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.