"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.

YNHH, the state, and the post-fordist city

I'm in the process of working out my dissertation proposal, which is about the history of service workers at urban universities, about what the expansion and restructuring of universities looks like when read through the experiences of racialized and gendered food service, maintenance, custodial, clerical, and technical workers. I'm also going to talk about, but have been thus far giving short shrift to, workers at university hospitals, which have been a major part of the aforementioned expansion as universities prioritize the maintenance and care of bodies in what's been an era dominated by economies of biopolitical (re)production. Universities and their teaching hospitals have come to dominate the social and physical geography of urban spaces - just look at this peice today in the New Haven Independent reporting that Yale has now completed it's formal takeover of the building that was once an important Hill neighborhood high school (and site of student protest) and has in the process subtracted even more New Haven real estate, as one anonymous commenter notes, from the city's dwindling tax base.

And if that isn't a good enough reason why i need to more centrally address the effects of hospital service work on the terrain of post-fordist labor relations, Undergraduate Organizing Committee member Hugh Baran offers readers of The Nation an even more instructive tale about a violated community benefits agreement, an intimidated and betrayed group of 1800 Yale New Haven hospital employees, and one of the clearest examples we have of the necessity of card check neutrality agreements in protecting the rights of working people, and a strong message about the role of the state in protecting or assailing workers' voices. Whether you're like me, and you've been following what's happened at the hospital, on whose governing board many Yale executives and trustees sit, along with local New Haven plutocrats and a scant few medical professionals, since you watched Rick Levin shrug off questions from concerned SLAC members eight years ago, or you're learning of this just now (in which case, welcome to the blog) Hugh writes powerfully about what YNHH tells us about U.S. labor politics, and you should go read his article.

Rat, commodified

The most bizarre moment of the GSOC strike was when a group of "counter-protestors" (actually actors hired by an advertising agency) set up a huge inflatable businessman in Washington Square Park, along with a nice, cuddly inflatable rat to protest the UAW's fangy, menacing protest rat. Wearing t-shirts and equipped with a web site that called on passersby and strikers alike to respect rodentia, and attempting to rebrand the rat as the "great pointed archer," (initials GPA. Get it? I just did...) threatened by villainous human supremacist trade unions, these ad agencies used our strike for some free publicity. The whole thing came out in MetroNY the next day. This was really my first interaction with an attempt to commodify the symbols of labor insurgency, other than asshole Yale undergrads wearing picket signs to frat halloween parties, and it's what came to mind immediately when I saw this in my subway station this morning.Yeah, that's an HSBC ad. the text beneath the photos reads "Different Values Make The World a Richer Place" You take the people pissed off at finance capital and you turn them into an advertisement for finance capital. Brilliant.

EDIT: Unless I'm being stupid and this is some culture jam a la adbusters, which would make some sense, but also points to how easily those tactics are incorporated into actual corporate strategies.

EDIT 2: Nope, it really is an HSBC ad. Incredible.

parker brothers meet baran and sweezy meet jackson lewis

All down Tillary street, down Jay street, down the Flatbush Avenue extension, lamp-posts are festooned with bright purple paeans to the newly-merged NYU-Polytechnic Institute, or, as the banners proclaim it, NYU-Poly. Except it's all in lowercase, and you can't really see the hyphen. So, as the most wise Noah observed when we both first noticed them, it looks like, and perhaps is ultoimately the case, that what Sexton's PR flacks are proclaiming is nyupoly, like monopoly, but putatively in the public service and now with 100% more purple and sketchy hugs.

Nyupoly. It's a ideology for growth - urban development, (real estate speculation, state entitlements for neoliberal corporate privatizers masquerading as 501c3,) university expansion (bust-buy-bust,) and it's a brand, as evinced by all those purple banners.

And so time moves on at NYU. We get mass emails describing graduate employees as "students on financial aid," blithely denying, erasing our labor. We get triumphalist updates on the coming venture in Abu Dhabi. Snide non-apologies for the constant meteoric increases in undergraduate tuition, and nary a word - at least to the graduate students thus far - about the administrative restructuring Sexton and Alfano decreed last year. Presumably that conversation, like all the others here, is "over;" the NYUpoly has spoken and the rest of us are consigned to wait and see what happens, or participate in some sham spectacle of empty gesticulations toward a mockery of democratic and collegial affairs, which have never really ruled in the university at all. So we wait, and we organize, and all around us the Nyupoly explodes outward. I cut my activist teeth, however ineffectual they were then, in high school, at the multitude of anti-police brutality marches in the wake of Louima's rape and Diallo's murder. "Whose Streets," we'd ask? The answer then was always "our streets," asserting a collective ownership of the city by people whose place in the disneyfied corporate amusement park NY was becoming was fundamentally under attack. I think we lost that fight, at least in NY, and I wonder if the answer to that question must not now be a far bleaker one.

(This post has been appended to since it was originally published.)

"...how we do things downtown."

I'm late getting to this, but ROC-NY has won big in its years-long struggle against managerial tip-stealing and racism at Fireman restauraunts. This is a big deal because ROC-NY is one of the organizations at the forefront of the workers' center movement that was and remains so central to the immigrant worker labor movement that took the mainstream media and the streets of cities across the country by storm two years ago.

I haven't been blogging too much about what this blog purports to be about, mostly because it's summer break, I'm still in post-exam vacation mode, and watching massive amounts of Deadwood, which has, by my count, employed all seven of the words the late George Carlin told us could not be said on television, and then some. I have also watched a lot of movies, some on my ipod, some in the theatre. Be Kind Rewind and There Will Be Blood were the best of these, the former had me laughing uproariously at my computer screen at six in the morning, while the latter makes me want to go out and read the Upton Sinclair novel on which it's based. I'm interested in what Be Kind Rewind has to say about a politics of history - the history Mike and Jerry remake, the history of the films they 'swede' ("anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of robocop") but also the history of Passaic, New Jersey, of its great textile strike ("Passaic means class struggle") and of the projects into which Danny Glover's Mr. Fletcher is relocated at the film's close. Mia Farrow's character suggests a radical populism inherent to this postmodern selective/fictive reinterpretation of text and event, but the political possibilities of this kind of play, the film seems to suggest, are fleeting.

