This is the week of UCATS' no confidence vote.
Marty Lipton (and Cyrus Patell) didn't really like this Jeff Goodwin NYT op-ed
Some great comments by Andrew Ross in this hilarious NYU Local writeup of the faculty's celebration of their no-confidence vote.
The AAUP responds to the NYU admin's response to the vote
NYU is not transparent, a point Take Back NYU made many years ago
Tisch could be next.
Questions over the relationship between nontenure track faculty and governance have come to light in the wake of the vote
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
An extraordinary timeline and interview about the Zuccotti Park occupation and its afterlives with some of the Grupo Affect folks has just been published at stress FM and at the affect site. I find its insights into the composition, politics, and conflicts of the past year and a half to be invaluable ones. Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.
For some who showed up to these assemblies what was at stake was simply developing a broad and functioning New York City General Assembly, which at the time seemed a little more ambitious and potentially more radical than simply a failed “day of action,” or demonstration, which many of us expected September 17th to be. These early general assemblies were often pretty small, around 30-65 people each week, which in a city of over 8 million, is not much to speak of. Even in the week before, there wasn’t much optimism that people would actually show up. But of course people did. Some of the initial discussions in the assemblies before the occupation spun around tactics—like whether or not violence was proper, what violence was, etc. Some of us of course pushed for tactical diversity and for communications media that would not be centralized. And some of us did not like the “We are the 99%” slogan which would later become so popular.
Here you can already see, before the occupation even began, a number of contradictions and divergent perspectives. There were those treating the weekly assemblies as autonomous actions in their own right, which should be developed and expanded, and thought of as independent from any calls or dates which did not themselves originate from the assembly itself, or even from New York. And there were others who thought the call and projected date should be taken seriously, that they gave us something specific and material to organize around, which made the assemblies often feel more like planning meetings than an assembly, as such. This split, if you will, would continue during the occupation of Zuccotti Park, as the general assembly quickly became a forum to manage the specific details of daily life in the park, rather than a body to work towards an ongoing revolutionary movement in New York.
Another of the contradictions was that, as mentioned, the general assemblies were not very big, and thus could hardly be said to speak for the population of New York City, never mind the United States. In the end, the online organizing initiated by Adbusters perhaps did more to capture popular imagination, and inspire participation, than did these rather modest and often dysfunctional early assemblies ostensibly meant to organize the city. What this led to was that many of those who would come to occupy Zuccotti Park were not New Yorkers, they didn’t live here, didn’t work here, didn’t grow up here, and as such didn’t have many social or political connections outside of the park. They arrived in New York for Occupy Wall Street, the online campaign, without much awareness of past struggles in New York, experience organizing in the city, or the knowledge or capacity to really spread the movement to different areas of the city, or involve more of its population.
So, the different approaches to the function of the general assembly within the Occupy movement, as well as its participants’ relationship to its online and virtual mythology versus the material struggles and spaces of potential intervention in the city: these might be seen as some unresolved contradictions.
Adbusters’ call seemed to be inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and to a lesser extent the occupation of the kasbah in Tunis earlier that winter. These indefinite occupations in Egypt and Tunisia were the urban communes that came to signal the ongoing commitment to the insurrections which took place in these countries. The call to Occupy Wall Street was not seriously committed to attempting the kinds of insurrections we saw in Tunisia or Egypt, but rather it was like those occupations which took place earlier that spring across the Mediterranean in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Athens—more symbolic, populist expressions of “direct democracy,” as a response to austerity and crisis.
The occupation that began in New York on September 17th, as well as those that spread throughout the United States that fall, though they weren’t explicitly insurrectionary in intent, or in result, did come to represent a rupture in American politics. The experimentation that took place in the occupied parks and plazas—as well as around them at the actions, marches, protests, and rallies which emanated out of the parks, often spontaneously and uncontrollably—went far beyond what could be accomplished at a demonstration, mass mobilization, or even a riot. The occupations experimented with the participants’ social relationships, social reproduction, subjectivity, the temporality of protest, the distribution of food, clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, and other supplies, decision-making, self-organization, etc. For many this living in public space, collectively, became a kind of prefigurative politics, an enacting of the commune to be created in a revolutionary process.
