Which "Love Me I'm A Liberal" Youtube video is more sexist?

This one:

Or

This one?

Don't they get that the "Dykes of the American Revolution" crack was a)part of the gag, b) dumb, and c) homophobic?

But just so I don't sour you on the genius of Phil Ochs...


Bonus:


I'd post Josh Eidelson's "Love Me I'm a Yalie," but I don't remember the lyrics.

(If you're reading this on facebook, you won't be able to see the embedded youtube clips. click through to the blog.)

Marc Bousquet reports on McGill's unionbusting as the strike there continues into its third week.

Meanwhile the Washington Square News, which spent the second half of the strike parroting administration anti-union rhetoric, is welcoming the Kennedy bill and the "return" of graduate employee unions. I welcome the sentiment, and I'm glad the new editors have their heads on straighter, but Prince's comments upon hearing "Sexy Back" seem appropriate nevertheless.

a question

So, if NYU is the new British Empire, does that mean that Njiall Ferguson will come back?

Brief early thoughts on remastered rerelease of Replacements' Let It Be. (1984)

"I Will Dare" sounds too bass-heavy. Mandolin kinda falls out.

Favorite Thing/We're Coming Out lose too much of their dirty, grainy, edge. Sound too sanitized, too eighties.

"Androgynous" sounds incredible, revelatory.

"Black Diamond" - was better on the old Twintone mix. too. Less focus on Bob Stinson wankery."

"Unsatisfied" sounds way off key, but the acoustic guitars sound great.

"Seen Your Video" sounds great.

"Gary's Got A Boner" still sucks, but sounds better doing so. Lyrics actually intelligible. Not sure if that's a good thing.

"Sixteen Blue" - Sounds even better than on the twintone. The remastering really brings out the guitar harmonies. I gain respect for Bob Stinson as a subtle lead guitarist.

"Answering Machine" - sounds fine. The demo is amazing.

Some thoughts on a shitstorm

I don't have much to say about the Aliza Shvarts mess other than that Yale should not be censoring artists who are doing innovative, politically complex and well-thought out work.

I'm particularly interested though, in a little-explored (at least in commentary I've read) aspect of the administrative fallout, which is the academic labor politics of the Dean's response.

From Peter Salovey's most recent statement:

After investigation, Dean Storr and I have determined that there were serious errors of judgment on the part of two individuals. In one case, the instructor responsible for the senior project should not have allowed it to go forward. In the other, an adviser [sic] should have interceded and consulted others when first given information about the project. Appropriate action has been taken in these two cases.

Both the instructor and the advisor are almost certainly adjuncts or otherwise contingent. (As a lecturer, the advisor is the former, albeit a highly credentialed one.) What is "appropriate action" here? How this act of censorship affect the employment status of these teachers? Without job security, academic freedom is a fiction.

quick links at the buttcrack of dawn

The WHO considers alternatives to international drug patent laws, University tech transfer czars object, the Huffington Post objects to their objections, and then they object to the Huffpo's objections to their objections. Lost in the equation, I'm sure, is the conversation about the casualized labor that produces the drugs but has no say in how the university and the corporations it partners with licenses and profits from them.

Meanwhile Homeland Security proposes making it even harder for international students to study in the U.S.

Ted Kennedy, Killer Coke Still Banned From NYU Campus, (except ) David Swensen is the New George Berkeley, and other stuff.

Ted Kennedy's introduced a bill to amend the NLRA to include graduate employees.

More than ever in modern education, teaching and research assistants are in classrooms every day, educating students in colleges and universities across the country. Their numbers are increasing as the number of full time faculty dwindles. Often, teaching and research assistants are now doing the same job as junior faculty members.

In fact, the classroom is a workplace for these scholars. It’s where they earn the money they need to pay to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. They deserve the right to stand together and make their voice heard in their workplace. Like other employees, they should have the right to join a union and improve their working conditions. Obviously, better wages and working conditions for them also means better education for their students.

In 2004, however, a decision by the National Labor Relations Board changed the law and denied fundamental workplace rights and protections for teaching and research assistants. This ruling stopped an active organizing movement in its tracks and deprived thousands of teaching and research assistants of their right to organize and bargain over their wages and working conditions.

It’s hardly the only bad decision by the National Labor Relations Board under the Bush Administration, which has been the most anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-union NLRB in history. The Board has let workers down at every turn. It has blocked efforts to gain union

representation, undermined workers’ attempts to improve their pay and benefits, and exposed them to penalties for seeking to improve their working conditions.

