Staffing the "Global Network University"

In their profile of Bloom, the designated head of the Abu Dhabi campus, raise some of the common questions about the endeavor:

Criticisms of colleges starting campuses or programs in the Middle East often include issues of academic freedom, human rights (in particular in the Emirates, concerns about migrant workers’ rights), and equal access and opportunities for women and Jews.

Lumping these together seems irresponsible to me, since some of the folks who've been loudest on the migrant worker issues have also been concerned with the orientalist assumptions involved in some of the ways gender, homosexuality (not even mentioned here) and Judaism in the middle east are being talked about. Here, the latter prove a smoke screen to allow the administrator-select to avoid discussing the former:

On the latter issue, “I am Jewish, as it is well-known,” Bloom said Monday. “I see the institution as committed to diversity, and that my appointment is emblematic of the diversity to which it is committed.”

“I know that the Abu Dhabi government will make it possible ... for us to include faculty and students from wherever they come.”

Thankfully, IHE also talked to Andrew Ross:

NYU’s Faculty Senators Council chair did not respond to e-mail and voice-mail messages inquiring about Bloom’s selection Monday. Andrew Ross, chair of NYU’s American Association of University Professors chapter and a professor and chair of the department of social and cultural analysis, said he was surprised that someone from outside NYU would be leading the Abu Dhabi branch.

“The way we’ve understood it is that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi wants some kind of facsimile of NYU on site in Abu Dhabi. I guess it would make sense for someone to know the culture of NYU to be in that figurehead position, executive position,” said Ross, who has questioned the motives and assumptions behind the campus and other similar initiatives.

At the same time, Ross continued, “Swarthmore isn’t just any liberal arts college … it’s one that’s known for its open and free speech culture. Surely that’s part of the message.”

“There’s still a widespread skepticism about the project, I would say,” Ross said, surmising that a main reason for the continuing skepticism was that the branch campus was a top-down rather than a faculty-driven endeavor. NYU’s AAUP has been working with Human Rights Watch to draft and push for the adoption of a code of conduct to govern labor practices in the construction and maintenance of the Abu Dhabi campus. The AAUP is also advocating for the establishment of a permanent tenured faculty in Abu Dhabi to safeguard academic freedom.

And interestingly Sexton responds:

“We view the faculty as being exactly the same as faculty we have in New York in all respects,” said Sexton. He said that tenure decisions will be up to individual schools and departments, but expects a significant portion of the Abu Dhabi campus’s faculty to be tenured or tenure-track.

This isn't much of an answer, though, because he's not telling us whether the faculty from the middle east and south asia who are not part of the Washington Square Campus's tenure(less) system will be able to earn tenure at NYU Abu Dhabi - the "significant portion" here could easily be a reference to the NYU faculty Sexton wants to serve "tours of duty" at the A.D. Institute. And there's no commitment here to ensure just working and living conditions for the migrant workers who'll build and staff the new campus. For more on the campaign to get NYu to commit to fair labor at branch campuses, check out the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU, sign the petition, and be on the lookout for upcoming events.

sigh

NYU's student newspaper continues its now apparently protracted polemics against a single student activist group targeted last week by President Sexton by informing all of us that real activism involves a little studying and then asking the "proper people" in the administration nicely. How tragic for the 25 GSOCers whom the administration fired and blacklisted that we were not privy to such brilliant advice three years ago when we most needed it. How helpful it is to have a campus newspaper that blithely echoes administration talking points in poorly orchestrated, poorly articulated, and poorly informed attacks on student activists. The Washington Square News is well aware - or should be - that SCRC, for instance, has been attempting to "productively engage" the administration for much of the last two semesters. The administration's silence on budget disclosure has more to do with their refusal to afford undergraduates (much less graduate employees now repeatedly branded "financial aid recipients") a seat at the table. (A table, by the way, which i would like to see thrown out entirely in favor of more just, more radical, if you will, overhaul of what it means to be a university, a student, a teacher. This, of course, is a concept the WSN refuses to even entertain, for it is surely too impractical for John Sexton and thus for them, too steeped in the "outdated" activism of, like, Cesar Chavez. And Gandhi. Fuck those guys. Sustainable tacos are so much more worthwhile.)

