Eight years, three months, and eleven days ago, GSOC-UAW's first contract with NYU expired.  Since the NLRB had struck down its own four year old precedent a year earlier, and NYU had unilaterally decided to make GSOC a thing of the past, this meant that August 31 was the last time NYU's graduate employees had union recognition.  In protest, many of them (this was the day before I started grad school, also the day I signed a union card) sat down in the street and blocked traffic in front of Bobst library, the site of invisible grad employee labor, of so many student suicides, and of the offices of President Sexton and his university leadership team.

Today GSOC is once again recognized, winning an American Arbitration Agency-supervised election by a total of 620 votes to 10.  I'm in a mild state of shock, and I'm pretty misty eyed, thinking about all of the people that made this possible, from the newer cohorts I don't even know to folks like Mike, Susan, Maggie, Tracy, Paul, Jenny, Franny, George, Steve, Andy, Miabi, Joanna, Leigh Claire, Jessie, Bekah, Sonia, Tricia, Stephanie, and everyone else who helped lead the union through the strike, Brenda and Mary and Anita and Jeffrey and Maris, who gave up a year or more of their lives for a union they didn't even belong to, the undergraduates who stormed Bobst, Rana, Patrick, Stefanie, Dacia, Lauren, Kari, Emmy, Tammy, Natan, Liz, Alex, David, Burgard, Magali, "the twins," union peter, sarah, paulette, lilly, and everyone else who sustained the union through the house of delegates and years of limbo and FAR4 and John Sexton's imperial circumatlantic (and pacific) expansions and debt-financed fire island bungalows.  Apologies to many folks I forgot to mention.

I have many criticisms of UAW strategy and leadership, but the refusal to walk away and abandon GSOC, or to sell it out to administrative trap doors like the 2005 open shop proposal or FAR4 or a TA-only, Washington Square only unit deserve a lot of praise and made this moment possible.  As folks think about what the second contract will look like, I hope one thing that people mull is a refusal to agree to noninterference in academic matters, a clause which both limited the scope of what GSOC could do (academic matters are our working conditions) and gave NYU some admittedly cynical ammunition with which to demonize the union and the grievances it filed while trying to contest administrative moves to staff union jobs with then non-union and much cheaper adjunct labor.  If the only power we have is in our labor and our ability to refuse to perform it, I don't think that academic workers should be afraid to organize to transform our workplaces beyond the limited scope of fordist collective bargaining regimes.  I also think it's important to remember that without ongoing shopfloor organizing across the university, the union is vulnerable to future attack and weakened even in the absence of any unionbusting initiative on NYU's part, so the question of a sustainable culture of constant and ongoing organizing becomes paramount.  Finally, the NYU strike and subsequent struggle have been linchpins for the broader movement across the US of the organization of contingent academic workers at private universities.  Workers at Columbia and Penn got arrested with us multiple times.  GESO sent four organizers and a researcher down for the duration of the strike and months afterwards.  I think it's important that GSOC find similarly powerful ways to be in solidarity with these and future struggles in the coming years.  Congratulations and thank you to everyone who made this possible.

Eight Years

Thanksgiving marked the eighth anniversary of John Sexton's so-called "threat letter," a long, rambling missive, released late in the strike's third week, which dropped the proverbial hammer on hundreds of striking teaching and research assistants, informing strikers that if they did not return to work by December 5, 2005, they would be fired from the positions they were striking and banned from further teaching at the university for an additional two semesters.  The punitive blacklist was ultimately rescinded, but the threats had their intended effect, sending many strikers back to work, mostly over the winter break.  Those who remained on strike eventually felt the full brunt of administrative repression, when the administration made good on its threats.  Beginning in late January of 2006, graduate student teaching assistants and instructors, first in the Sociology ad Spanish departments, and later, the vast majority of strikers in the english department, recieved letters from a mysterious administrator in the provost's office named Frank Hoppensteadt, PhD, informing them of their impending pay cutoff.  There was a grievance process on the university's terms (the union contract's expiration having been the cause of the strike in the first place) which went nowhere, and the strike gradually shifted from its semi-euphoric (semi because harassment and threats circulated intradepartmentally throughout the first few weeks, leading, for instance, to strikers in the Math department returning to work very quickly) to its apocalyptic phase, a generalized sense of frustration and hopelessness which my blog posts from the moment mid-late february, 2006, let's say) both acknowledge and attempt to move beyond with occasionally triumphalist language and frequent gestures towards New Haven as roadmap. 