The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect the rights of American workers, but it is failing teaching and research assistants, just as it has failed so many others. By passing the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act, Congress will give these workers back the rights that the National Labor Relations Board has taken away. This legislation amends the definition of employee under the National Labor Relations Act to explicitly include teaching and research assistants at private universities and colleges and restores the law to where it was before the Bush Board’s anti-worker decision.

This bill is a significant step forward in restoring workers’ rights, and I urge my colleagues to join in supporting this important legislation.

The NYU University Senate has upheld the coke ban. Good.

S.P. and A.S.C. are the new masters of Ezra Stiles College. They're great teachers and deeply invested in undergraduate education, so congrats to them both.

They could have picked a worse college to take over, (seriously?)

Barf.

Well, Stiles has its own histories of erasures and injustices, (Yale demolished a top notch public high school to build the dorms, and see also 'Newport') and these histories constantly haunt the Yale campus and like the acid they pour on the buildings to artificially age them, leave lasting marks. But if these institutional spaces are going to exist, i can't think of better folks to occupy them and do good things with them, and I wish them the best.

rethinking rethinking the university

Some hopefully constructive reflections on what was overall an incredible experience.

The awesome:

• exciting, brilliant papers from folks like Isaac Kamola and Eli Meyerhoff from University of Minnesota, Tim from the Counter-Cartographies Collective, Eli Thorkelson from U of Chicago. , NYU's own Lena Sze, and Morgan Adamson's autonomist Marxist reading of student debt. And many others. The focus on autonomia was really useful for me - using autonomist theories of the affective and immaterial to think about the university is something i've been thinking about in terms of my own work since my junior year of college. It was really incredible to see the amazing, innovative work folks were doing with this scholarship and these theoretical frameworks.
  
• exciting, inspiring conversations with folks from across the academy.
• It snowed all weekend and I walked across the Mississippi River on a freaking bridge.

The "problematic"

• With a couple of exceptions there was a conspicuous absence of a race analysis in a lot of the panels - the ones I went to at least, and I went to most of them. Indeed race is barely even incidental to my own contribution. This is a bit disconcerting given how racialized the neoliberal university is, the extent to which its projects are racial projects as defined by Omi and Winant. Nor did my recuperation of the virus, as Rana pointed out, acknowledge at all the history of AIDS activism to which such moves owe much. Shout outs to ugly words.
  
• suggestion by one panelist that the future of movements over the rights of contingent teachers & researchers would not be in the labor movement. He dismissed the Yale fight as a fiasco and the GSOC strike similarly. I assume he was talking, with regards to Yale, about the May 1 2003 vote, which may have been a tactical mistake - definitely not for me to say - but was ultimately lost by about 40 votes because of a vicious anti-union campaign. Rebuilding was quick and effective and GESO built back to majority and struck by itself two years later. Fiasco? Not so much. As for GSOC, see the last paragraph of my comments from our panel. There were farcical aspects to what happened but to dismiss the totality of what we did, what we learned, and what's happened as a result as a "fiasco" is too simple. I respect this scholar's politics and I respect his work a lot, but this was frustrating. Not even sure whether I should be posting this. Particularly since i included his name in my last post. Perhaps I misinterpreted his intentions or meaning, but I don't think i did.
  

The completely terrifying

• The Big Red Box. From Elizabeth Kissling's paper on branding campaigns and contract negotiations at Eastern Washington University. Check out those fucked up neoliberal identity politics.
  

I was, on the whole, humbled as well as deeply excited by the conversations talking place and the kinds of interventions people were making. I'm excited to see where this all goes.

The return of the virus?

I figured i'd make available here my comments from the panel Steve Fletcher chaired yesterday on "The NYU Grad Strike and the Neoliberal University" at the conference titled Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value, at the University of Minnesota.

Without Our Brain and Muscle: NYU and the Future of the Neoliberal University.