Zuccotti Park is four blocks from Wall Street, and is across the street from the site of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t the first location chosen to occupy, as those were already gated off by police and private security the night before the occupation was to take place. Zuccotti Park remained open as a technicality, as New York’s public parks have gates and strongly enforced curfews, something which dates back to the late 1980s when the city was preparing for the gentrification to come. Public parks in New York often close at nighttime, 10 o’clock or midnight, but Zuccotti Park was privately owned by the building across the street. New York often makes deals with the developers of large skyscraper buildings where, in exchange for constructing so tall a building, they’re required to create some public space nearby. Zuccotti Park was one of these “privately-owned public spaces,” or POPS, which meant it was required to be open 24 hours a day, and that it was up to the private owner, and not the city or its police department, when it was closed. This was the legal loophole that led to the first few days of arrival for occupiers.
Friday, March 15, 2013
NO CONFIDENCE
The votes are in
Other divisions at NYU are considering holding their own no-confidence votes may now move forward with them. Prior to the vote, the school's board of trustees had publicly reaffirmed their support of Sexton, so the vote alone is unlikely to drive him out of office.
Andrew Ross, a vocal critic of Sexton and his policies, said he expects the struggle over the direction of the school will shift from faculty-against-president to faculty-against-trustees. "They represent the concentrated power of Wall Street," he said. "For us, I think that fight will be an opportunity to shine a light on the Trustees, which rarely happens."
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Not Confused.
A defender of the Sexton plan and of the man who authored it has surfaced, and it's Cyrus Patell, an associate dean of humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi and associate professor of English at NYUNY. I'd like to take some space here to engage his critique and note its omissions.
Patell begins his critique of the FASP line by questioning, whether, indeed, universities have ever been "fundamentally democratic institutions." It goes downhill from there, though, when Patell decides to defend the undemocratic hierarchies of the university through first dropping the H-bomb, naturalizing the perpetuity of both the institution and its administrative strata and thus putting forward a set of authoritative claims which no student, not even an 8th year PhD student, can ever make use of. The university belongs to its traditions, and its traditions belong to its administrators. Patell continues, buttressing his argument in favor of the hierarchical structure of university administration by confiding in his readers that he rarely learns things from his students, that knowledge transfer in his classrooms is mostly unidirectional. Freirean pedagogical objections and #nodads dismissed as "fashionable" nonsense, Patell affirms the value of the bloated administrative class of which he has recently become a member, however, he says, reluctantly. Sexton et al, Patell argues, are important because only they can perform the hard work of herding cats, of disciplining and directing the faculty. Sexton in particular, Patell writes, deserves praise both for creating the global network university that Patell helps to administrate, and for NYU's rapid expansion since Patell first arrived on campus in 1993 (though Sexton was president only for the last half of that time period.) Curiously, Patell puts forward this argument despite (in the comments) acknowledging that NYU's endowment continues to lag far behind the institutions it considers its peers, and, I mean, fuck endowments, but how can we read that and not interrogate the gross salaries of Sexton and the university's other administrators? Jack Lew's golden parachute alone could have more than paid for all of the lost wages of the fired and blacklisted GSOC strikers, many of whom came from Patell's department, and some of whom never worked for NYU again.
Others have written far better critiques of the global network university and the University Leadership Team's governance of it than I have room or time for here, but, in brief, the GNU looks, both in its rhetoric and in its political and economic operation, to many less like the beacon of global connection and interchange that Sexton champions and Patell endorses and more like a set of colonial outposts. This is still the case even if one sets aside the language with which Sexton described his brainchild for much of its planning stages - as an effort to "embrace the other," to transform the globalized NYU brand into "the university of the other," colonizing global alterity under the umbrella of the purple capital of neoliberal multiculturalism. I understand Sexton has been persuaded to de-emphasize this rhetoric in more recent communiques and speeches. At least, I haven't heard him use it in a few years. But the animating logic of the enterprise remains unchanged, as does its political economy, which rests upon massive donations from host institutions and states back to the twelfth floor of Bobst, a practice revealed by the aforelinked Zvika Krieger essay but revealed as not an outlier but indeed routine by this illuminating NYU Local report on the demise of Tisch Asia, the one international campus beyond the scope of the GNU. When Singaporean officials explored the possibility of saving the program by integrating it into other NYU global initiatives, Sexton responded by demanding a $40,000,000 donation "just to talk". This is not open exchange, it's boutique franchising, buoyed by NYU's own study-abroad outsourcing of the costs of educating students on its own campus and the lucrative and profoundly cynical windfall of shipping them across the globe but continuing to charge them New York rates, to impose New York levels of student debt. For if Patell lauds NYU's ascendance to the big leagues in the last two decades, he's mum on the university's concomitant rise in levels of student debt. That NYU generates more student debt than any other tax-exempt university in the US apparently isn't worth a mention in assessing the pros and cons of the university's administration. Those students from whom Patell tells us he rarely learns anything disagree.
