Just before noon today, the NYU administration, in a strategy built entirely upon lies and fear, summoned the negotiators under the pretense that it had come in good faith, but instead secluded them from the other occupiers and told everyone they were suspended, a group which included friends and former students of mine. Then the security guards rushed the Kimmel Marketplace, and it was over. (What better site for an occupation at a university so explicitly ruled by neoliberal logics of profit maximalization, privatization of public space and resources, and ruthless disciplinary repression of workers and other movements?)
A couple scattered thoughts as I try now to focus on my dissertation proposal. First, this outcome has the potential to be extremely demobilizing, which is certainly what NYU intends. Let's not let this happen. Too many people put too much on the line to let this be anything other than a beginning, a point from which to stage new struggles to transform the university into a space of justice and democracy rather than the finanicalization of immaterial and service labor, the accumulation of cognitive and other capital. NYU is trying to suspend and unspecified number of protesters and evict and ban them from its residence halls. The university is trying to forclose upon its future, to eat, as the old New Left would have put it, its young. So I think a task for those of us who share with those who went in a vision for a transformed university is to develop strategies for countering these attacks and moving forward, building stronger movements and expanding our reach and our demands.
"2,4,6,8: John Sexton is an asshole"
"3,5,7,9: Where's my fucking contract?"
- psychology graduate student, GSOC strike, 2005-2006
hi zach,
ReplyDeleteeli from uchicago (and from rethinking the university) here. just wanted to say i (re?)discovered your blog the other day and have greatly enjoyed reading it lately. partly just for following NYU politics (we at Chicago are all hoping that you, or Brown, will be the test case for Obama's new, presumably more grad-labor-friendly NLRB) and partly to have some sense of solidarity with other campus labor organizers.
is your research about universities? i got that impression from looking you up on the nyu american studies webpage. anyway, mine is; i'd be interested in comparing notes on that sometime!
solidarity, eli
(ps i heard from someone who was at the New School that it was really not very successful in terms of concrete goals reached. sounds like the admin mostly made vague promises -- and, of course, kerrey didn't resign. thoughts on that?)
Hi Eli,
ReplyDeleteI read your blog frequently and enjoy it a great deal. I'm writing, i think, on the history of service workers at U.S. universities between 1945 and the present, thinking about the expansion and restructuring of american higher education in relation to the management of service work and the movements formed by service workers as part of the history of the transformation of the university pre and post bayh-dole. I'm also trying to historicize the place of service labor in the spatial logic of urban universities' relationships with their host cities and the emergence of the university-hospital city in the wake of deindustrialization.
My sense of the New School Occupation (and there is heated debate among folks who were inside -- i was not) is that they won everything but the first two demands (Kerrey and Murtha out.) At the time, it did seem to me as an observer that what had been won at the very least greatly embarrassed and further destabilized kerrey's presidency and was difficult to see as anything other than a victory even if it was not so complete a victory as some might have hoped. I thought it seemed best to understand it as a springboard from which to launch further organizing than as some kind of overdetermined tactical orgasm after which there could be nothing else. but again, I wasn't involved in organizing the occupation or the very heated conversations which took place on the inside. We'll see what organizing goes into and what comes out of the recently announced April 1st deadline.
The NYU Admin's response was obviously much more vicious than the New School. Sexton has the faculty crushed under his heel to a far greater extent than Kerrey, obviously, and among many undergraduates there's a deep internalization of the neoliberal logics of privilege in the amusement park city. That said, support for the occupation and its demands was far greater here than is being reported and numerous conversations are already taking place regarding how to move forward and expand the fight, both among the occupiers and among folks who are in solidarity with them.
I was going to submit an abstract on the history of the university building occupation in the U.S. to reworking the university, but i got too overhwlmed by organizing work and other research. I still want to write it, though.
Also, I am not making some kind of gradualist argument against occupations with broad, radical demands or suggesting that the new school occupation should or shouldn't have ended before or after it did. I do think that we ought not to fetishize the occupation as a tactic and instead understand it within contexts of strategic organizing. The Take Back NYU folks did this and from what i understand, so did the various factions at the New School. I am all for occupations but the chorus of "radical" voices that wants to make them the be all end all of radical movements and understands them as entirely spontaneous and utterly removed from all contexts, terming long-duree campaigns reformist liberalism doesn't really succeed in offering a persuasive understanding of the anatomy of social struggles.
ReplyDeleteback to the diss proposal...
hey zach,
ReplyDeleteyour project about service work in universities sounds awesome! i've been hearing for a while that the proportion of non-academic staff at research universities has expanded enormously in relation to faculty -- i think this has a lot to do with science lab personnel, new student services, new administrative departments, not really sure how it relates to service workers in the sense of food service/maintenance/custodial stuff. do you have numbers on that stuff? i've been wondering where to find that out. and how do you define "service workers"? are there convergences between white and blue-collar service work in universities, given (ostensibly increasing) consumerist attitudes towards education, and adjuncts/TAs with poor working conditions?
would love to hear more about how you think about academic space too -- been thinking about that on my blog without getting anywhere terribly useful. about univ-hospital and community relations, are you following the controversy about our hospitals? during michelle obama's term as VP for community affairs, they instituted policies making it harder for poor people to get treatment at the ER. This may violate federal law and supposedly there may be congressional investigations...
