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.

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.

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.

NYU No Confidence Vote Starts today

The NYU faculty no confidence vote, which begins today.  The NYT has both a report with a damning quote from Andrew Ross:

“He has a very evangelical sense of purpose,” said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis, “that does not extend beyond the concept that the university should be an entity of his own making.”

And a video in which Sexton's attempt to both appear conciliatory and dodge any frank conversation about faculty grievances and the vote's implications backfires pretty spectacularly.  Sexton's self-presentation here seems part of a larger effort to head off faculty discontent by claiming that things have already changed, that the administration recognizes past errors and is moving forward in the spirit of reconciliation.  At the same time the administration finds itself pressed by the faculty to explain golden parachutes for union-busting ex-VP and new Treasury Secretary Jacob "Jack" Lew.

Hagiographic tumblrs (trigger warning: sketchy hugs) aside, scrutiny of Sexton's administration is becoming even more widespread than it was during our strike seven years ago.  Here's Andrew Ross on the Fox Business channel, and here's Inside Higher Ed on faculty discontent with the demise of Tisch Asia and the administration of the Global Network University.

I'm in Albany, nursing a large burn on my arm - a grilled cheese accident.  But i'll try to keep updating.

EDIT: Here's a direct link to the AAUP letter written and cosigned by Andrew Ross, Molly Nolan, Rebecca Karl, Marie Monaco, Anna McCarthy, and Rana Jaleel.

"Public reports stating otherwise are premature and based on speculation and incomplete information."

Yesterday I argued that the new partnership between Yale and the defense department ought to be read through the historical lens of the university's relationship with the state over the course of the last sixty years and the changing alchemy of the colonial relationship between post-industrial town and globalized gown.  Today, responding to media furor over reports of the new center's intentions to test interrogation on the minds and bodies of New Haven's immigrant population, Yale spokesperson (and former Eidelson nemesis) Tom Conroy puts forth this very history as an argument for why critics should shut up and trust the university's administration.

Volunteer interviewees would be selected from diverse ethnic groups who would be protected by oversight from Yale's Human Research Protection Program. Research would be conducted in a manner consistent with all other research at Yale and with the expectation that findings would be reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In short, the center, if established, would be designed in the best traditions of Yale research and scholarship.

But, as I suggested in my post yesterday, these traditions are themselves at issue.  How rigorously  and on what criteria the university's human subjects review board will screen the Department of Defense's initiatives remains a serious issue, but, as Batraville and Lew noted in their op-ed, there are larger issues at work than how the university and military find uses for poor and working class New Haveners.  We also have to ask why - what are the politics of this alliance, on both a global and metropolitan scale?  What are the forms of coloniality Yale and the DOD trace and reinscribe?  How does this center demonstrate continuities with and where does it break from the long history of the university's partnerships with the military and the state and with its use of the city as cheap labor, real estate, and research material?

Speaking of the university's coloniality, there is a long story in this week's edition of the Village Voice reporting on the current faculty rebellion against the NYU administration's janus-faced expansion plans in New York City and across the globe.  After a long period of quiescence from all but the most stalwart of the administration's faculty opposition, NYU's tenured professoriate's prerogatives have been so abused by the Sexton administration's top-down evangelical neoliberalism that faculty are organizing for a no confidence vote.  I'm skeptical of some of the rallying cries faculty sometimes use in opposing the NYU administration.  Collegiality and faculty governance mean almost as little to most of the university's workers - including the vast majority of its teachers, most of whom are adjuncts and precarious low wage graduate student teaching assistants - as they do to Sexton and his squadron of yes-men and women on the twelfth floor of the library.  More heartening are the ways in which faculty have taken up the question of the relationship between university expansion and student debt, the ways in which they understand the impossibility of an easy return to a mythic golden age of faculty democracy.   

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a vocal critic of the administration, suggests that there's something more systemic going on: The American university may be assuming a strange new role. Ross argues that the "interlocking directorates" of power theorized by C. Wright Mills 50 years ago—corporate, governmental, and military interests—is being updated. Universities like NYU, he says, are becoming "players in their own right."

 Up here in Albany, I feel pretty distant from NYU.  That distance lets me say things like that I think the faculty's success may depend in part on the role that student activists and grad employees (not to mention other groups of workers) will play in this developing movement - some have been working with the faculty.  I do not think that even a sizeable minority of NYU's already small minority of tenured teachers and researchers has enough institutional power at this point to beat the administration.  But I'm in Albany, not NYC, and therefore can offer no responsible diagnosis of the extent to which the faculty have secured alliances with other campus workers.  Victories at NYU - both in the form of the no-confidence vote and on the still nebulously demarcated prospect of a new GSOC election - would be a big fucking deal.

Still, though, given the relations of force within the higher education "industry," the discourse of collegiality, of the abrogation of faculty privilege, seems all the more insufficient.  At a moment when universities are selling naming rights to notorious private prison corporations, nostalgia for a past that was never quite as idyllic as its advocates imagine seems particularly unstrategic.  As university administrators increasingly fetishize MOOCs and other phantasms of a precarious present, academic workers need to think more expansively about what we are fighting for and with whom we are fighting.

Either that, or we should just tear everything down and build something else instead.

Probably both.