On momentum

This afternoon John Sexton sent an email to the entire NYU 'community.'  It is a curious email.  In it, Sexton boasts of having increased the "average scholarship grant from 34% of tuition to 55% of tuition," and details the ongoing efforts to raise $1 billion dollars for undergraduate financial aid.  Now, a %21 increase in financial aid would indeed by a good thing, if tuition itself had not increased by more than thirty percent over the same period.  For the 2013-14 year, NYU has estimated that tuition and fees, health insurance, and room and board all add up to a cost of over 72,000.  As such it's really not that much of a surprise that NYU generates massive levels of student debt - the most of any university with more than 10,000 students, says the Wall Street Journal,  Because NYU has so many students, this means it is also the tax-exempt school which generates more aggregate student debt than any other such institution in the U.S. (That doesn't include U of Phoenix or Nova Southeastern, which have gotten rich in part by consuming GI Bill money and spitting out degreeless veterans or veterans with worthless degrees.)  In his claim, then, that he is "calling our community together – students, faculty, administrators, alumni, Trustees – and re-sharpening our focus on financial aid and student debt," the JSex doth protest too much.

Indeed both of the two initiatives that the email actually describes - a "Finish Line" grant program to reduce debt by as much as $5,000 and a "Global Pathways Scholarship" program (GPS!  GET IT?) to defray costs of studying abroad by as much as $4000 are at best purely cosmetic.  NYU student debt is often far higher than its median $30,000, a figure likely deflated by the large number of very wealthy students whose parents bankroll their education, and the difference between $80,000 and $75,000 is pretty small in the scheme of things.  At worst they are cynical ploys, PR stunts attempting to rebrand NYU as debt conscious and concerned about students' welfare in contrast to Sexton's earlier strategy of telling overburdened students to consider CUNY - a move some students brilliantly parodied several years ago, and as a defense against the critiques made by groups like NYUFASP and SAASP and, before them, Take Back NYU and the Tuition Reform Action Coalition.  The GPS logic is particularly flimsy.  NYU makes large amounts of money sending students abroad while charging them New York-equivalent tuition and board, a practice it intends, as Sexton notes in his email, to expand further.  The GPS is less a charitable attempt at providing students with an opportunity to defray the costs of lost wages than it is a fairly crude spatial fix.

There are steps NYU could take to alleviate debt burdens.  President Sexton could sell the Fire Island bungalow that student debt paid for and donate the money to the financial aid fund.  He could throw in the next three years of his $1.5 million salary and whatever obscene amount of money NYU plans to pay him each month after he steps down in 2016.  These would be reformist gestures, of course.  They would never address the structural questions which have made the contemporary university into a debt vampire, an agent of racial capitalism, grown engorged from the contingent labor of so many adjuncts and temps and subcontracted workers across its global network, flush with oil money and grand plans.  But Sexton could take these steps tomorrow.  He will not in part because he does not give a shit about students in debt except to the extent that said debt keeps him in bungalows and other sundry real estate holdings, and it makes him look bad.  It threatens his self-crafted image as the avuncular cosmopolitan liberal subject of a new global order structured by the globalization of university neoliberalism which privileges NYU's commodification of alterity and geographic urban cartographic non-contiguity.  Back before Abu Dhabi, Sexton had a name for this practice, "embracing the other," a term which placed his own well-known predilection for granting and demanding hugs from students at the center of a development-oriented diplomacy, the object of which was, through the embrace of difference, to make NYU the "university of the other" for the 21st century.  At the heart of that vision, making it possible, was the labor of south and southeast asian guestworkers building the emirati campus, student debtors working twenty or thirty hours each week trying to stay afloat, de-unionized graduate employees, exploited adjuncts, clerical workers fending off demanded contractual takebacks, school of continuing and professional studies students funneling money down the for-profit drain to help finance John Sexton's air travel between New York and Abu Dhabi to instruct grateful colonials about the wonders of god and baseball.

If there is any value in this latest missive, it is perhaps the evidence that several years of increasing scrutiny of NYU debt and increasing militancy of NYU debtors and their allies have the administration on the defensive.  Our move now.