Iron Man was one of the better Marvel Comics movies, up there with the second Spider-Man film and maybe X2: X-Men United as the best of a bunch which includes the unwatchable Tom Jane Punisher remake (Dolph Lungren now keeping himself busy as a VH1 nostalgia show talking head), the execrable Daredevil, and its seque Elektra, whose existence escapes reason, as well as the crass Fantastic Four franchise. (Joel Schumacher Batman installments and Catwoman aside, DC's been much better at this sort of thing lately - Superman Returns was great, and while i didn't get much out of Batman Begins, it was certainly better than, say the Brett Ratner X-Men 3 crapfest.) When Iron Man came out back in May there was a great deal of hubbub about the critique of war profiteering and then backlash "it's not really a very strong critique" in response. The critique is somewhat limited, but even if Stain's double-dealing offers an easy way out of the conundrum, the film does highlight some interesting questions raised by corporate R&D and its relationship to the war state in an old-school, Eisenhower "Military Industrial Complex" manner (rather than a new school, Jeremy Scahill, labor subcontracting, Blackwater etc. one.) I do think that the ghostface killah cameo would have made more sense in this film than it does in Walk Hard, which I enjoyed mostly because of the 3 seconds of Martin Starr's Yiddish accent. Semi-Pro was pretty bad. Cloverfield was a boring landscape of gentrified, yuppie Manhattan in crisis. Charlie Wilson's War combined Aaron Sorkin's usual preachy liberalism with a worldview even more neocolonial than usual. Kung Fu Panda was OK. I like how they never explain why his father's a goose. No Country for Old Men was interesting. Breach was boring despite Chris Cooper, and Ryan Phillipe can't act. I don't remember what else I watched.

I've started walking again, and organizing again, and in general I'm enjoying being done with my exams and will soon move on to my incompletes and my dissertation proposal. Sigh.

random, but awesome.

twee pregnancies and postindustrializing racializations of space

As with most things, I'm about five months late with this, but I finally saw Juno tonight. My reactions follow, though it's narcissistic of me to assume that anyone would care at this point.

My parents loved the movie, my great aunt thought it was anti-abortion (but never saw it), and my own reaction falls in with the ambivalent chorus that my own age cohort seems to have with the movie. I do think it's a bit anti-abortion, moreso even than Knocked Up and the whole "shmushmortion" claptrap that actually merited column space in,like, the New York Times and The Nation. But then I've never actually been in an abortion clinic, so maybe barely post-pubescent goths do regale patients with tales of their boyfriend's grape penis and anti-abortion protesters engage potential aborters in well meaning conversations about fingernails rather than shouting threats and physically accosting them, cause, you know, that sort of thing only happens in movies. Like Dogma. Or not.

The twee-ness of the dialogue, and really therefore the uber-reliance on commodity fetishism (The Stooges, Sonic Youth, Orange tic tacs, blue slurpees, Kimya Dawson) in lieu of meaningful character development is either a really profound comment on postmodern aporia or just really lazy, probably both. And it's weird to see a song I got over quickly when i first heard it like six years ago treated as if it were the most profound piece of music in a film since John Cusack's boom-box discovered "Within Your Reach," which was the real star of Say Anything, not that Peter Gabriel song. I've always felt, since i first saw them at one of the Sideway anti-folk nights (I'd gone to see Sam play) that the moldy peaches were good, but not great, fun but hardly world altering, and this seems to be the kind of intervention the film wants to make too, just in a much more pretentious, Wes Andersonny kind of way.

Let me also add, on a totally unrelated note, that while I have not yet read, but look forward to reading Mandi Isaacs Jackson's new book about New Haven in the 1960s and 70s, Model City Blues, I have read an earlier essay Jackson (who i've known for about six years) wrote on the subject and I've done a good amount of research on the period (for my senior essay, which looked at the years between 1968 and 1971) and Paul Bass's review in New Haven Independent, which posits Bass collaborator Doug Rae as paragon of multivocality and textual democracy, is a bit problematic. Some of Bass's criticisms may be justified - I haven't read the book yet, but what I have read and my own knowledge of New Haven history leads me to be skeptical of some of the more pointed allegations Bass makes of Jackson's alleged historiographical failures, which would be strengthened if Bass were willing to discuss the actual text beyond offering a scarequote here or there. Though we need to be skeptical of the idea that people are organically speaking for themselves when interviewed by an academic or journalist - speech is always mediated - Bass might be right that there may be value in talking to more people than he accuses Jackson of doing. Again i don't yet know enough to form an opinion. But that doesn't, i think, invalidate the way Jackson reads the archive that she works with, the way she finds traces of a very real subaltern resistance (Hill Parents Association, anyone?) to the New Haven planner state in file photos and newspaper articles, for instance. Bass's claim that the fact that Jackson only interviews seven people means that her massive archival work is somehow flawed is thus specious. This is not an adequate lens by which to evaluate Jackson's project and/or its viability.

Bass's takedown really seems to unravel, though around his offering up of Rae as paragon of scholarly virtue - Rae whose investment in the actions of planners (ordinary people appear anecdotally and occupy a decidedly subaltern position in Rae's text, which tows orthodox lines on all matters of New Haven political history - Lee flawed, Panthers bad, John Daniels happy ending, Levin era implicit new epoch in Yale's investment in city though analysis of university's role largely absent from book despite G. William Domhoff's urges to the contrary) erases much if not all of the history Jackson treats on, almost completely ignores any popular involvement in the conversation around the city's future in favor of the narrative of heroically flawed planners. Rae's book - and i will admit it's been a few years since i read it, seemed to me far more invested in taking arrogant potshots at the left than in adequately answering the questions Jackson's work does deal with - the untold stories of urban redesign, the fraught and contested histories of racialized urban space, and the ways in which such spaces are shaped and reshaped not only by the Doug Raes of the world, but also the movements that Rae largely dismisses, ignores, or pathologizes in his own text. (Rae's hostility towards, for instance, the FHUE that Bass namedrops and that Jackson has been involved with for nearly a decade, is well known.) There's far more value in such a project than what Bass, despite his pointed references here to FHUE's complex tactical frames, seems, of late, willing to admit.