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein[i]

The afterlife of the strike

The picket lines of what was likely the longest strike in the history of the graduate employee labor movement in the U.S. came down on May 11^{th, 2006,} following a “strike graduation” rally two blocks south of the university’s commencement ceremonies. By fall, the police barricades along the sidewalks of West 4^th Street, outside the library over which the university president’s offices panoptically loom, were gone, soon replaced, oddly, by NYPD protest pen-style bike rack barriers painted NYU purple. The forlorn island of dirt where strikers had erected sign-in tables and munched on stale bagels for six months was rendered inaccessible by a wall of scaffolding and nets. The dirt had to be scrubbed from the library’s red-brown façade. It took nearly a year. Gone too was the rickety ugly green dumpster in which strikers had hauled picket signs, tables, and the gas tank, generator, and what I can only describe as the decaying corpse of our environmentally unsustainable giant inflatable rat, which, eyes red and fangs bared, stood with us in the freezing rain and silently, stoically, bore witness to so much of a strike that mixed the theatre of the absurd and the infuriating with high tragedy, surreal farce, tortuous monotony, and its fair share of deeply inspiring and emotionally exhausting moments.

The NYU campus feels palpably different now, emptier. The drum beats and chants that echoed off the campus’s forbidding edifices and wafted through its securitized apertures marked the dramatically increased visibility and audibility of a precarious, transient, and contingent population of teachers and researchers. As things have quieted down in the strike’s wake, that presence now feels somewhat spectral. Yet if we have not shouted with the same volume as we did during the strike, we have not been inactive. Even as organizing efforts have continued, and graduate employees have continuously attempted to rethink strategic miscues and failures and move towards new ways of being and building a union for academic workers, we’ve seen the institution at which we labor undertake multiple new projects and outline broad plans for financial, territorial, and global expansion.

It’s important to remember and rethink and reevaluate the strike. I’m grateful for the interventions that Andy and Monika have made here, and I agree with them. But I think it’s equally important to think about what’s happened since and what may happen next, to think, briefly, about recent developments in the constitution of the deeply contradictory and evangelically neoliberal university that is NYU and to posit a role for graduate employee unionists in transforming it, moving beyond it.

Spatial Contours of the Enterprise University: ICE and the Global Network

John Sexton has underlined his vision of NYU’s future explicitly and grandiloquently. He is fond of making broad and overarching pronouncements and declarations, in a manner which, admittedly, often smacks of the absurd, the preposterous. There is method in his megalomania, though, and I believe his words must be taken at face value more often than not. Soon after his installation, President Sexton issued a series of missives (Mary Nolan calls them “Epistles”) on the “Enterprise University,” or “Common Enterprise University” (how’s that for a “capitalist commons?”) which he framed as a disciplinary mechanism to be exercised upon wayward faculty, necessitating the centralization of power and governance in the hands of his handpicked “University Leadership Team” in order to compel an unacknowledgedly and increasingly casualized workforce to perform its labors as desired. The Enterprise University was and is the Managed University, and it was this bureaucratic arrangement of administrative power that cut off negotiations with GSOC, blacklisted and fired some twenty strikers, and recruited two enterprising professional students to begin designing the company union structure which would ostensibly replace the UAW-allied union. In April of 2006 one of these individuals received a fifty-thousand dollar fellowship for his “social entrepreneurship” through a newly created university program. This program was endowed by then newly crowned NYU Trustee for Life Catherine B. Reynolds, who not long after came under pressure from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for selling student loans with inflated interest rates. Which is interesting, to say the least.[ii]

The Common Enterprise University represents the death knell of faculty governance, which we ought to caution ourselves against being too nostalgic for in its actually existing, or actually having existed forms, as complicit as it’s been in structures of exclusion, empire, and the political economy of the academic superstar system. Yet Faculty Democracy of the sort advocated by hundreds of pro-union NYU faculty as they joined GSOC picket lines and stormed John Sexton’s offices in November of 2005 becomes more than worth supporting, at least if one cares about the principle that people should have some form of control over and/or voice in the work that they do.