And then there is the labor question again. Not only does the blog post not address at all the ongoing concerns about NYUAD's construction and staffing in a context infamous for abuses of migrant construction and service workers, it is also mum on the labor struggles which have been ongoing closer to 19 University Place for most of the last two decades, struggles over the casualization and precaritization of the university's teaching workforce, overwhelmingly composed, by contact hour, of adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants, and over the unionization of the latter, which, if you want to know more about, you've certainly come to the right blog. We don't talk nearly enough, at NYU, about the fact that our "campus" was the site of the longest strike in the history of the U.S. academic labor movement less than seven years ago, a strike many of us were involved in, in one way or another. Any account of Sexton's presidency which doesn't address his role as unionbuster seems woefully insufficient to me, however biased I may be in that regard. (I disavow the triumphalism and some of the politics of those earlier entries, but I'll have to write more about that later.)
If Patell is correct to note that the university has never been a democratic space, I take issue with his conclusions. We may not run it, we may not control it, but the university is ours. It exists because of our labor as contingent academics, (and because of the labor of people, like the migrant workers in the UAE, who will always be understood as the university's outside, as its other, whether or not megalomaniacal administrators like president Sexton choose to "embrace" them.) That the university has an undercommons, that it is a space of exploitation, of hierarchy, privilege, power, capital, is no argument for why it ought to continue as such. And it certainly ought not to. But what university, if any, we should bring to birth from the ashes of the old is a question which John Sexton can have no role in answering. We have had enough of him. If the university has never been a democratic space, the point is not to defend its future as a hierarchical engine of neoliberalism, privatization, gentrification, and empire, but instead to make it a site of a struggle which exceeds and escapes its boundaries.
Parts of the second paragraph have been rewritten for grammar/flow.
Patell begins his critique of the FASP line by questioning, whether, indeed, universities have ever been "fundamentally democratic institutions." It goes downhill from there, though, when Patell decides to defend the undemocratic hierarchies of the university through first dropping the H-bomb, naturalizing the perpetuity of both the institution and its administrative strata and thus putting forward a set of authoritative claims which no student, not even an 8th year PhD student, can ever make use of. The university belongs to its traditions, and its traditions belong to its administrators. Patell continues, buttressing his argument in favor of the hierarchical structure of university administration by confiding in his readers that he rarely learns things from his students, that knowledge transfer in his classrooms is mostly unidirectional. Freirean pedagogical objections and #nodads dismissed as "fashionable" nonsense, Patell affirms the value of the bloated administrative class of which he has recently become a member, however, he says, reluctantly. Sexton et al, Patell argues, are important because only they can perform the hard work of herding cats, of disciplining and directing the faculty. Sexton in particular, Patell writes, deserves praise both for creating the global network university that Patell helps to administrate, and for NYU's rapid expansion since Patell first arrived on campus in 1993 (though Sexton was president only for the last half of that time period.) Curiously, Patell puts forward this argument despite (in the comments) acknowledging that NYU's endowment continues to lag far behind the institutions it considers its peers, and, I mean, fuck endowments, but how can we read that and not interrogate the gross salaries of Sexton and the university's other administrators? Jack Lew's golden parachute alone could have more than paid for all of the lost wages of the fired and blacklisted GSOC strikers, many of whom came from Patell's department, and some of whom never worked for NYU again.
Others have written far better critiques of the global network university and the University Leadership Team's governance of it than I have room or time for here, but, in brief, the GNU looks, both in its rhetoric and in its political and economic operation, to many less like the beacon of global connection and interchange that Sexton champions and Patell endorses and more like a set of colonial outposts. This is still the case even if one sets aside the language with which Sexton described his brainchild for much of its planning stages - as an effort to "embrace the other," to transform the globalized NYU brand into "the university of the other," colonizing global alterity under the umbrella of the purple capital of neoliberal multiculturalism. I understand Sexton has been persuaded to de-emphasize this rhetoric in more recent communiques and speeches. At least, I haven't heard him use it in a few years. But the animating logic of the enterprise remains unchanged, as does its political economy, which rests upon massive donations from host institutions and states back to the twelfth floor of Bobst, a practice revealed by the aforelinked Zvika Krieger essay but revealed as not an outlier but indeed routine by this illuminating NYU Local report on the demise of Tisch Asia, the one international campus beyond the scope of the GNU. When Singaporean officials explored the possibility of saving the program by integrating it into other NYU global initiatives, Sexton responded by demanding a $40,000,000 donation "just to talk". This is not open exchange, it's boutique franchising, buoyed by NYU's own study-abroad outsourcing of the costs of educating students on its own campus and the lucrative and profoundly cynical windfall of shipping them across the globe but continuing to charge them New York rates, to impose New York levels of student debt. For if Patell lauds NYU's ascendance to the big leagues in the last two decades, he's mum on the university's concomitant rise in levels of student debt. That NYU generates more student debt than any other tax-exempt university in the US apparently isn't worth a mention in assessing the pros and cons of the university's administration. Those students from whom Patell tells us he rarely learns anything disagree.