Late last week, the UAW and NYU reached an agreement.  GSOC will withdraw its two petitions before the national labor relations board for TAs and RAs at NYU and NYUpoly, respectively.  The challenge to the Bush administration's legalized excision of contingent graduate student academic workers from collective bargaining and federal labor-management regimes will have to wait indefinitely.  In return, the university  administration has agreed to an election in less that two weeks for a bargaining unit which includes teaching assistants at both NYU and NYUpoly, a larger unit than the one the strike failed to preserve, and administrators have also importantly agreed to remain neutral and begin bargaining quickly in the event that the union indeed wins the election.  

I first heard about all of this in the middle of my panel at ASA, although I did not learn details immediately.  The full announcement, inlcuding one statement by President Sexton and Bob Berne and another joint statement by UAW officials and university administrators came early this week.  From those of us no longer actively organizing, which now means everyone who was around for the strike, and most of us who organized during the almost eight years since its end, there have been a range of emotions articulated in several different forms and venues, and reaction among others in the academic labor movement seems similarly unsettled, as folks try to make sense of whether this is some kind of sellout, or a worthy conclusion to a very long and very difficult struggle, pending, of course, an actual election victory and then all of the things that follow it, or neither, or both.  At the moment, and don't hold me to this, what we know about the agreement makes it look pretty good.  Though it will not change federal labor law, a victory at NYU after 8 years of administrative retrenchment and against one of the most aggressively expansionist, authoritarian, anti-union and anti-faculty administrations around, would likely spur rather than set back ongoing and future organizing at Yale, University of Chicago, and other private universities, though I am interested to hear from folks organizing there and elsewhere about how they interpret what this means and how it changes the strategy moving forward.  I do think that there is an argument to be made (and unions have been making it for well over a decade) for circumventing the ponderous and anti-worker NLRB process in any way possible.  However, GSOC will either need an eventual NLRB decision or a remarkably high level of organization - something we have struggled with in the past - to prevent a repeat of 2005, meaning another withdrawal of voluntary recognition, absent compulsory legal recognition under the National Labor Relations Act.   

Meanwhile, eight years to the day after the SCRC/GUS occupation of the tenth floor of Bobst library, eight years of organizing and waiting, dropped balls and slammed doors and clandestine organizing meetings at the four faced liar, on the second floor of dunkin donuts, at that shitty expensive bar on university place after the picket line, in the sociology department, at Liz's apartment, in SCA, in the old union office, and in the new union office the single GSOC Venceremos sticker which inexplicably remained fixed to a mirror in the West Wing bathroom on the tenth floor of Bobst, eight years of work-ins and the ghosts of the strike, eight years of phonebanking and wandering through unfamiliar departments and laboratories, eight years of picketing, incompletes, concern trolling from faculty and hostility from so-called colleagues, eight years of missed paychecks and slashed healthcare  and the whole archive of messy fucked up shit I won't go into here, it feels so strange to no longer be a part of the bargaining unit, to be on my way back to ALbany, frantically trying to find a job and finish my dissertation when I feel like I should instead be doing turnout or throwing police barriers through bobst's picture windows and declaring the reestablishment of the NYU commune or something.)

N.B.:  I started writing this post on 11/26, but finished it on 11/30 and will correct the date in a few hours.  Also, for more information about the deal and what GSOC is up to, keep checking http://makingabetternyu.org

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.

Resist, Occupy, Grade Papers

Today somewhere between 70 and 100 NYU graduate employees occupied the cavernous lobby of Elmer Holmes Bobst Panopticon for an hour and, wearing our "GSOC Is Here To Stay" t-shirts and a panoply of awesome signs created in a frenzy of creativity and unintentionally-inhaled marker fumes, graded, read, and otherwise made visible some of the many forms of the labor the university administration's been trying to occlude and obfuscate for so many years.

