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.

The faculty's discontent, reports the Washington Square News, is not limited to the FAS.  Following up on the 39 departmental resolutions against the Sexton Plan passed last year in departments as diverse as Steinhardt's Administration, Leadership, and Technology and the Stern School of Business, a broad conversation about university governance is beginning in Steinhardt.  Even the generally conservative, pro-"Jsex" editorial board of the Washington Square News expresses grave reservations about the administration's global ambitions.