And then there is the labor question again. Not only does the blog post not address at all the ongoing concerns about NYUAD's construction and staffing in a context infamous for abuses of migrant construction and service workers, it is also mum on the labor struggles which have been ongoing closer to 19 University Place for most of the last two decades, struggles over the casualization and precaritization of the university's teaching workforce, overwhelmingly composed, by contact hour, of adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants, and over the unionization of the latter, which, if you want to know more about, you've certainly come to the right blog. We don't talk nearly enough, at NYU, about the fact that our "campus" was the site of the longest strike in the history of the U.S. academic labor movement less than seven years ago, a strike many of us were involved in, in one way or another. Any account of Sexton's presidency which doesn't address his role as unionbuster seems woefully insufficient to me, however biased I may be in that regard. (I disavow the triumphalism and some of the politics of those earlier entries, but I'll have to write more about that later.)
If Patell is correct to note that the university has never been a democratic space, I take issue with his conclusions. We may not run it, we may not control it, but the university is ours. It exists because of our labor as contingent academics, (and because of the labor of people, like the migrant workers in the UAE, who will always be understood as the university's outside, as its other, whether or not megalomaniacal administrators like president Sexton choose to "embrace" them.) That the university has an undercommons, that it is a space of exploitation, of hierarchy, privilege, power, capital, is no argument for why it ought to continue as such. And it certainly ought not to. But what university, if any, we should bring to birth from the ashes of the old is a question which John Sexton can have no role in answering. We have had enough of him. If the university has never been a democratic space, the point is not to defend its future as a hierarchical engine of neoliberalism, privatization, gentrification, and empire, but instead to make it a site of a struggle which exceeds and escapes its boundaries.
Parts of the second paragraph have been rewritten for grammar/flow.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
It was never just the faculty
NYU Faculty Against The Sexton Plan report, via facebook, an exciting development. With unanimous consent, the executive committee of UCATS Local 3882, the union of NYU's clerical employees, has decided to institute a no confidence vote among its own membership. This move is an interesting rejoinder to notions of faculty governance which insist on the differentiation between the faculty and the mere employee as subjects of the university, a gesture of solidarity which also implies, rather forcefully, that if the contemporary university has any right to continue to exist, (and I think that's debatable) the precaritization and proletarianization of a large part of the teaching faculty makes new solidarities and connections between disparate groups of workers both possible and necessary. It also makes legible claims to governance from groups of workers whose claims to professionalism would often have gone unacknowledged by faculty and university administrators alike. A no confidence vote among a significant number of the faculty of the "heart" of NYU's liberal arts function would be a powerful statement. A simultaneous no confidence vote among clerical workers would be something entirely different.
NYU no confidence vote roundup, part II
Scrutiny of NYU’s lavish home purchases and loans for top
administrators and choice faculty is nothing new – the New York Times ran a lengthy story on the issue five years ago. But, as the no-confidence vote among NYU's Faculty of Arts and Science enters day 3, outrage over the perks the university offers to its highest paid administrators and a small stratum of highly compensated faculty is increasing, propelled in no small part by the gross inequities between the largess the University Leadership Team demonstrates toward its own membership and the steady abrogation of the power and living standards of a faculty hit hard by both the university's expansion and the ongoing casualization of its labor force. In understanding how the Sexton administration has structured gross inequalities into NYU's divisions of (academic) labor, this email from NYU Faculty Against The Sexton Plan is crucial. Linda Mills and Jess Benhabib, with whom GSOC members "conferred" in vain through the sham company union House of Delegates mechanism created by the administration during the strike, both made nearly half a million dollars in the 2010-11 fiscal year. Sexton made 1.5 million dollars a year. The dean of the medical school twice that - though presumably he lacks Sexton's eventual $800,000/yr pension. Meanwhile tenured faculty salaries average much less than half of Benhabib's and Mills', and the majority of NYU teaching, by contact hours, is performed by people like me - graduate student and adjunct instructors paid by the course, with no security whatsoever. When Sexton does bother teaching undergrads, as the NYUFASP communique helpfully notes, his salary works out to about $8800 more per hour, than those teaching at the bottom of the university's hierarchy.