I feel a little weird posting this having not yet read Jackson's book (i just ordered a copy this morning,) so I'll stop there and maybe I'll post more later after I've finished reading it. But let me end with a question: does the fact that, say, Vinnie Sirabella was a backer/booster of Richard Lee's renewal programs really invalidate what i am sure is a very smart account of movements against said transformations or for a different kind of city if the author of such a history is a product of a political legacy which unites that opposition with the unions Sirabella helmed? That is what I take to be Bass's overriding argument, and it's unsatisfying.

Ted Kennedy, Killer Coke Still Banned From NYU Campus, (except ) David Swensen is the New George Berkeley, and other stuff.

Ted Kennedy's introduced a bill to amend the NLRA to include graduate employees.

More than ever in modern education, teaching and research assistants are in classrooms every day, educating students in colleges and universities across the country. Their numbers are increasing as the number of full time faculty dwindles. Often, teaching and research assistants are now doing the same job as junior faculty members.

In fact, the classroom is a workplace for these scholars. It’s where they earn the money they need to pay to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. They deserve the right to stand together and make their voice heard in their workplace. Like other employees, they should have the right to join a union and improve their working conditions. Obviously, better wages and working conditions for them also means better education for their students.

In 2004, however, a decision by the National Labor Relations Board changed the law and denied fundamental workplace rights and protections for teaching and research assistants. This ruling stopped an active organizing movement in its tracks and deprived thousands of teaching and research assistants of their right to organize and bargain over their wages and working conditions.

It’s hardly the only bad decision by the National Labor Relations Board under the Bush Administration, which has been the most anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-union NLRB in history. The Board has let workers down at every turn. It has blocked efforts to gain union

representation, undermined workers’ attempts to improve their pay and benefits, and exposed them to penalties for seeking to improve their working conditions.

The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect the rights of American workers, but it is failing teaching and research assistants, just as it has failed so many others. By passing the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act, Congress will give these workers back the rights that the National Labor Relations Board has taken away. This legislation amends the definition of employee under the National Labor Relations Act to explicitly include teaching and research assistants at private universities and colleges and restores the law to where it was before the Bush Board’s anti-worker decision.

This bill is a significant step forward in restoring workers’ rights, and I urge my colleagues to join in supporting this important legislation.

The NYU University Senate has upheld the coke ban. Good.

S.P. and A.S.C. are the new masters of Ezra Stiles College. They're great teachers and deeply invested in undergraduate education, so congrats to them both.

They could have picked a worse college to take over, (seriously?)

Barf.

Well, Stiles has its own histories of erasures and injustices, (Yale demolished a top notch public high school to build the dorms, and see also 'Newport') and these histories constantly haunt the Yale campus and like the acid they pour on the buildings to artificially age them, leave lasting marks. But if these institutional spaces are going to exist, i can't think of better folks to occupy them and do good things with them, and I wish them the best.

The return of the virus?

I figured i'd make available here my comments from the panel Steve Fletcher chaired yesterday on "The NYU Grad Strike and the Neoliberal University" at the conference titled Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value, at the University of Minnesota.

Without Our Brain and Muscle: NYU and the Future of the Neoliberal University.

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein[i]

The afterlife of the strike

The picket lines of what was likely the longest strike in the history of the graduate employee labor movement in the U.S. came down on May 11^{th, 2006,} following a “strike graduation” rally two blocks south of the university’s commencement ceremonies. By fall, the police barricades along the sidewalks of West 4^th Street, outside the library over which the university president’s offices panoptically loom, were gone, soon replaced, oddly, by NYPD protest pen-style bike rack barriers painted NYU purple. The forlorn island of dirt where strikers had erected sign-in tables and munched on stale bagels for six months was rendered inaccessible by a wall of scaffolding and nets. The dirt had to be scrubbed from the library’s red-brown façade. It took nearly a year. Gone too was the rickety ugly green dumpster in which strikers had hauled picket signs, tables, and the gas tank, generator, and what I can only describe as the decaying corpse of our environmentally unsustainable giant inflatable rat, which, eyes red and fangs bared, stood with us in the freezing rain and silently, stoically, bore witness to so much of a strike that mixed the theatre of the absurd and the infuriating with high tragedy, surreal farce, tortuous monotony, and its fair share of deeply inspiring and emotionally exhausting moments.

The NYU campus feels palpably different now, emptier. The drum beats and chants that echoed off the campus’s forbidding edifices and wafted through its securitized apertures marked the dramatically increased visibility and audibility of a precarious, transient, and contingent population of teachers and researchers. As things have quieted down in the strike’s wake, that presence now feels somewhat spectral. Yet if we have not shouted with the same volume as we did during the strike, we have not been inactive. Even as organizing efforts have continued, and graduate employees have continuously attempted to rethink strategic miscues and failures and move towards new ways of being and building a union for academic workers, we’ve seen the institution at which we labor undertake multiple new projects and outline broad plans for financial, territorial, and global expansion.

It’s important to remember and rethink and reevaluate the strike. I’m grateful for the interventions that Andy and Monika have made here, and I agree with them. But I think it’s equally important to think about what’s happened since and what may happen next, to think, briefly, about recent developments in the constitution of the deeply contradictory and evangelically neoliberal university that is NYU and to posit a role for graduate employee unionists in transforming it, moving beyond it.

