"financial aid" is an interesting term. On an undergraduate level, it often conceals a massive labor system of debt and exploitation - see the fourth chapter of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works, online here. (Doesn't mean we shouldn't absolutely be organizing for it, but we have to do so critically, understanding the fundamental inequalities it doesn't resolve.) At NYU in recent years, the term has also come to stand in and ideologically erase and deny the labor of contingent teachers and researchers, as NYU reorganizes its job structures in anticipation of the possibility of a new NLRB and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act.
No longer are we workers, now we are not even "graduate students who teach," but instead "students who recieve financial aid," not workers, but instead the overprivileged welfare queens of the academy, lucky to be here, lucky to be afforded the privilege of doing the "non-work" we are permitted to do.
This strategy on the part of the administration has material effects. This semester the administration has merged fellowship stipend checks and paychecks into the same system. For some reason this led them to put me on a direct deposit program i never authorized, and my last paycheck went to a bank account i don't have. What this ultimately means is that I haven't been paid for a month.
Apparently, we need a union.
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