Ok, that last bit came off as kind of obnoxious. The speed with which administrators adopt green capitalism as the epitome of 'responsible' activism has always horrified me, but I don't mean to disparage the very commendable efforts of student activists to institutionalize environmentalist practices even in the most neoliberal of institutional spaces.

In other NYU news, Sexton has lured the sitting president of Swarthmore College to be the head of the NYU Abu Dhabi adventure, and the endowment, flush with donations from rich alumni and the labor of thousands of contingent academics has reached 2.5 billion dollars. Clearly, it's time to buy a new luxury condominium building, because who needs financial aid, anyway?

addendum,

except the liner notes to the Tim remaster tell us that Westerberg wrote "Waitress in the Sky" about his sister, a flight attendant, from the point of view of an asshole customer. While the subtlety of wit may be lost on listeners and critics alike, who've long panned the song as sounding like grade a rock star idiocy, i wonder if we have to read it differently with this familial intimacy in mind...

Alright, that's the last I'll have to say about Paul Westerberg for a while, barring a new album, another reunion, or me actually ever buying Don't Tell a Soul and/or All Shook Down

and sometimes i just ain't in the mood to take my place in back with the loudmouths

So i got those remastered versions of Tim and Pleased to Meet Me today. I was somewhat skeptical about the need for remasters on the twin tone cds. They always sounded perfect to me as is, and the graininess of the earlier CD mixes of Let It Be in particular felt more appropriate to what the album is and is trying to do than the remaster, which gave certain songs a vh1-y feel. But Pleased to Meet Me always sounded terrible on CD - distant, muted, brackish. I'm listening to the remaster now, and the songs that always sounded great sound better - those horns on "Can't Hardly Wait," for instance, now evoke the Memphis soul they were supposed to rather than Huey Lewis and the News, and i can hear subtleties of the guitar riff on "Alex Chilton" that I can't on the original CD version. The songs i usually skip on the album also sound better - "The Ledge" is explosive now, and the lyrics of "Shooting Dirty Pool"'s first verse are now almost comprehensible. "Nightclub Jitters" sounds hte most radically different - the remaster brings the bass way up, and it almost sounds like Sinatra meets Portishead or something.

Tim sounds mostly the same to me, and for me, that's a good thing. I've never had any problem with Tommy Erdelyi's production on that CD. One thing the remaster does is make Left of the Dial slightly cleaner, but not so much that it doesn't sound like what it is, a paean to the 1980s 'alternative' scene. At any rate, "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular" sound as good as always, just a little louder, and I'm fine with that. Between them, the two discs have four different versions of "Can't Hardly Wait," one acoustic (which doesn't really work at all), with three different versions of the lyrics. The "Studio Demo" of "Kiss Me on the Bus" has Dinosaur Jr. levels of distorted guitar. "Nowhere is my home," an unreleased track from the Tim sessions, shows how great a guitarist Bob Stinson could be. Pleased to Meet Me has TEN bonus tracks. Some of the unreleased stuff, like "Birthday gal" and the incredible "photo," whose pre-chorus is awesomely reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult's "burnin' for you," are wonderful. Chris Mars's take on "Cool Water" anticipates Cool Dump (and predates it by two decades.)

My three day-long stint in post-nasal hell caught up with me in the classroom today. It wasn't that I was underprepared so much as that my brain wasn't making the connections i wanted it to, that I just kind of blanked on where I wanted class to go and about a third of the connections i wanted to push people to make. Which sucks, because it was an important week in terms of the readings -- racialized domestic work. emotional labor. affect. Grr. Bobst Library is much more fun at 7 AM.

Mets are currently down 5 to 1 in the eighth. Here's hoping they pull out of it...

\EDIT: in lieu of Arlie Russel Hochschild's work and following Kathleen Barry's own work on flight attendant labor, i should note that "Waitress in the Sky" is an obnoxious, bad, and offensive song from a guy who once expressed admiration of ronal dreagan and said some dumb shit about Vietnam but writes (mostly) amazing songs.

Case in point: "Swingin' Party"

Reason #347 Why Pitchfork Sucks

No way is Pleased to Meet Me a better album than Tim!

The former has four great songs and a lot of mediocre ones. The latter has three terrible songs and a lot of great ones. I love them both, but the idea that "One good dose of thunder" cancels out "here comes a regular" seems suspect..., as does the fact that an album that sounds as canned and as crappy as Pleased to Meet Me sometimes did (although i have not yet heard the reissue) could be the one cited as having better sound.

