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.