The current NYU administration has designs, at any rate, not merely on bending the academic workforce to its will, but also on radically restructuring city and state economic policies. President Sexton has, since 2004, advocated reconfiguring New York’s political infrastructure around what he calls ICE – a set of policies in which “global talent” is increasingly concentrated in centers of Information, Culture, and Economy. Sexton is fond of making a proprietary claim to this term. As a member of the Higher Education Committee created by former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, President Sexton has actively pushed the idea of New York City as in “idea capital” of the future, and called for a reorganization of its economy which foregrounds the revenue-generating potential of the private research university.[iii] Writing in The University Against Itself, Sarah Nash, a GSOC veteran and former staff researcher for the union, and Steven Duncombe, a professor in NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, have noted the ironies of a term that hinges upon the exploitation and financialization of academic and intellectual innovation but is itself seemingly plagiarized from Indian economists, who apparently doubt the model’s efficacy.[iv] But ICE’s neoliberalism lies not only in its zeal for the commodification of immaterial labor, but also in its demand that state funding for public education should be, in the words of the Washington Square News, NYU’s student paper, “spread less thinly and given mostly to private universities,” This, President Sexton explains to the WSN reporter, is “merit based pay,” “making sure the investment is not wasted.”[v] The language of finance and pragmatism here masks the ways in which NYU’s regional growth involves the enclosure of public spaces and the expropriation of public institutions and funds. This regional expansion, it’s important to note, also involves developing Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, and colonizing a broad swathe of downtown Brooklyn’s working class commercial district south of the newly acquired campus of Polytechnic University, an area which currently serves a predominantly working class and African-American clientele.[vi] This considerable addition to the university’s already formidable real estate empire is a key piece of the university’s “2031” plan, which involves the acquisition or construction of 6 million square feet of space over the next 23 years, as the university continues ot admit increasing numbers of students at ever-rising tuition rates.[vii]

NYU’s expansion is hardly limited to the New York metropolitan area. Though plans for a partnership with American University in Paris on an island NYU recently purchased in the Seine fell through last month, the university holds or has recently opened satellite campuses and programs in London, Madrid, Accra, Paris (a smaller operation than the planned joint venture) Singapore, Argentina, Israel, Berlin, Prague, and Shanghai.[viii] And construction may begin very soon on NYU in Abu Dhabi, a project whose history was recently discussed by Tamar Lewin in a lengthy article in the New York Times,[ix] though Andrew Ross’s recent article on the matter which appeared both in Inside Higher Ed and in The University Against Itself is engages the project more rigorously and more valuably. Our colleague Lena Sze reminds us that the politics surrounding the Abu Dhabi venture are complex and multivalent, and Rana Jaleel will speak about how NYU graduate employees are thinking about potential interventions in the university’s transnational enterprise, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about the issue, but I am interested in the ways in which Sexton’s framed this ‘partnership’, which began during the GSOC strike and which Sexton refused to “take seriously” unless UAE representatives made a 50 million dollar donation to NYU’s endowment.[x] Fond of ruminating in totalizing and indeed orientalist terms on the 21^st century as “The Century of the Other,” Sexton recently described the university’s expansion to Abu Dhabi and elsewhere in terms of the globalization of ICE ‘idea capitals’ and the ‘embrace of otherness,’ – meaning, apparently ‘we don’t mind our campus interrupted with other buildings instead if an NYU building,’ as an ethic of expansion. The latter statement, by the way, is one that the historical preservationists who unsuccessfully fought NYU’s annexation and demolition of Edgar Allan Poe’s House, might disagree with.[xi]

The Truth Is A Virus

Thus, NYU becomes what Sexton has alternatingly termed “the global network university” and “the university of the other,”[xii] The other, of course, meaning potentially everything which is not NYU, with NYU imagined as homogeneous, Western, white, apparently, and unitarily, proprietarily progressive and dynamic. Meanwhile, back in Greenwich Village, expansion means, as a March 7 memo from Executive Vice President Michael Alfano announces, a hiring freeze for the coming year for clerical and administrative labor, with concomitant calls for increases in efficiency inevitably spelling speed-up, increased outsourcing, and the increasing consolidation of such function’s under the U.L.T.’s watchful eyes.[xiii] The sweeping nature of these changes evince a swagger on the part of administrators who believe they’ve moved past (Sexton’s often repeated words during the strike) the challenges from below posed by GSOC and its allies and supporters.

In November 2005, a striking graduate teaching assistant in the NYU English department booked a meeting with President Sexton during his office hours. Sexton, dismayed to learn of his guest’s support for the union, informed her that GSOC was a “virus” that needed to be “eradicated from the earth.” [totally anecdotal.] I share this anecdote not to solicit your outrage, much less your sympathy, but rather because I think it offers both a clear window into how the NYU administration views its “waste” – to steal from Marc Bousquet’s brilliant theorization of the exploitative structure of academic knowledge production. We are completely abject, menacing, microscopic, indeed barely material but nonetheless necessitating either the university’s vaccination or our own destruction.

