It's been a pretty rough week.  I sat through one of the most difficult meetings I've ever been party to.  That NYT article I shouldn't talk about here.  I have some difficult stuff going on in my family right now.  Two nyu undergrad activists were attacked by the cops and arrested the other night at an impromptu solidarity action with the incredible mobilizations across the UC system.  One of those arrested was a former student.  I hear a certain law student anarchist friend got hit with a police baton in Berkeley.   I got stuck in an elevator with about fifteen other people.  Actually that was pretty fun.  Etc.

I feel a bit better today, excited about organizing possibilities albeit mostly ones outside of my current comfort zone, and excited about my research and its political possibilities and talking a bit about them hopefully at the Minnesota conference in April.  I'm excited about the movements folks are building, the actions folks are taking in CA even if the regents just voted to up tuition by 32% in the next two years, which is obscene even by NYU standards, which are themselves obscene.

What is taking place there, and in Bern, and in Austria, is incredible despite the police repression and the neoliberal state's unflinching acceleration of its privatization/privation engine.  Another university isn't just possible, it's being made on the streets and in the occupied spaces of these movements every day.

But what about those whom the university's discursive practices and regimes of looking cast to its "margins?"  Specifically I am thinking - a more urgent question for the elite private universities, perhaps, than those which can still claim to belong to the public in however extraordinarily attenuated a manner and however attenuated and circumscribed a "public" - and when we say public we are never talking about the commons - about the service labor that makes possible the acts more traditionally associated with the "work of the university," the clerical and technical, service, maintenance, culinary and caring labor that supports the teaching, research, study and policing, the administration and investment and gentrification and enclosure, all the many things that universities do.  In california the UPTE and the UAW are on strike too, and some of the occupations are directly challenging worker firings, I know, but I worry about the extent to which student movement rhetorics marginalize and exclude such workers as subjects of the university.  But maybe too much time in grad school has led me to privilege word over deed, when what we should be paying attention to is not rhetoric but tactics and strategy and action, at the very least what's said in organizing conversations and in strategy meetings rather than in communiques and newspaper articles?  In New York, though, such concerns seem entirely absent from what some anarchists are doing.  Which is ok, I support them anyway, even as I wanna engage them critically, as others have done and continue to do, on their racial politics and anarchohipster exclusions and ennui and hypermasculinism.  Because I believe an organizing conversation can be as transformative and perhaps even moreso as/than a building occupation (and i am all about building occupations) and i believe a wider understanding of what the university is, who is the university, and what the university does, makes for a more radical set of questions and goals than those currently being put forward in some circles.  That's the kernel of the paper i want to give in MN, I think.

Anyway, as I get deeper into my research, I'll try to blog here more regularly.  I missed the GEO Strike entirely, and I'm not really providing the coverage of the UC struggles the title of this blog suggests I should be.  But i was about to quit blogging altogether before Eli suggested the group blogging experiment, and I think i still have blogging fatigue from four years ago, and I'm going to try to make this a useful space for me and for folks who are still reading this thing anyway.