About the occupations: yeah, I was surprised that the NYU response was so brutal. I thought that those people had kind of decided after 1969, or Kent State or something, that beating up the college students was really bad publicity. Do you think that somewhere there are manuals or administrative guidelines for dealing with student protests? It's hard to tell how calculated these responses are. And, obviously, I agree with you about occupation being one tactic among others, whose utility varies with context. I guess my feeling about the neo-SDS folks who always want the most radical rhetoric and action is that they often have a poor grasp of how to do outreach to non-radicals who might be won over...
Thanks. I'm including clerical and technical workers and (blue collar) hospital workers as "service" along with maintenance and custodial and food service etc, mostly because the unspoken but incredibly strong influence on the project is the movement at Yale, which has articulated all those elements (and graduate employees, who i'm probably not going to deal with at all) together so well. I'm shying away from looking at academic labor movements, for the most part, because I think so much of the critical literature on universities deals with instructional labor to the exclusion of of all the other work universities do, and i wanted to think about service work in relation to broader regional labor markets, to the racialized, gendered, and, for lack of a better term, "classed" space of the campus, and about and the commodification of affective, emotional, and other forms of immaterial labor.
ReplyDeleteMy sense is that a lot of the non-academic staff increase has been middle and lower management as well as lab personnel and, of course, the new frontiers of superexploited undergrad labor that Marc Bousquet writes about. I don't have numbers on that off hand, though I've heard or seen some at specific institutions, which may or may not pertain specifically as much to the rhythms of collective bargaining agreements and cyclical layoffs as to broader trends across multiple institutions.
NYU's so deterritorialized that I haven't been in a frame to do much thinking about space lately, except to see the university as fractal urban neocolonialism spreading what one NYU spokesperson called its "tendrils" across the river and across the globe with reckless and evangelical zeal, particularly as far as NYU Abu Dhabi is concerned. This is obviously really simplistic and i need to go read some Lefevre or something.
I hadn't been following the U of Chicago hospital stuff, but i want to find out more - Chicago is one of the schools I'm interested in writing about given its location and its history, and that sounds like a familiar story in terms of how urban university hospitals operate.
The NYU occupation wasn't Kent State, but tensions between the protesters and the cops and security guards became heightened Thursday night and NYU just let hostilities build because they knew it strengthened their hand when it came time to pull people out. I'm particularly struck by the fact that they (illegally, we assume,) called students' parents to alert them to the fact that their (adult) children were occupying the building and promised negotiations as a ploy to detain the negotiators and isolate them from the rest of the protesters while they stormed the space. The FERPA/in loco parentis questions are interesting.
What is your research focusing on? The gender/space stuff on the blog has been really great.
Yeah, it's funny about NYU being deterritorialized -- when I was in NYC in January, I was intermittently trying to take pictures of university campuses, but when I got to NYU, I was completely stymied by the problem of figuring out what visually to take pictures of, because the boundaries of academic space there seemed so unclear. Also, when I was in front of Bobst Lib, there were a lot of security guards who kind of made me feel nervous about standing on the sidewalk photographing NYU buildings. Though they didn't actually say anything and I suppose it might have been fine...
ReplyDeletei'll send you the next good thing i come across on our hospitals -- is that really a familiar story, trying to exclude the poor from urban univ. hospitals? where else has that happened?
anyway, my research is supposed to be about the relationship between philosophy and university politics in (contemporary) France -- I guess you could say it's about the convergence of leftist/marxist philosophical radicalism, French Republican state/official philosophy, academic everyday life, the ongoing (neoliberal) university reforms in France, and different kinds of political (dis)engagement. I'm proposing futures as a guiding theme (am now working on my diss. proposal, like you I gather), since there's a lot of anxiety about the future in France, at individual and disciplinary and institutional and national levels -- anxieties about getting jobs, anxieties about maintaining French national distinction, etc. Anyway on an empirical level it's going to be an ethnographic study of two philosophy departments, one with a leftist heritage and another that's importing anglo-american (relatively apolitical) analytic philosophy into France. With a bit of supplemental research into national discourses on academic politics, teacher and student unions, and the like.
ok, back to work...
Bobst Library is a very strange place, where librarians of radical labor archives walk up a flight to share private elevators with union-busting administrators and debt-burdened undergraduates camp out in the sub basements.
ReplyDeleteThere was a series of articles on medical debt collection practices in the Wall Street Journal about six years ago which was spurred on in part by work that SEIU researchers did on Yale-New Haven hospital's predatory debt collection practices and its panopoly of liens on New Haven area homes. It turned out a lot of debtors were hospital workers who couldn't afford health care because of their non-union unaffordable health care coverage. The WSJ series looked at hospitals all over the country though, not just in Connecticut. Not exclusion so much as debt peonage, but the effect is similar.
Sounds like a fascinating project and like the combination of the ethnographic component with the braoder social and cultural analysis will be really valuable in thinking about disciplinary formation and politics.
NYU has a superstar analytic philosophy department whose faculty were among the most actively engaged in the anti-union campaign leading up to and during the strike. Your project sounds like it could speak to the politics at hand in interesting ways...
I forgot to ask - how are things going with GSU? What are you guys up to? You can email me off blog at zachsw at gmail dot com if you want.
back to grading...
hey--sorry, this is off-topic. Zach, I'm trying to find take a slot for me on a confirmed panel at Left Forum (Pace University, Saturday afternoon April 17-19), topic class contradictions in the u. The organizer loves the idea of one (or two) folks from NYU-GSOC (perhaps someone from TakeBack as well) taking the slot. I've tried to write Rana, but perhaps it was the wrong email? Anyway--even if none of you are interested, it'd be great to know either way so I can ask someone else. Marc Bousquet, pmbousquet AT gmail Solidarity, M
ReplyDelete