Spatial Contours of the Enterprise University: ICE and the Global Network

John Sexton has underlined his vision of NYU’s future explicitly and grandiloquently. He is fond of making broad and overarching pronouncements and declarations, in a manner which, admittedly, often smacks of the absurd, the preposterous. There is method in his megalomania, though, and I believe his words must be taken at face value more often than not. Soon after his installation, President Sexton issued a series of missives (Mary Nolan calls them “Epistles”) on the “Enterprise University,” or “Common Enterprise University” (how’s that for a “capitalist commons?”) which he framed as a disciplinary mechanism to be exercised upon wayward faculty, necessitating the centralization of power and governance in the hands of his handpicked “University Leadership Team” in order to compel an unacknowledgedly and increasingly casualized workforce to perform its labors as desired. The Enterprise University was and is the Managed University, and it was this bureaucratic arrangement of administrative power that cut off negotiations with GSOC, blacklisted and fired some twenty strikers, and recruited two enterprising professional students to begin designing the company union structure which would ostensibly replace the UAW-allied union. In April of 2006 one of these individuals received a fifty-thousand dollar fellowship for his “social entrepreneurship” through a newly created university program. This program was endowed by then newly crowned NYU Trustee for Life Catherine B. Reynolds, who not long after came under pressure from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for selling student loans with inflated interest rates. Which is interesting, to say the least.[ii]

The Common Enterprise University represents the death knell of faculty governance, which we ought to caution ourselves against being too nostalgic for in its actually existing, or actually having existed forms, as complicit as it’s been in structures of exclusion, empire, and the political economy of the academic superstar system. Yet Faculty Democracy of the sort advocated by hundreds of pro-union NYU faculty as they joined GSOC picket lines and stormed John Sexton’s offices in November of 2005 becomes more than worth supporting, at least if one cares about the principle that people should have some form of control over and/or voice in the work that they do.

The current NYU administration has designs, at any rate, not merely on bending the academic workforce to its will, but also on radically restructuring city and state economic policies. President Sexton has, since 2004, advocated reconfiguring New York’s political infrastructure around what he calls ICE – a set of policies in which “global talent” is increasingly concentrated in centers of Information, Culture, and Economy. Sexton is fond of making a proprietary claim to this term. As a member of the Higher Education Committee created by former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, President Sexton has actively pushed the idea of New York City as in “idea capital” of the future, and called for a reorganization of its economy which foregrounds the revenue-generating potential of the private research university.[iii] Writing in The University Against Itself, Sarah Nash, a GSOC veteran and former staff researcher for the union, and Steven Duncombe, a professor in NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, have noted the ironies of a term that hinges upon the exploitation and financialization of academic and intellectual innovation but is itself seemingly plagiarized from Indian economists, who apparently doubt the model’s efficacy.[iv] But ICE’s neoliberalism lies not only in its zeal for the commodification of immaterial labor, but also in its demand that state funding for public education should be, in the words of the Washington Square News, NYU’s student paper, “spread less thinly and given mostly to private universities,” This, President Sexton explains to the WSN reporter, is “merit based pay,” “making sure the investment is not wasted.”[v] The language of finance and pragmatism here masks the ways in which NYU’s regional growth involves the enclosure of public spaces and the expropriation of public institutions and funds. This regional expansion, it’s important to note, also involves developing Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, and colonizing a broad swathe of downtown Brooklyn’s working class commercial district south of the newly acquired campus of Polytechnic University, an area which currently serves a predominantly working class and African-American clientele.[vi] This considerable addition to the university’s already formidable real estate empire is a key piece of the university’s “2031” plan, which involves the acquisition or construction of 6 million square feet of space over the next 23 years, as the university continues ot admit increasing numbers of students at ever-rising tuition rates.[vii]

NYU’s expansion is hardly limited to the New York metropolitan area. Though plans for a partnership with American University in Paris on an island NYU recently purchased in the Seine fell through last month, the university holds or has recently opened satellite campuses and programs in London, Madrid, Accra, Paris (a smaller operation than the planned joint venture) Singapore, Argentina, Israel, Berlin, Prague, and Shanghai.[viii] And construction may begin very soon on NYU in Abu Dhabi, a project whose history was recently discussed by Tamar Lewin in a lengthy article in the New York Times,[ix] though Andrew Ross’s recent article on the matter which appeared both in Inside Higher Ed and in The University Against Itself is engages the project more rigorously and more valuably. Our colleague Lena Sze reminds us that the politics surrounding the Abu Dhabi venture are complex and multivalent, and Rana Jaleel will speak about how NYU graduate employees are thinking about potential interventions in the university’s transnational enterprise, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about the issue, but I am interested in the ways in which Sexton’s framed this ‘partnership’, which began during the GSOC strike and which Sexton refused to “take seriously” unless UAE representatives made a 50 million dollar donation to NYU’s endowment.[x] Fond of ruminating in totalizing and indeed orientalist terms on the 21^st century as “The Century of the Other,” Sexton recently described the university’s expansion to Abu Dhabi and elsewhere in terms of the globalization of ICE ‘idea capitals’ and the ‘embrace of otherness,’ – meaning, apparently ‘we don’t mind our campus interrupted with other buildings instead if an NYU building,’ as an ethic of expansion. The latter statement, by the way, is one that the historical preservationists who unsuccessfully fought NYU’s annexation and demolition of Edgar Allan Poe’s House, might disagree with.[xi]

The Truth Is A Virus

Thus, NYU becomes what Sexton has alternatingly termed “the global network university” and “the university of the other,”[xii] The other, of course, meaning potentially everything which is not NYU, with NYU imagined as homogeneous, Western, white, apparently, and unitarily, proprietarily progressive and dynamic. Meanwhile, back in Greenwich Village, expansion means, as a March 7 memo from Executive Vice President Michael Alfano announces, a hiring freeze for the coming year for clerical and administrative labor, with concomitant calls for increases in efficiency inevitably spelling speed-up, increased outsourcing, and the increasing consolidation of such function’s under the U.L.T.’s watchful eyes.[xiii] The sweeping nature of these changes evince a swagger on the part of administrators who believe they’ve moved past (Sexton’s often repeated words during the strike) the challenges from below posed by GSOC and its allies and supporters.

In November 2005, a striking graduate teaching assistant in the NYU English department booked a meeting with President Sexton during his office hours. Sexton, dismayed to learn of his guest’s support for the union, informed her that GSOC was a “virus” that needed to be “eradicated from the earth.” [totally anecdotal.] I share this anecdote not to solicit your outrage, much less your sympathy, but rather because I think it offers both a clear window into how the NYU administration views its “waste” – to steal from Marc Bousquet’s brilliant theorization of the exploitative structure of academic knowledge production. We are completely abject, menacing, microscopic, indeed barely material but nonetheless necessitating either the university’s vaccination or our own destruction.