And for the faculty, this president's regime has been one long top-down push toward the lowest of equality for all, so as to have a mass of teachers big and cheap enough to service the ever-growing mass of student "clients." Since he was appointed, we have seen a steady increase in the numbers of contingent faculty ---- clinical professors, adjuncts, graduate instructors ---- and, at the same time, a subtle drive to undercut, and break, the troublesome minority that is the tenured faculty. This drive has been apparent in the President's long refusal of shared governance (while claiming to support it), and his efforts to derail, and then discredit, this week's vote ---- to name but two examples out of many.
It is that ruthless and unthinking push to grow this university, whatever it may cost financially or academically, that has us pushing back this week ---- to save NYU's neighborhood, the city, and the university itself, from "2031"; to bring NYU's rampant global enterprise under rational control; and, at long last, to share the governance of this great university, so that our students are not just counted, but count most, and all faculty are duly honored and rewarded for it.
.jpg)
Monday, March 11, 2013
NYU No Confidence Vote Starts today
The NYU faculty no confidence vote, which begins today. The NYT has both a report with a damning quote from Andrew Ross:
And a video in which Sexton's attempt to both appear conciliatory and dodge any frank conversation about faculty grievances and the vote's implications backfires pretty spectacularly. Sexton's self-presentation here seems part of a larger effort to head off faculty discontent by claiming that things have already changed, that the administration recognizes past errors and is moving forward in the spirit of reconciliation. At the same time the administration finds itself pressed by the faculty to explain golden parachutes for union-busting ex-VP and new Treasury Secretary Jacob "Jack" Lew.
Hagiographic tumblrs (trigger warning: sketchy hugs) aside, scrutiny of Sexton's administration is becoming even more widespread than it was during our strike seven years ago. Here's Andrew Ross on the Fox Business channel, and here's Inside Higher Ed on faculty discontent with the demise of Tisch Asia and the administration of the Global Network University.
I'm in Albany, nursing a large burn on my arm - a grilled cheese accident. But i'll try to keep updating.
EDIT: Here's a direct link to the AAUP letter written and cosigned by Andrew Ross, Molly Nolan, Rebecca Karl, Marie Monaco, Anna McCarthy, and Rana Jaleel.
“He has a very evangelical sense of purpose,” said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis, “that does not extend beyond the concept that the university should be an entity of his own making.”
And a video in which Sexton's attempt to both appear conciliatory and dodge any frank conversation about faculty grievances and the vote's implications backfires pretty spectacularly. Sexton's self-presentation here seems part of a larger effort to head off faculty discontent by claiming that things have already changed, that the administration recognizes past errors and is moving forward in the spirit of reconciliation. At the same time the administration finds itself pressed by the faculty to explain golden parachutes for union-busting ex-VP and new Treasury Secretary Jacob "Jack" Lew.
Hagiographic tumblrs (trigger warning: sketchy hugs) aside, scrutiny of Sexton's administration is becoming even more widespread than it was during our strike seven years ago. Here's Andrew Ross on the Fox Business channel, and here's Inside Higher Ed on faculty discontent with the demise of Tisch Asia and the administration of the Global Network University.
I'm in Albany, nursing a large burn on my arm - a grilled cheese accident. But i'll try to keep updating.
EDIT: Here's a direct link to the AAUP letter written and cosigned by Andrew Ross, Molly Nolan, Rebecca Karl, Marie Monaco, Anna McCarthy, and Rana Jaleel.
"Regular employees"
As blogger and historian Angus Johnston notes, one of the most striking aspects of the Harvard email story is the way in which it exposes the university administration's different standards for faculty and "regular employees," a distinction which matters here because of university administrators' contention that the residential deans whose email accounts they combed trying to discover who was leaking information about a student cheating "scandal" were the latter rather than the former. That Harvard holds different standards of privacy and academic freedom for its noninstructional workers is not surprising. Even at a heavily unionized campus like Harvard's, the labor regimes of the contemporary university are highly stratified: mental over manual, tenured over nontenured over lecturer over precarious. What is interesting is the ways in which the division of labor is securitized, the way not having your employer search your email becomes a perk afforded only to a subset of those whose work the university valorizes as more than work, as what the president of my current institution has referred to as a "calling."
