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.)
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