I also raise the virus metaphor because I think it offers, as does Bousquet’s model, a path for potential intervention, disruption and recuperation of the neoliberal university. Disgusting as it seems, I wonder if the virus, constantly shifting, constantly adapting, reconstituting itself, rhizomatic, hybrid, and nearly irresistible, might, taking a cue from the Aids activism of an earlier moment – and I’m indebted to Rana Jaleel for pointing out my reliance on these histories of activism and struggle - offer a useful way to think about how we organize against and within and increasingly spread out, de/territorialized, ruthless, employer. This is a position I’m wary of taking, particularly because the history of contagion in this country is very much a racialized one, and I wonder whether an uncritical appropriation or reclamation of the union as virus ignores the ways in which some of us are more immediately read as threats to afflict the social body than others. But still, I find the possibilities alluring. Moten and Harney[xiv] describe a subversive relationship to the university which is premised on criminality, and specifically on theft – To the university I’ll steal and there I’ll steal. What would it look like if instead we thought about our relationships to the university through the metaphor of infection?

Addendum: I want to respectfully disagree with Peter Rachleff that addressing the concerns of the university’s undercommons – Moten and Harney again – must be done outside of the labor movement, that our struggle exceeds the bounds of such forms, because I’m not convinced we can know the bounds of any union or any form of struggle until we can push them no further. Our strike was no "fiasco." Rather, it was extraordinarily instructive, and I hope the tactics we have developed, the lessons we have learned, will prove useful to university employees in the years to come who are imagining and pushing forward alternative futures for the sites in which we all labor.

---

[i] I owe thanks to the many members of GSOC, to the folks from GESO who lent our struggle new force and direction, and thus made this paper possible. Steve Fletcher, Andy Cornell, Rana Jaleel, Mike Palm, Andrew Ross, Johana Londono, and many others guided and helped to shape this paper, whether they knew it or not.

[ii] “First Class of Reynolds Scholars Named,” WSN 5/8/2006 and “Trustee’s nonprofit loan co. under fire,” WSN 9/20/2007

[iii] “Sexton: Private and public Schools should partner,” Washington Square News, 12/6/2007

[iv] Duncombe and Nash, “Ice From the Ashes of Fire: NYU and The Economy of Culture In New York City,” in Palm, Krause, Ross, and Nolan, eds. The University Against Itself Philadelphia; Temple University Press, 2008. 72

[v] “Sexton: Private and public Schools should partner,” Washington Square News, 12/6/2007

[vi] NYU 2031 Open House Presentation, Jan 30, 2008.

[vii] “Villagers still wary of NYU’s growth” WSN 11/15/2007

[viii] “Cramped In Village, NYU Eyes Globe as It Grows,” WSN 12/7/07 and Andrew Ross, “Global U” in The University Against Itself 212

[ix] Lewin, “Universities Rush to Set up Outposts Abroad,” NYT 2/10/2008

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Duncombe and Nash, 80

[xii] “Cramped In Village, NYU Eyes Globe as it grows,” op cit

[xiii] Michael Alfano, “Administrative re-engineering – A follow-up to John Sexton’s Memo”. 3/7/2008

[xiv] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and its Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text79, 2004

NYT: NYU "Makes the Town-Gown Relationship almost toxic"

Since many residents are either current or former faculty and have a connection to N.Y.U., few are willing to speak negatively about the university for fear of losing their apartments. But in private they are plenty mad, and the environmental mishap, one top of outrage over the university’s expansion plans, makes the town-gown relationship almost toxic. Said one long time resident of the Mews: “This appears to some to be another example of the wide gait with which N.Y.U. strides over Greenwich Village. Some villagers are already up in arms over N.Y.U.’s over-saturation of their neighborhood.”

All Your Brooklyn Are Belong To Us

I haven't been blogging much lately due to the crush of teaching, academic work, organizing, and other sundry cocnerns, but I want to post a link to Marc Bousquet's How The University Works blog, which is sort of what this blog aspires to be, minus all my wacky song rewrites.

I went to the "open house" for NYU's "NYU 2031" expansion plan Wednesday afternoon after lecture. Some stuff was obvious - building a skyscraper on top of the gymnasium (hey, why not,) continuously expanding the student population as a means of securing easy and cheap revenue flows, turning Washington PLace into a mall, demolishing the area in "Schwartz Plaza" where GSOCers staged our picket line for seven long months in favor off an outdoor cafe and a more open panopticon, the expansion of offsite outsourced campuses like the one in Abu Dhabi, built and probably staffed with exploited migrant labor from across South Asia and the Middle East. Some of it shocked even me. A map of downtown Brooklyn (page 28) displays orange splotches all over downtown Brooklyn, along both sides of Flatbush avenue, surrounding the LIU campus, the city courts, encircling the working class black open air Fulton Mall commercial district and lining much of Willoughby Street between Flatbush and Adams, extending almost as far South as Boerum Hill and Park Slope - a huge footprint for NYU's ever covetous "tentacles," removing a massive amount of space from public use and NYC tax rolls, creating a neoliberal satellite campus in a borough where displacement and gentrification are already very serious concerns. NYC Democratic political leadership seems tenatively behind the plan, which marks a more shrewd attempt by the university to court certain constituencies of elite public opinion - village dwellers, city councilpeople, Scott Stringer, but never Fulton Mallgoers, Myrtle Avenue residents, or current business owners or workers who work in the affected areas in Brooklyn. What else could be done with this space? Is this the future we want for our city? What is to be done? What would a real social contract between NYU and working class New York look like?

NYT: "City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention"

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, confirmed that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had been an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention.

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. When the detectives went out of town, he said, the department usually alerted the local authorities by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York — like those in many other big cities — have operated under special limits as a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu.

