So five years ago Thursday, just after Education In The Streets, GESO hosted a teach-in in First & Summerfield's main chapel. I remember all the speakers, and Brenda Carter's introductory remarks. i have a pretty sick memory when it comes to FHUE events and UOC meetings. (1199 has another move!) But what I remembered most from that panel (and most of that day after EITS remains a euphoric blur, albeit possibly because of the "Trash Yale" controversy) was Gordon Lafer's comment that an undergraduate education at Yale was deeply an "education in cynicism." This stuck out so much that it made it to the quote page, alongside David Lee's radical churchspeak and Mark Wilson's declaration that if Yale continued to push Local 35 members out of the picture (by subcontracting jobs,) then union members would "take the camera and make our own damn picture."
I think what struck me about Lafer's words was the radical possibility inherent in them - the contradictions of faculty and administrative liberal rhetorics and the practices of union busting, neoliberal expansion, globalizing yale, all foment cynicism about the way the university works, but also posit a direct relationship between the political economy of the neoliberal university and the subjectivity of undergraduates that at a moment when 500 undergraduates had just taken to the streets in the middle of a blizzard to participate in a very different vision of what the university could look like, was deeply intriguing.
I raise all this not for nostalgia's sake, but rather i'm reminded of it because of today's forum, which GSOC's been working on planning for months and from which i just returned. Lafer spoke on the first panel of the day, along with Joanna Holzman and Randy Martin. Joanna gave a general and personal history of GSOC, spoke eloquently, as she often does, about how the contract and the union radically changed her graduate school experience. Randy Martin performed a really useful analysis of the financialization of the university, talking about the speculative logics of financial aid reform or lacks thereof, about the ways that NYU's endowment and expansion plans solicit alumni donations which produce the endowment as a hedge fund analogue, as a high risk investment in the university's real estate futures, and the implications of the denial of the presence of labor (the installation "of labor in the center of every curriculum".) Lafer talked about that cynicism again, about student government as either a game or a pun, about the ironies of the Sextonian erasure of faculty governance, about the difficulties of rebuilding after bitter strikes and defeats and moving forward in the "university of broken people." Lisa Duggan, speaking on the second panel, after Monika summarized the really important arguments she and Mike Palm make in their essay in The University Against Itself,) spoke about the broader agendas to which we should aspire, the power of unions as sites from which to launch movements unwilling to cede to the university all terrain not comfortably relegated to the parochial domain of business unionism, although Stephanie Hsu raised an important point about how this labor towards something other than a contract gets remunerated and valorized. It's an interesting point that Stephanie made, but i think we're weaker as a union if we don't figure out ways to organize around what Rick Levin once scorned as a "broader agenda" - which includes thinking about labor and difference in complex and careful ways.
I'm inspired by the turnout, excited about the fact that GSOC just had our first large public event since the strike ended, excited to see where this new organizing takes us, what we can build together, what struggles we can undertake together. And in the spirit of this week and what it means to those of us who were in New Haven in March of 2003, "mountain, move out of my way."
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