At every institution I've been at, students have organized with the presumption that administrators read our emails - there was one incident at Yale when the president's office contacted us about a space we had announced an action in and not reserved through proper channels that some of us were sure they could only have learned of through surveilling our communication. At NYU, GSOC has used email sparingly since the end of the strike, but much of what we have done has been over non-NYU email accounts. And this incident is reminiscent of the actions by NYU administrators during the 2005-2006 strike to use the proprietary instructional software Blackboard to determine which teaching assistants and language instructors were striking our classes and which faculty had moved their classes off campus in solidarity with the strike. So administrative surveillance isn't novel - even at Harvard. What's interesting is the ways in which Harvard's actions here expose a previously invisible faultline in the university's division of labor. It will be interesting to see what develops from this news and the reaction to it both on and off campus.
PS: If any NYU faculty read this blog, GET IT. (It being a Sextonless future.)
At every institution I've been at, students have organized with the presumption that administrators read our emails - there was one incident at Yale when the president's office contacted us about a space we had announced an action in and not reserved through proper channels that some of us were sure they could only have learned of through surveilling our communication. At NYU, GSOC has used email sparingly since the end of the strike, but much of what we have done has been over non-NYU email accounts. And this incident is reminiscent of the actions by NYU administrators during the 2005-2006 strike to use the proprietary instructional software Blackboard to determine which teaching assistants and language instructors were striking our classes and which faculty had moved their classes off campus in solidarity with the strike. So administrative surveillance isn't novel - even at Harvard. What's interesting is the ways in which Harvard's actions here expose a previously invisible faultline in the university's division of labor. It will be interesting to see what develops from this news and the reaction to it both on and off campus.
PS: If any NYU faculty read this blog, GET IT. (It being a Sextonless future.)
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
education in the streets
Ten years ago today, on the fourth day of a one week long strike of Yale food service, maintenance, clerical, technical, hospital cafeteria workers, and graduate employees, undergraduates set up blackboards and classrooms on College Street in downtown New Haven, along the university's boundary and just in front of the church where the unions' offices were situated (and remain today.) Somewhere around five hundred undergraduates showed up, in the middle of a blizzard, to join the picket lines of striking cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, secretaries, and teaching assistants in teaching each other about our collective struggles and simultaneously offering an alternative, constituent form of what education at the university could look like. Also, we completely shut down a busy campus thoroughfare in the middle of a snowstorm.
There's been a great deal of contempt on the radical left for symbolic activism, a contempt which yokes such tactics to representation, to postmodernity, to neoliberal multiculturalism. I'm increasingly sympathetic to these arguments, but the "Education in the Streets" action, created and, I think, named by my friend Abbey during a brainstorming session in her dormitory common room a few days before the strike began, was, for many of us who organized and lived through it, both a potent capstone to years of organizing and a promise of the ways in which our practices of solidarity and collectivity might rewrite our campus's neocolonial spatial practices and relations of domination. What made it a useful action was in part the disciplined organizing that brought five hundred undergraduates out to a picket line in a snowstorm during the height of midterms and kept hundreds more teaching assistants and thousands of service and clerical workers out on strike, in part the kinds of exchanges made possible by the format - workers and community activists and student radicals recast as teachers, and in part the expansive vision of another university, of another city, which those practices embodied. It wasn't an insurrectionary occupation, though we were planning one of those too (the university caved before we could do it,) but it wasn't "mere" representation either - and our refusal of representative politics shouldn't blind us to the ways in which representation and discourse mediate and structure the exercise of power. Anyway, that's partly why I'm thinking about it ten years later, this morning, even after all photographic traces seem to have vanished from the internet, and it's why I'll continue to think about both the action and the organizing that made it happen in the years to come.
Edit: I was wrong about the disappearing from the internet thing. Alek has saved a bunch of photos and posted them on facebook. Here's one from the "community" classroom. The woman standing before the board is New Haven community activist Bea Dozier-Taylor.