“All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu review,” Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, was “central to the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,” Gerald C. Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department, said in a federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the Police Department have fought in federal court over how to balance public safety, free speech and the penetrating but potentially disruptive force of police surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police commissioner in January 2002, “took the position that the N.Y.P.D. could no longer rely on the federal government alone, and that the department had to build an intelligence capacity worthy of the name,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities was essential to fighting terrorism. “Given the range of activities that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the N.Y.P.D. must be available to conduct investigations into political activity and intelligence-related issues,” Mr. Cohen wrote in an affidavit dated Sept. 12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest — coincidentally, three days before the convention — of a man who spoke about bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative, detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the department had security worries — in particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison Square Garden, where events would be held — and logistical concerns about managing huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

“We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including vandalism,” Mr. Browne said. “Our goal was to safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike.”

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests — marked “Secret” — were circulated weekly under the heading “Key Findings.”...

The police efforts are being led by the same unit of the Internal Affairs
Bureau that spearheaded the inquiry into the police shooting of Amadou
Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, seven years ago.

And what happened in that case? Oh yeah, they moved the trial to Albany and exonerated every cop involved. And clearly everything's all better now...

Brearley Unleashed

One wonders if BlackRock Realty, thought to be involved in a possible deal to sell rent-regulated housing on the (ugh) Upper East Side off to the elite Brearley School, is related to BlackRock Inc, the capital management firm operated by NYU Board of Trustees Vice Chair Laurence D. Fink...

quis custodiet ipsos custodies, II

The past few weeks have seen a noticeable spike in police brutality in New York. However the powers that be swear that the Bloomberg administration is more tolerant and liberal than the Giuliani era NYPD racialized assault on poor and working class communities of color, and perhaps these claims are true, perhaps not - the end result doesn't seem much different. First and most high profile is this weekend's shooting by police in Jamaica, Queens of a young man on his wedding day outside the strip club where his bachelor party was held, as police fired 50 shots into the unarmed man's car, killing him and wounding two others. There has been a great deal of attention placed on this event, because it's tragic, and because the "story" plays well in the media, but even if he'd been just some random guy coming out of a strip club at four in the morning, not about to get married, would his death be any more acceptable? And the fact that some of the officers in volved were black and latino clearly does not trouble the racialized structures of policing and punishment except in the most superficial sense. A young black male in the crosshairs of a police officer's gun remains a young black male no matter the racialized construction of the officer who is holding the gun. The technology of policing and control itself produces and reproduces a discourse of race intimately linked to the frameworks of NYPD multiculturalism which the Bloomberg administration has so carefully nurtured as a means of avoiding the crises of the previous administration. Even now, Bloomberg plays the role of the contrite and concerned patriarch, rather than the sneering apologist for racialized terror - the posie so often assumed by his predecessor. None of this makes Sean Bell any less dead.

Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village (forwarded from an email sent out over the NYU Gender-Studies listserve)

