I haven't been blogging much lately due to the crush of teaching, academic work, organizing, and other sundry cocnerns, but I want to post a link to Marc Bousquet's How The University Works blog, which is sort of what this blog aspires to be, minus all my wacky song rewrites.
I went to the "open house" for NYU's "NYU 2031" expansion plan Wednesday afternoon after lecture. Some stuff was obvious - building a skyscraper on top of the gymnasium (hey, why not,) continuously expanding the student population as a means of securing easy and cheap revenue flows, turning Washington PLace into a mall, demolishing the area in "Schwartz Plaza" where GSOCers staged our picket line for seven long months in favor off an outdoor cafe and a more open panopticon, the expansion of offsite outsourced campuses like the one in Abu Dhabi, built and probably staffed with exploited migrant labor from across South Asia and the Middle East. Some of it shocked even me. A map of downtown Brooklyn (page 28) displays orange splotches all over downtown Brooklyn, along both sides of Flatbush avenue, surrounding the LIU campus, the city courts, encircling the working class black open air Fulton Mall commercial district and lining much of Willoughby Street between Flatbush and Adams, extending almost as far South as Boerum Hill and Park Slope - a huge footprint for NYU's ever covetous "tentacles," removing a massive amount of space from public use and NYC tax rolls, creating a neoliberal satellite campus in a borough where displacement and gentrification are already very serious concerns. NYC Democratic political leadership seems tenatively behind the plan, which marks a more shrewd attempt by the university to court certain constituencies of elite public opinion - village dwellers, city councilpeople, Scott Stringer, but never Fulton Mallgoers, Myrtle Avenue residents, or current business owners or workers who work in the affected areas in Brooklyn. What else could be done with this space? Is this the future we want for our city? What is to be done? What would a real social contract between NYU and working class New York look like?
I don't think NYU's been all too concerned with working class New York since Jay Oliva took his imperialist throne.
ReplyDeleteOther than its token HEOP-CSTEP programs, it also makes little attempt at fostering diversity. And, by diversity I mean socioeconomic diversity. Most of the undergrad population surely hails from the middle to upper middle to downright "rich" ranks of society. That "private university dedicated to public service" (not entirely accurate, forgive me) needs some updating, no?