There's been a great deal of contempt on the radical left for symbolic activism, a contempt which yokes such tactics to representation, to postmodernity, to neoliberal multiculturalism. I'm increasingly sympathetic to these arguments, but the "Education in the Streets" action, created and, I think, named by my friend Abbey during a brainstorming session in her dormitory common room a few days before the strike began, was, for many of us who organized and lived through it, both a potent capstone to years of organizing and a promise of the ways in which our practices of solidarity and collectivity might rewrite our campus's neocolonial spatial practices and relations of domination. What made it a useful action was in part the disciplined organizing that brought five hundred undergraduates out to a picket line in a snowstorm during the height of midterms and kept hundreds more teaching assistants and thousands of service and clerical workers out on strike, in part the kinds of exchanges made possible by the format - workers and community activists and student radicals recast as teachers, and in part the expansive vision of another university, of another city, which those practices embodied. It wasn't an insurrectionary occupation, though we were planning one of those too (the university caved before we could do it,) but it wasn't "mere" representation either - and our refusal of representative politics shouldn't blind us to the ways in which representation and discourse mediate and structure the exercise of power. Anyway, that's partly why I'm thinking about it ten years later, this morning, even after all photographic traces seem to have vanished from the internet, and it's why I'll continue to think about both the action and the organizing that made it happen in the years to come.
Edit: I was wrong about the disappearing from the internet thing. Alek has saved a bunch of photos and posted them on facebook. Here's one from the "community" classroom. The woman standing before the board is New Haven community activist Bea Dozier-Taylor.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Some links.
1. First, everyone should read this intervention by some Michigan folks into the the politics of the general assembly-form. I really appreciate both the substance of the authors' critique, ("Ultimately the long, drawn out, romantically declarative GA felt like a fetishistic performance of what we imagined politics to be") and the way in which they raise it, which I think provides a sympathetic but also rigorously critical account of what kinds of political imaginary is at work in the general assembly and the role it was understood to play by many participants in the post 9/17/2011 occupy movement. I'm particularly appreciative of the position of critical solidarity the authors chart, which strikes me as a less abstracted (and certainly more charitable) but equally valuable critique of the GA to that found in, say, The Coming Insurrection. I do have a couple criticisms of the piece, neither of which pertain to the four hypotheses which constitute the main argumentative thrust of the article and which are, I think, entirely correct. First, as someone who spent most of the fall of 2011 hanging around Occupy Boston GAs, I think the authors are a bit too quick to let the large urban GAs off the hook in drawing an early contrast between the Zuccotti Park GAs and those in smaller and more intimate locales such as university campuses. As the authors themselves note, neither “better facilitation” nor “bigger GAs” would have changed the political valence of the Occupy model." Second, the article concludes with some more general conclusions on campus organizing. I think there's much to agree with here, especially the insistence that the university is a "trap" which our struggles must escape. But, for the moment, the authors cast the student as the privileged subject of radical organizing. There may be sociological evidence for this as a demographic reality, (fuck if I know) but I think it forecloses some escape routes by unintentionally erasing the other political subjects of the university and/or positing them as secondary to the students' struggle, to be organized by the students at a later date once the students have organized themselves. Without fetishizing trade unionism I would like to note that noninstructional university workers and other members of the "communities that surround us" have their own histories of struggle against and beyond the university we need to learn more from. Nevertheless I think this reflection and its hypotheses are exciting and I.m definitely looking forward to seeing what conversations and/or occupations follow them.
2. Another must-read: Prima Porta on austerity and/as the crisis of the social reproduction of the wage relation
The fight against austerity can only go in one direction: towards supplying ourselves with the materials and tools necessary for living together, reproducing ourselves as an ensemble: a commune. At the very least, we might start by rejecting the model of the nuclear family tout court - personally, but also politically (in this sense, queer theory and communization theory align on the question of the family). Patriarchy is at issue here, but is not the only issue; the persistence of the family-form has long served to atomize and contain proletarian communities, branding the inclination to socialize as a leisure activity without political standing and applying the mold of the nuclear family as a means of disciplining the poor, preventing extended families and expanded societies from acquiring economic validity. It is therefore not enough to merely laud promiscuity or polyamory; we must also seek to demolish the economic priority of the family-form, replacing it with the commune-form. This means politicizing the decision to separate into isolated families, agitating to subvert the reproductive importance of the heterosexual couple. Practices of communist child-rearing are in order, and also of communist sexuality; we will not find them in utopian experiments, however, but rather in political activity contra capital. There can be no avoidance of anti-austerity struggles, in other words; but only when we refuse austerity in the name of no future will emancipation be possible in the here and now.