We Demand that The NYPDStop Racist Police BrutalityDrop all the Charges
against Shakur Trammel & hisco-defendantsFIRE OFFICER TOCCOS! Release the
names of all theofficers involved in the attack on November 1stEnd the NYPD
campaign of Racial and Gender ProfilingStop the attacks on youth, people of
color, thehomeless and lesbian, gay, bi and trans people in theWest VillageWhat
Happened at Hudson and Christopher – HalloweenNight 2006According to
eyewitnesses, on November 1st, at around4:30am, at the intersection of Hudson
and Christopher,various African-American and Latina/o people wereapproached by a
van of police officers and told tomove from the corner. Some of these people
werepatrons of a pizza restaurant who were standing out infront, while others
were simply crossing theintersection.As people began to move away from the
corner, a20-year old African-American female remarked on howdisrespectful the
tone had been of the female officerwho had given the order. The same officer got
out ofthe van and began to initiate an argument with the20-year-old woman.
Within seconds, Officer Toccos, awhite male cop, also jumped out of the van and
beganto shout at the 20-year-old female.Then without warning or provocation,
Officer Toccospushed the 20-year-old African-American woman twice inher breasts
forcing her backwards. A witness at the
Shakur Trammel requested the badge
number of OfficerToccos.In answer to that request, Shakur Trammel was punchedin
his face. In a fit of rage, Toccos began punchingTrammel repeatedly in his
chest. He soon threw him ontop of the front of the police van and began
chokinghim with his nightstick. A rampage ensued. Witnessesreport, that between
4 to 6 cops, mostly whiteofficers, began kicking and punching, Shakur Trammelas
he lay on the ground. Throughout the attack,Officer Toccos continuously beat
Trammel with hisnightstick. Covered with bruises and his left elbowdislocated
Shakur Trammel was then thrown into apolice van.During the attack, Trammel could
hear the voices ofseveral people yelling for the police to stop andcalling on
each other to take pictures to document theassault. As many as 20 people, the
vast majority ofwhich were people of color, witnessed the attack. Eyewitnesses
report that the police went into the crowdand began beating another
African–American man,believed to be in his 30’s, who was very vocal abouthis
outrage at the police brutality wielded againstTrammel. Both men were arrested
along with anAfrican–American female who refused to follow thepolice command for
the witnesses to disperse.Once they arrived at the 6th Precinct, Shakur
Trammeltold his arresting officer that he was a Transsexualmale and wanted to be
placed in a separate cell. Thisrequest was ignored. Both of the men, in
desperateneed of medical attention, were initially placed inthe same holding
cell. Already in the cell were twoother men, one Black and one Latino, both
injured andbleeding, who reported that the police at the 6thPrecinct also
assaulted them. After an hour ofdemanding to be taken to a hospital, one of the
four",1]
);
//-->
scene, 23 year old African-American college
studentShakur Trammel requested the badge number of OfficerToccos.In answer to
that request, Shakur Trammel was punchedin his face. In a fit of rage, Toccos
began punchingTrammel repeatedly in his chest. He soon threw him ontop of the
front of the police van and began chokinghim with his nightstick. A rampage
ensued. Witnessesreport, that between 4 to 6 cops, mostly whiteofficers, began
kicking and punching, Shakur Trammelas he lay on the ground. Throughout the
attack,Officer Toccos continuously beat Trammel with hisnightstick. Covered with
bruises and his left elbowdislocated Shakur Trammel was then thrown into apolice
van.During the attack, Trammel could hear the voices ofseveral people yelling
for the police to stop andcalling on each other to take pictures to document
theassault. As many as 20 people, the vast majority ofwhich were people of
color, witnessed the attack. Eyewitnesses report that the police went into the
crowdand began beating another African–American man,believed to be in his 30’s,
who was very vocal abouthis outrage at the police brutality wielded
againstTrammel. Both men were arrested along with anAfrican–American female who
refused to follow thepolice command for the witnesses to disperse.Once they
arrived at the 6th Precinct, Shakur Trammeltold his arresting officer that he
was a Transsexualmale and wanted to be placed in a separate cell. Thisrequest
was ignored. Both of the men, in desperateneed of medical attention, were
initially placed inthe same holding cell. Already in the cell were twoother men,
one Black and one Latino, both injured andbleeding, who reported that the police
at the 6thPrecinct also assaulted them. After an hour ofdemanding to be taken to
a hospital, one of the four
armed with a stun gun.On November 1st 2006, at
the corner of Hudson andChristopher, 2 Black men were beaten, one trans andone
non-trans, and arrested along with one Blackwoman, for refusing to stand idly by
as a 20-year oldBlack woman was assaulted by a white cop. Racistpolice attacks
like the one on November 1st are adaily occurrence in working class and
communities ofcolor throughout NYC. In the West Village, the 6thPrecinct has
become notorious for racist, sexist andanti-lesbian, gay, bi and trans violence
unleashedparticularly against young people of color, thehomeless and transgender
people. The people of colorLGBT youth organization, FIERCE!, has been at
theforefront of fighting on these issues in the WestVillage for several
years.TransJustice of The Audre Lorde Project calls onsocial justice activists
and organizations from acrossthe city to Endorse and Come to an
Anti-PoliceBrutality Press Conference & Picket Line Wednesday,Nov 29th
6:30pm – 7:30pm in front of the 6th Precinct(233 West 10th Street)TransJustice
is a political group created by and forTrans and Gender Non-Conforming people of
color. Wework to mobilize our communities and allies to actionon the pressing
political issues we face. Theseissues include gaining access to jobs, housing,
andeducation; the need for Trans-sensitive healthcare,HIV-related services, and
job-training programs;resisting police, government and anti-immigrantviolence.
To endorse or for more info call 718596-0342 ext 15 or email ikhenry@alp.orgFrank León RobertsDoctoral Candidate, Department of
Performance StudiesGraduate School of Arts and Science & Tisch School of the
Arts, NYU---You are currently subscribed to gender-studies as: zsw201@nyu.eduTo unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-gender-studies-1868526P@forums.nyu.edu",0]
);
//-->
men of color was then taken from the cell by copsarmed with a stun gun.On
November 1st 2006, at the corner of Hudson andChristopher, 2 Black men were
beaten, one trans andone non-trans, and arrested along with one Blackwoman, for
refusing to stand idly by as a 20-year oldBlack woman was assaulted by a white
cop. Racistpolice attacks like the one on November 1st are adaily occurrence in
working class and communities ofcolor throughout NYC. In the West Village, the
6thPrecinct has become notorious for racist, sexist andanti-lesbian, gay, bi and
trans violence unleashedparticularly against young people of color, thehomeless
and transgender people. The people of colorLGBT youth organization, FIERCE!, has
been at theforefront of fighting on these issues in the WestVillage for several
years.TransJustice of The Audre Lorde Project calls onsocial justice activists
and organizations from acrossthe city to Endorse and Come to an
Anti-PoliceBrutality Press Conference & Picket Line Wednesday,Nov 29th
6:30pm – 7:30pm in front of the 6th Precinct(233 West 10th Street)TransJustice
is a political group created by and forTrans and Gender Non-Conforming people of
color. Wework to mobilize our communities and allies to actionon the pressing
political issues we face. Theseissues include gaining access to jobs, housing,
andeducation; the need for Trans-sensitive healthcare,HIV-related services, and
job-training programs;resisting police, government and anti-immigrantviolence.
To endorse or for more info call 718596-0342 ext 15 or email ikhenry@alp.org

I Can't Stand (in) The Rain

The democrats have control of the House and possibly the Senate (it's tied at the very least, although the Shuler/Tester/Casey democrat is basically a repulican by another name), Rumsfeld is gone (I'll blink when someone shoves him in front of a war crimes tribunal.) Interesting. I don't blog much on electoral politics, and I won't start now, but this seems worth acknowledging.

I was supposed to meet a friend from high school at the corner of 242nd street and Broadway on the edges of Riverdale and Van Cortlandt Park, where a decade ago I used to do things like hang out with my friends after school, drink Jamaican Ginger Beer, and run cross country. (Shut up.)

The block's changed, but not that much - although Character's Deli is now a diner called Mr. D's and there's a Dunkin Donuts where one of those bodegas used to be on Broadway that everyone would play X-Men Vs. Streetfighter at after school -- right where the Bx9 stops on its way to Kingsbridge and on to Fordham Road and East Tremont.

My friend never showed, and I wound up standing in the pouring rain, watching Horace Mann kids ditch school and walk up the steps to the elevated subway platform. I thought about walking up the hill and getting food, but it was miserable out and as musch as there are probably teachers up there I'd like to say hi to, there are also reasons i haven't been back in almost half a decade and if i do go up there I don't really feel like doing it alone, and I have no interest in a nostalgia trip which obscures all the pain and loss of these last few years - L, etc. I don't know if I'm making sense to myself right now, so excuse me if I'm dealing in esoterica.

So I got back on the 1, transfered at 168th (the 1/9 platform at that station is probably my favorite station on the MTA, with it's DC-style arched ceilings and globular gaslights. It feels very steampunk.)

The NYU Law School has a coatroom where someone is paid to sit and take your coat. I found this out when i went in there to pee after getting off the A at West 4th. So this is what NYU spends its resources on ebsides busting unions, buying real estate, and strawberries. A private university in the public service, folks.