I also raise the virus metaphor because I think it offers, as does Bousquet’s model, a path for potential intervention, disruption and recuperation of the neoliberal university. Disgusting as it seems, I wonder if the virus, constantly shifting, constantly adapting, reconstituting itself, rhizomatic, hybrid, and nearly irresistible, might, taking a cue from the Aids activism of an earlier moment – and I’m indebted to Rana Jaleel for pointing out my reliance on these histories of activism and struggle - offer a useful way to think about how we organize against and within and increasingly spread out, de/territorialized, ruthless, employer. This is a position I’m wary of taking, particularly because the history of contagion in this country is very much a racialized one, and I wonder whether an uncritical appropriation or reclamation of the union as virus ignores the ways in which some of us are more immediately read as threats to afflict the social body than others. But still, I find the possibilities alluring. Moten and Harney[xiv] describe a subversive relationship to the university which is premised on criminality, and specifically on theft – To the university I’ll steal and there I’ll steal. What would it look like if instead we thought about our relationships to the university through the metaphor of infection?

Addendum: I want to respectfully disagree with Peter Rachleff that addressing the concerns of the university’s undercommons – Moten and Harney again – must be done outside of the labor movement, that our struggle exceeds the bounds of such forms, because I’m not convinced we can know the bounds of any union or any form of struggle until we can push them no further. Our strike was no "fiasco." Rather, it was extraordinarily instructive, and I hope the tactics we have developed, the lessons we have learned, will prove useful to university employees in the years to come who are imagining and pushing forward alternative futures for the sites in which we all labor.

---

[i] I owe thanks to the many members of GSOC, to the folks from GESO who lent our struggle new force and direction, and thus made this paper possible. Steve Fletcher, Andy Cornell, Rana Jaleel, Mike Palm, Andrew Ross, Johana Londono, and many others guided and helped to shape this paper, whether they knew it or not.

[ii] “First Class of Reynolds Scholars Named,” WSN 5/8/2006 and “Trustee’s nonprofit loan co. under fire,” WSN 9/20/2007

[iii] “Sexton: Private and public Schools should partner,” Washington Square News, 12/6/2007

[iv] Duncombe and Nash, “Ice From the Ashes of Fire: NYU and The Economy of Culture In New York City,” in Palm, Krause, Ross, and Nolan, eds. The University Against Itself Philadelphia; Temple University Press, 2008. 72

[v] “Sexton: Private and public Schools should partner,” Washington Square News, 12/6/2007

[vi] NYU 2031 Open House Presentation, Jan 30, 2008.

[vii] “Villagers still wary of NYU’s growth” WSN 11/15/2007

[viii] “Cramped In Village, NYU Eyes Globe as It Grows,” WSN 12/7/07 and Andrew Ross, “Global U” in The University Against Itself 212

[ix] Lewin, “Universities Rush to Set up Outposts Abroad,” NYT 2/10/2008

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Duncombe and Nash, 80

[xii] “Cramped In Village, NYU Eyes Globe as it grows,” op cit

[xiii] Michael Alfano, “Administrative re-engineering – A follow-up to John Sexton’s Memo”. 3/7/2008

[xiv] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and its Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text79, 2004

good night.

gotta get up and beeee somebody.

NYT: NYU "Makes the Town-Gown Relationship almost toxic"

Since many residents are either current or former faculty and have a connection to N.Y.U., few are willing to speak negatively about the university for fear of losing their apartments. But in private they are plenty mad, and the environmental mishap, one top of outrage over the university’s expansion plans, makes the town-gown relationship almost toxic. Said one long time resident of the Mews: “This appears to some to be another example of the wide gait with which N.Y.U. strides over Greenwich Village. Some villagers are already up in arms over N.Y.U.’s over-saturation of their neighborhood.”

Global U Roundup: France, Bombs, Freedom, Dead Rising and Urban Neocolonialism, anti-permatemping vs. job security

As NYU expands operations in Paris, The WSN reports on the entanglement between the Department of Defense and the NYU Physics Department, while the editors are distressed by how the university works.

Meanwhile, Yale contemplates tearing down walls, but not the right ones, and Marc Bousquet has a very interesting article on Inside Higher Ed about conflicts between contingent faculty and the AFT's anti-permatemping bill.

Now off to teach.

briefly,

Ugh. On so many levels.

Meanwhile, NPR's story of the day is investment tips from David Swensen, the dude who put Yale's money into places like the Sudanese Civil War and those aformementioned coal plants. Tres Sustainable, no?