3. Darwin Bond-Graham on the University of California's role in Monsanto's privatization of agriculture
4. Princeton's suppressed a survey of female students in which 1 in 6 reported being raped during their time at the university. Rape is notoriously underrated on campuses, and Princeton is neither the only nor the first institution to "juke the stats" in such a manner. I am not defending Princeton. Princeton needs to be communized. Let's all dance in the ruins of its eating clubs. Etc. But the methodical disappearing of sexual violence by university administrations seems to be a pandemic condition rather than an isolated or egregious incident. So, fuck them all.
5. David Price and Marshall Sahlins on Chagnon, military research, and the National Academy of Sciences.
6. nepotism here: my brother's band Krallice, IIIIIIII (Acheron, Brooklyn, 3.2.2013)
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Lucille Dickess, 1934-2013
There's a great tribute to Lucille Dickess, the first president of HERE Local 34, Yale's Clerical and Technical worker union, up at the New Haven Independent today. Dickess died last week. After voting no on two earlier organizing campaigns (by the OPEIU and District 65), and scabbing during local 35's long strikes in the 1970s, Dickess, a registrar in Yale's department of Geology and Geophysics, became a rank and file leader of an organizing drive which emphasized constant, one on one, grassroots organizing and worker participation, leadership, and power. As an undergraduate during the long 2001-2003 contract fight, I met Dickess several times and saw her talk about her experiences at panels and at strategy meetings. She was always profoundly supportive of us undergraduate radicals, even half a decade after her retirement from the university. In late August 2003, Dickess and seven members of the Yale Union Retirees Association occupied the offices of the university's million-dollar-a-year investment guru, David Swensen, to demand information about the university's pension fund and why Yale hadn't contributed to it in two years. On the first afternoon of what became an overnight occupation, kickstarting the second of two strikes that year, several of us entered the building with a bag full of sandwiches and pepsis for the occupiers. They were confiscated at Swenson's office by rentacops who, comically, accused us of smuggling contraband, and demanded to inspect the sandwiches, which probably never made it to their intended recipients. But in addition to the sandwich inspectors, we also found Lucille, who had left the occupation to use the bathroom and was brilliantly and adeptly working the rentacops to gain re-entry back into the room where the other retirees had hunkered down. I was impressed with Lucille's bravery - there were, and are, a lot of very brave people in the federation of hospital and university employees - but also with the nonchalance with which Lucille dealt with the intimidating and obnoxious presence of the university's security, and her unshakeable commitment to continuing the occupation of Swensen's office until he agreed to a meeting.
Lucille helped to build and spent decades fighting for a union that has played a pretty formative role in my political and intellectual life, and in that of this blog. Her dedication and ability as an organizer have served as a model for me for almost a decade, and I've always been in awe of the work that she and her co-workers did to create what Jay Driskell (on Facebook) termed, appropriately and powerfully, "the union that created me." So, thank you, Lucille Dickess. You won't be forgotten.
Lucille helped to build and spent decades fighting for a union that has played a pretty formative role in my political and intellectual life, and in that of this blog. Her dedication and ability as an organizer have served as a model for me for almost a decade, and I've always been in awe of the work that she and her co-workers did to create what Jay Driskell (on Facebook) termed, appropriately and powerfully, "the union that created me." So, thank you, Lucille Dickess. You won't be forgotten.
 |
| Excerpt of transcript of the episode of Phil Donahue's daytime talk show filmed at Yale during the 1984 Clerical and Technical workers' strike. Lucille Dickess faced off against University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. |
Friday, March 1, 2013
It seems that while we were all worrying about the DOD, Yale Psychiatrist Charles Morgan was already helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution with its own lengthy history in New Haven, to practice interrogation tactics on New Haven's growing Colombian immigrant population.
EDIT: Yale responds by disavowing involvement in Morgan's private research, of course.
Local immigrant advocates like Kica Matos are more skeptical of Morgan’s use of New Haven immigrants for terrorism-related or military research. Matos, a longtime Fair Haven-based immigrant rights activist, said she and fellow organizers are gearing up a campaign to urge local Latino immigrants not to participate in Morgan’s research.
Matos said Morgan’s current study at the Gold building “troubles” her because it racially profiles “vulnerable communities of color.” She also questioned the ultimate purpose of the research into how to question and assess responses from foreign-born Latinos.
“Interrogations are inherently coercive,” said Matos, the director of immigrant rights & racial justice for the national Center for Community Change. “The FBI is not a friend of communities of color. They have a long history of engaging in the most subversive and devious engagement with communities of color.COINTELPRO is an example.”
EDIT: Yale responds by disavowing involvement in Morgan's private research, of course.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)