occupy texas

This week has seen a wave of building occupations at universities over a range of issues - the actions against cuts in the cal state system, and the sit-ins at Emory, William and Mary, and Tulane against the food service subcontractor Sodexo and for better working conditions for campus workers, as well as the occupation at Rutgers against sweatshop licensing, and at Madison against the Scott Walker and University Admin-backed privatization scheme that would separate the Madison campus of UW from the rest of the system. They are now joined by students at UT Austin. The photo of the occupiers in the president's office is fairly amazing, in that ludic reappropriation/recuperation of the space of the neoliberal university kind of way. I'm inspired by these movements and by the way they have disrupted the smooth functioning of the university, foregrounded questions of labor and privatization, and brought the fight to the centers of administrative control of the university. Those of us who are fighting to transform (or destroy and rebuild/reconstitute) spaces of knowledge production should be paying attention to these occupations. And those of us in the graduate employee labor movement in particular ought to be thinking about the lessons we can take from both these student struggles and those of our counterparts in Madison's TAA, who've played a central a role in the struggle against Scott Walker's shock doctrine austerity measures and attacks on public employees. I'm sorry this blog has been so nonexistent lately. The subjects it's concerned with certainly have not been. So i'm going to try to blog a bit more - though not simply for the sake of blogging. I'll write when there's reason to, and new posts will go up here, at the new home of Weapon of Class Instruction, now with a 39% more relevant URL. I'll probably delete the old blog within the next few weeks, but for now I'm leaving it up so folks can switch their RSS readers and/or browser bookmarks

Not unrelatedly, this is upsetting as hell.