Also, it's kind of amazing that six plus years on, there's still a UOC for the YDN to complain about.

on embracing change, pt II

omg.

I've been meaning to blog about this and this and this. Unfortunately, i'm swamped and sick, and i don't know when i'll get around to it. So let me instead briefly commemorate this, which happened six years ago today, and which i have been thinking about even through my post-nasal drip haze. That was a little too graphic and doesn't do justice what the movement did that day and in the years since. Not much can, which is why all the media accounts of that action, particularly the snarky one in the NYT to which i will not link here, completely misunderstood what was at stake and what was going on.

Back to preparing for tomorrow's sections, in which we'll discuss racialized and gendered service work and affective and emotional labor in Mary Romero's Maid in the USA, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Domestica, Robin Leidner's Fast Food Fast Talk, and Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart.

Seriously?

The hysteria over policing faculty politics has clearly gone way too far. (Not that there's anything new about that.)

(Can we talk about the fact that they are quoting in their mission statement a former university president who was so reactionary and incompetrent that a faculty as complacent, self-satisfied, and conservatiove as Yale's actually forced his ouster? Ok, back to the real story)

Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois campuses.

The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the messages on those buttons and stickers was strictly nonpartisan. In addition, professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if those rallies express support for a candidate or political party.

kinda ironic...

... that a scandal about an imaginary graduate assistant would pop up in a "public labor relations course.

That's really all I have to say about this.

change is sooo in right now.

no comment?

Oh, by the way

I'm not sure if anyone's reading, but i'm blogging again. I've got a pretty big workoad this semester, but i'll try to update regularly. Post comments and critiques, or send subpoenas.

social entrepreneurship?

The first in the speaker series endowned by Catherine B. Reynolds, NYU Trustee for Life, student debt profiteer (I'd link, but the WSN site is down,) and purveyor of a $50,000 scholarship to the guy who's responsible for our company union debacle, is none other than (drumroll)

Union-busting anti-union ideologue Whole Foods CEO John Mackey!!!11!1??!1!

That's the NYU vision of social change right there.

Rat, commodified

The most bizarre moment of the GSOC strike was when a group of "counter-protestors" (actually actors hired by an advertising agency) set up a huge inflatable businessman in Washington Square Park, along with a nice, cuddly inflatable rat to protest the UAW's fangy, menacing protest rat. Wearing t-shirts and equipped with a web site that called on passersby and strikers alike to respect rodentia, and attempting to rebrand the rat as the "great pointed archer," (initials GPA. Get it? I just did...) threatened by villainous human supremacist trade unions, these ad agencies used our strike for some free publicity. The whole thing came out in MetroNY the next day. This was really my first interaction with an attempt to commodify the symbols of labor insurgency, other than asshole Yale undergrads wearing picket signs to frat halloween parties, and it's what came to mind immediately when I saw this in my subway station this morning.Yeah, that's an HSBC ad. the text beneath the photos reads "Different Values Make The World a Richer Place" You take the people pissed off at finance capital and you turn them into an advertisement for finance capital. Brilliant.

EDIT: Unless I'm being stupid and this is some culture jam a la adbusters, which would make some sense, but also points to how easily those tactics are incorporated into actual corporate strategies.

EDIT 2: Nope, it really is an HSBC ad. Incredible.

On strike for part-timers in Canada

The chroned news blog reports that faculty and librarians are on strike at the University of Windsor.

The union says it is fighting for more money for part-time faculty members, saying they receive the lowest wages in Ontario, according to The Windsor Star. Other issues include salary, teaching standards and concerns over the university’s attempts to introduce “instructional teachers,” who have less experience and, in many case, less-advanced degrees than the current faculty. The union believes such teachers would have a negative impact on teaching, research, and graduate programs. The faculty voted 96 percent in favor of today’s strike.

dispatches

"Pure maths be damned." The Washington Square News reports on the Courant Institute's ties (the Math department, specifically) to Wall Street, through fields like financial math and programs to train PhDs in the kind of mathematics valued by money managers. By the way, capitalism appears to be in crisis - though that didn't stop Yale's endowment from growing. At whose expense this time, we wonder...