I'm hungry.

pathetic peoplehood and computer lab ettiquette

It's been a busy week. Presentation tuesday, and i just finished a paper about five hours ago. Tuesday afternoon, around 1 PM, I was sitting in the ITS computer lab in the school of ed. building finishing up my presentation on CLR James for my postcolonial Marxism class. Because of the ADD, i get all sensitive to noise when i'm trying to write stuff i have to ocncentrate real hard on (not like blog entries,) and sometimes people in that lab are very loud, in which case sometimes i do my little mutter-scowl barely passive-aggressive schtick for a few seconds until I catch myself, reqalize I'm only an old man in Julie Math (fast approaching the big 9-0) and then get back to work. Tuesday was different.

An undergrad - a woman with long curly hair in hipster/olsen twin garb sat down immediately next to me and started a very loud and clearly unimportant conversation. Nothign worng with unimportant loud cell phone conversations. I have many of them myself. Just not in computer labs where phones are banned. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic than I was, but given her response, in retrospect, I really doubt it would have helped. In a slightly frustrated tone, I said, "You know, you really can't talk on the phone in here." This was an accurate claim. I've seen ITS employees say the same thing to offenders numerous times. The woman, not missing a beat or averting her eyes from her screen, said loudly and ina disgusted tone to whover was on the other end of her telephone conversation, "Ok, a pathetic person just told me to get off the phone. He thinks he runs the place."

I kinda did a Stephanie Tanner ("how rude") at this point, and was mildly shocked by the rudeness and self-centered nature of her response. I trieds to explain that this was the lab policy as i had seen it enforced and that I was not trying to be rude, but she did a non-verbal "talk to the hand" motion and hung up the phone.

Thankfully, not all NYU undergraduates are this spoiled and obnoxious - many of them are really great but it's the hipster ennui, the dissafected, post-gentriification sense of yuppie entitlement to urban space - which is certainly not unique to NYU students (although at Yale, there's much more of a technocrats of the future thing going on)- which i find so disconcerting.

Mikey Bloomberg, Standing Up For The Little Guy

If by "little guy," we mean Jack Valenti.

“Video piracy is not a victimless crime — it kills jobs,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference. The mayor, who has made courting the film industry a priority for his administration, added that revenues from such piracy supports criminal gangs. In addition, the counterfeit DVD business has attracted its share of violence in recent years, with several shootings connected to DVD robberies in Midtown.

Using tactics the city employed to go after counterfeiting in the apparel industry, officials at the association, the Police Department and the city’s Office of Special Enforcement will work to identify buildings where piracy operations are located and take legal action against landlords and owners.

Under nuisance abatement laws, according to John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator, the city can essentially take control of the properties, shutting down offices, floors or entire buildings, depending on how they are being used, and suing the landlords, which could result in substantial fines. The legal actions could also force landlords and owners to post bonds and to submit new tenants for city approval.

Officials also plan to seek state legislation to make illegally recording a motion picture, currently only a violation, a crime carrying potential time behind bars. The plan would make the first offense a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in prison, and subsequent convictions Class E felonies, punishable by up to four years in prison.

The city also plans to work with the motion picture association to create a public service campaign to educate New York consumers about the detrimental effects of piracy.

Screw all those homeless people, forget about gentrification and the skyrocketing cost of living in NYC, the 30,000 transportation worers who still have no contract, etc etc - clearly, it's the guy selling bootleg spanish language DVDs on my corner who's destroying America. Michael Bloomberg, I salute you for being so in touch with the problems faced by wealthy movie moguls!

Sovereign Bank crushes Independence Bank

The gigantic floating bioluminescent testicular object suspended above a stretch limousine outside Bowlmor Lanes, 13th and University, last night.

The space race

I don't know what's worse - the arrogant assumption that any available land in the east village should be an NYU dormitory, (what new dorm are they "losing?" it's a vacant lot!) or the mindblowingly disingenuous claim that there is some sort of link between community intransigence over NYU's attempt to illegally build a 26 story dorm based on a fraudulent sale of air rights, and NYPD/yuppie homocon attacks on queer/trans youth of color in the west village - i.e., the battle over the Christopher Street pier.

No, scratch that, the latter is far worse, because it ignores the immense social and political differences between a multi-billion dollar real estate behemoth like NYU and an amazing , bottom-up organization of working class and un/underemployed queer/trans street kids like FIERCE. The claim that NYU students are being discriminated against by Andrew Berman is problematic on at least three levels. 1)The neighborhood residents are suing NYU, not NYU students. There are already a number of NYU dorms in the area, and the question is not whether NYU is building a dorm there, at this point, as much as whether NYU's dorm will be a 13 story dorm or a 26 story dorm. 2)The power differential between NYU and the east village is significantly different than what the WSN editorial board represents it as being. NYU is the largest private landowner in the city and has been continuosuly buying up downtown property at a rapid pace, privatizing public space and taking housing units off the market. To claim that any opposition to this represents "anti-student" discrimination is apalling. 3)The link the article tries to make between NYU students in the east village and LGBT people in the west village collapses and glosses over the role of NYU in creating a downtown in which queer youth of color are apparently personae non gratae and the cenrality of racialized and gendered logics of spatiality and visuality at work in the struggle over the West Village as a space where queer youth of color are or are not welcome and the relative class privilege - and whiteness - of most NYU undergraduates. I don't mean to suggest that people who own property on east 12th street may not in some cases be yuppie NIMBYers, but under no circumstances does that somehow make what NYU is doing any less indefensible or allow indignant WSN editors to colonize queer youth's struggles for social justice as a means to sidestep questions of privilege and power in understanding the dynamics of urban development and gentrification.

edit:A little clarification:

I don't mean to suggest that all NYU undergrads are rich or white. Many aren't. Many of them are fighting for tuition reform. Nor am I unaware of NYU's celebrated "queer friendly" status, or in any position to refute this designation. But i do think that organizations like FIERCE force those of us who regularly interact with either end of the village to confront the way it has been (re)racialized as a gentrified, opulent space in recent decade, and whom the architects of the new village have sought to displace, and why. And whatever investment NYU has in it's "edgy progressive" reputation, we would be remiss to ignore NYUs role in crafting the west village so invested in policing and obliterating the spaces of queer youth of color...

I welcome critical perspectives on this, as always.