After a vicious anti-union campaign, after everything the bush administration could throw at us, we're not only still here, we're growing every day. Today's action sent a clear message to President Sexton and his "University Leadership Team," (Beckman, fresh from his 'mountainous region,' was wearing a puce fleece vest and looking about nervously) that we aren't going away, that we're in this for the long haul, that they might as well negotiate because none of the many ways they've tried to destroy our union have been successful and none will be.

I like actions - like one which took place six years ago last week - that combine the performative, the disruptive, and the practical (that is, the committee-building,) this action worked because it did this well. I'm excited for the next steps.

Oh, by the way, Watchmen (the movie) was atrocious, poorly directed, politically lobotomized, an utter failure at capturing or gesturing towards the comic's complex intertextualities and deconstructionist position. Indeed this was an over the top, milleresque, grim and gritty orgy of hypermasculinity and fascist aesthetics, exactly the sort of thing that Watchmen parodized and critiqued and which only Rob Leifeld ever thought it actually stood for. Alan Moore should be very glad his name was nowhere on this thing. I want my twelve fifty back.

occupiamo tutto

Just saw like fifty NYU folks and allies barricade themselves into the Kimmel "Marketplace" in a full on occupation of the space. A bunch of us GSOC folks (I'm on staff this semester - have I mentioned that here?) were there, though i have to teach in ten hours so i wasn't able to stay inside, and instead moved to the sidewalk solidarity demo when the cops shut down the building. I'm excited about what the folks inside have done and I'm awed and inspired. Seeing the barricades come down was one of my top five NYU moments.

FREE UNION PETER!

Anyway, here is the list of demands for folks who are interested:

At approximately 10pm tonight (Feb. 18), students of Take Back NYU! took over the Kimmel Marketplace. They have blockaded the doors and declared an occupation!
NYU is the latest university to join a wave of global student occupations in the name of student empowerment. The Kimmel Center for University life is official a reclaimed space.

What you can do:
Come support the occupation!
Send a letter to the administration in solidarity
Send an e-mail to your professors, peers, listservs, facebook groups you name it! Tell the world.
Have your parent write a letter or e-mail to the university
Print the following demands and distribute them far and wide:

DEMANDS

We, the students of NYU, declare an occupation of this space. This occupation is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Take Back NYU! coalition, and of campaigns from years past, in whose footsteps we follow.

In order to create a more accountable, democratic and socially responsible university, we demand the following:

1. Full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation.

2. Full compensation for all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation.

3. Public release of NYU’s annual operating budget, including a full list of university expenditures, salaries for all employees compensated on a semester or annual basis, funds allocated for staff wages, contracts to non-university organizations for university construction and services, financial aid data for each college, and money allocated to each college, department, and administrative unit of the university. Furthermore, this should include a full disclosure of the amount and sources of the university’s funding.

4. Disclosure of NYU’s endowment holdings, investment strategy, projected endowment growth, and persons, corporations and firms involved in the investment of the university’s endowment funds. Additionally, we demand an endowment oversight body of students, faculty and staff who exercise shareholder proxy voting power for the university’s investments.

5. That the NYU Administration agrees to resume negotiations with GSOC/UAW Local 2110 – the union for NYU graduate assistants, teaching assistants, and research assistants. That NYU publically affirm its commitment to respect all its workers, including student employees, by recognizing their right to form unions and to bargain collectively. That NYU publically affirm that it will recognize workers’ unions through majority card verification.

6. That NYU signs a contract guaranteeing fair labor practices for all NYU employees at home and abroad. This contract will extend to subcontracted workers, including bus drivers, food service employees and anyone involved in the construction, operation and maintenance at any of NYU’s non-U.S. sites.