(Wouldn't it be nice to have similar data on NYU...?

parker brothers meet baran and sweezy meet jackson lewis

All down Tillary street, down Jay street, down the Flatbush Avenue extension, lamp-posts are festooned with bright purple paeans to the newly-merged NYU-Polytechnic Institute, or, as the banners proclaim it, NYU-Poly. Except it's all in lowercase, and you can't really see the hyphen. So, as the most wise Noah observed when we both first noticed them, it looks like, and perhaps is ultoimately the case, that what Sexton's PR flacks are proclaiming is nyupoly, like monopoly, but putatively in the public service and now with 100% more purple and sketchy hugs.

Nyupoly. It's a ideology for growth - urban development, (real estate speculation, state entitlements for neoliberal corporate privatizers masquerading as 501c3,) university expansion (bust-buy-bust,) and it's a brand, as evinced by all those purple banners.

And so time moves on at NYU. We get mass emails describing graduate employees as "students on financial aid," blithely denying, erasing our labor. We get triumphalist updates on the coming venture in Abu Dhabi. Snide non-apologies for the constant meteoric increases in undergraduate tuition, and nary a word - at least to the graduate students thus far - about the administrative restructuring Sexton and Alfano decreed last year. Presumably that conversation, like all the others here, is "over;" the NYUpoly has spoken and the rest of us are consigned to wait and see what happens, or participate in some sham spectacle of empty gesticulations toward a mockery of democratic and collegial affairs, which have never really ruled in the university at all. So we wait, and we organize, and all around us the Nyupoly explodes outward. I cut my activist teeth, however ineffectual they were then, in high school, at the multitude of anti-police brutality marches in the wake of Louima's rape and Diallo's murder. "Whose Streets," we'd ask? The answer then was always "our streets," asserting a collective ownership of the city by people whose place in the disneyfied corporate amusement park NY was becoming was fundamentally under attack. I think we lost that fight, at least in NY, and I wonder if the answer to that question must not now be a far bleaker one.

(This post has been appended to since it was originally published.)

There's probably an essay to be written somewhere about what exactly is going on here. Academe? Hasids? Chimpanzees in Red Sox Jerseys? Hasids drumming? Grayscale flashbacks?

Alison Richard, universities, and social justice

As provost of Yale University for the first eight or nine years of Richard Levin's presidency, Alison Richard, an anthropologist by discipline, actively fought the attempts by Yale TAs and research assistants to win union recognititon and negotiate with the university. At worst, this was complicity with the multiple administrative harassment and intimidation campaigns which were promoted by the administration and often prosecuted by an all too willing tenured professoriat. At best we might imagine Richard a mere ideologue of a university with close relationships to "the marketplace" (scroll down) but to which collective organizations of employees were nonetheless anathema. (See pages 11-12.)

It shouldn't really surprise anyone, then, that Richard has recently come under fire for remarks asserting that the prosperity of universities depends in part on their autonomy from the demands of social justice movements.

The quality of what we provide and our capacity to attract talent are both at risk. Ironically, in my view one of the greatest risks is driven by the growing appreciation of the relevance of universities, in many ways so welcome: the problem is that the conception of relevance is often narrow while the fact of relevance encourages meddling. As institutions charged with education, research and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice. Responsive to and helping shape the national policy context, we need the independence and autonomy to chart our individual institutional courses, and to experiment.

Maybe Richard is right. Maybe the sort of "business-facing" institution she here asserts that Cambridge is can't afford to worry about such things, though not even Richard's former colleagues Richard Brodhead and Richard Levin would go so far in public - all that rhetoric about training leaders is, after all, an elitist neoliberal version of a theory of the university's role in promoting social justice, or at least "progress" in managerial and corporate terms. But really I think this invites us to do two things - one, to recoil at the "leadership" that universities like Yale are exporting all over the world in the form of academic administrators like Richard, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford, Susan Hockfield at M.I.T., Brodhead at Duke, etc., as well as in the form of politicians it trains - neoconservatives like Ashcroft and Bush, and neoliberals like the Clintons and so many others, and protofascist journalists of multiple generations. Two, i think we should take Richard's remarks as an occasion to reflect upon what new university we might bring to birth from the ashes of the old (campus,) what a university that is indeed an engine for promoting real social justice might look like, if such a thing is indeed possible (and I think it is.)

"This election is not about issues, This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates" is the new ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''