convenient abjection?

In a rather craven and transparent move, the NYU administration is attempting to 'disown' and thus disqualify the protesters by branding them as outside agitators.

Take Back N.Y.U. has been a vocal presence on campus for the last few years, said Lynne Brown, the senior vice president for university relations. Ms. Brown said that she believed only about half of the protesters were from N.Y.U. and that the rest probably included students from the New School, which had its own student occupation in December during protests over the school’s embattled president, Bob Kerrey.

Ms. Brown said the university will allow the students to remain in the cafeteria through the night and will give them access to restrooms.

The notion that NYU, a "private university in the public service" is only accountable to those who pay tuition to it, its "customers," if we are willing to traffic in the neoliberal frame which has governed the institution for well over a decade now is not only specious but indeed evinces the logics of administration and governance of which Sexton fancies himself the greatest ideologue and his administration the zenith. (Disclaimer: i couldn't sleep last night for the second night in a roaw, so i am not sure if anything i'm writing makes any sense.) This is the logic of the university against which the folks in the cafeteria are actively in revolt.

That said, there were folks from CUNY and the New School and Columbia there last night, mostly, i suspect, on the outside, but the occupation is not the work of "outside agitators," arising instead from very real antagonisms and structural conditions produced by seven years of rapid tuition hikes, administrative fiats, questionable investments, and imperial hugs. That the occupiers have declared solidarity with comrades in the UK, Greece, Italy, Rochester, and on fifth avenue in no way exculpates the NYU University Leadership Team for its venal neoliberalism, its arrogant attacks against the academic and urban commons, and its evangelical fervor for the bottom line above all else, that is, the superexploitation of precarious and transient labor in the form of undergraduate work study, graduate employees, adjuncts, and postdocs, not ot mention migrant construction labor in Abu Dhabi, etc. This occupation, as VP brown would realize if she knew any of the students who are behind the barricades, is very much in and of NYU even as it participates in a larger transnational conversation about the spatial politics of the global university and the future of the city.