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 11th, 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 4th 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 21st 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
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