realize that's insane, but it occurred to me repeatedly as I thought about it: Students don't need to study at an NYU in Elsewhere to become acculturated. Cynics have pointed out that NYU study abroad sites are great cash cows. I asked Nyarko if these sites turn a profit. His answer? "We don't seek to make a profit." Reassuring, I suppose, but evasive nevertheless.

Now, I don't necessarily think NYU should dump its own sites; plenty of students adore the unadventurous option. But for the love of God, please make it possible for students to take a semester or two away without having to take a leave of absence. Exploring something new for a year doesn't compromise our loyalty to the NYU brand and even if it did, that's no excuse to prevent anyone from trying new things.

Also, I hate this language of globalization. It is not NYU's duty to take up the white man's burden or make money on these endeavors - we're a nonprofit. Nyarko and NYU President John Sexton are both correct when they claim that globalization can't be held back, but NYU should simply continue to distinguish itself: They will come to us, no colonization necessary.

Plus, the price of birth control at NYU Health Services more than doubles, and NYU is one of 60 schools fingered in the AG's probe of the relationships between financial aid offices and the outside lenders to which they refer students.

Digital Diploma Mills Are The New Pornography, or Casualization Gets Mass Romantic

I just saw a new tv commercial for the University of Phoenix, an entirely online university which relies on a hypercasualized, hypercontingent labor force of teahcers and graders who never meet their students. This commercial utilized the chorus of the New Pornographers' "Bleeding Heart Show," specifically the innocous-sounding "Hey-Na" part.

There's obviously some serious irony here. Beyond that, I'll leave off deeper analysis in favor of reader interjection. So, dear reader, I ask you, WTF?

Nerds has the latest on the interim grievance nonsense from the administration. Anyone interested in just how great the university's failure to address these grievances a year after they were filed need only to look at this latest confused, self-contradicting dismissal handed down by a vice dean. It's barely readable.

I want to post a more detailed response to the issues Alek raised in the comments on the last post, but I've been exhausted all weekend since helping friends move a very heavy refrigerator and many extremely heavy book boxes up three flights of stairs Thursday afternoon, and haven't felt much like blogging.