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.