7. The establishment of a student elected Socially Responsible Finance Committee. This Committee will have full power to vote on proxies, draft shareholder resolutions, screen all university investments, establish new programs that encourage social and environmental responsibility and override all financial decisions the committee deems socially irresponsible, including investment decisions. The committee will be composed of two subcommittees: one to assess the operating budget and one to assess the endowment holdings. Each committee will be composed of ten students democratically elected from the graduate and under-graduate student bodies. All committee decisions will be made a strict majority vote, and will be upheld by the university. All members of the Socially Responsible Finance Committee will sit on the board of trustees, and will have equal voting rights. All Socially Responsible Finance Committee and Trustee meetings shall be open to the public, and their minutes made accessible electronically through NYU’s website. Elections will be held the second Tuesday of every March beginning March 10th 2009, and meetings will be held biweekly beginning the week of March 30th 2009.

8. That the first two orders of business of the Socially Responsible Finance committee will be:
a) An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories.
b) A reassessment of the recently lifted of the ban on Coca Cola products.

9. That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.

10. That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.

11. Tuition stabilization for all students, beginning with the class of 2012. All students will pay their initial tuition rate throughout the course of their education at New York University. Tuition rates for each successive year will not exceed the rate of inflation, nor shall they exceed one percent. The university shall meet 100% of government-calculated student financial need.

12. That student groups have priority when reserving space in the buildings owned or leased by New York University, including, and especially, the Kimmel Center.

13. That the general public have access to Bobst Library.

Along with this, students have issued a

SOLIDARITY STATEMENT

We, the students of Take Back NYU! declare our solidarity with the student occupations in Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as those of the University of
Rochester, the New School for Social Research, and with future
occupations to come in the name of democracy and student power. We stand
in solidarity with the University of Gaza, and with the people of
Palestine.

"financial aid" is just work they don't acknowledge

"financial aid" is an interesting term. On an undergraduate level, it often conceals a massive labor system of debt and exploitation - see the fourth chapter of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works, online here. (Doesn't mean we shouldn't absolutely be organizing for it, but we have to do so critically, understanding the fundamental inequalities it doesn't resolve.) At NYU in recent years, the term has also come to stand in and ideologically erase and deny the labor of contingent teachers and researchers, as NYU reorganizes its job structures in anticipation of the possibility of a new NLRB and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act.

No longer are we workers, now we are not even "graduate students who teach," but instead "students who recieve financial aid," not workers, but instead the overprivileged welfare queens of the academy, lucky to be here, lucky to be afforded the privilege of doing the "non-work" we are permitted to do.

This strategy on the part of the administration has material effects. This semester the administration has merged fellowship stipend checks and paychecks into the same system. For some reason this led them to put me on a direct deposit program i never authorized, and my last paycheck went to a bank account i don't have. What this ultimately means is that I haven't been paid for a month.

Apparently, we need a union.

Staffing the "Global Network University"

In their profile of Bloom, the designated head of the Abu Dhabi campus, raise some of the common questions about the endeavor:

Criticisms of colleges starting campuses or programs in the Middle East often include issues of academic freedom, human rights (in particular in the Emirates, concerns about migrant workers’ rights), and equal access and opportunities for women and Jews.

Lumping these together seems irresponsible to me, since some of the folks who've been loudest on the migrant worker issues have also been concerned with the orientalist assumptions involved in some of the ways gender, homosexuality (not even mentioned here) and Judaism in the middle east are being talked about. Here, the latter prove a smoke screen to allow the administrator-select to avoid discussing the former:

On the latter issue, “I am Jewish, as it is well-known,” Bloom said Monday. “I see the institution as committed to diversity, and that my appointment is emblematic of the diversity to which it is committed.”

“I know that the Abu Dhabi government will make it possible ... for us to include faculty and students from wherever they come.”

Thankfully, IHE also talked to Andrew Ross:

NYU’s Faculty Senators Council chair did not respond to e-mail and voice-mail messages inquiring about Bloom’s selection Monday. Andrew Ross, chair of NYU’s American Association of University Professors chapter and a professor and chair of the department of social and cultural analysis, said he was surprised that someone from outside NYU would be leading the Abu Dhabi branch.

“The way we’ve understood it is that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi wants some kind of facsimile of NYU on site in Abu Dhabi. I guess it would make sense for someone to know the culture of NYU to be in that figurehead position, executive position,” said Ross, who has questioned the motives and assumptions behind the campus and other similar initiatives.

At the same time, Ross continued, “Swarthmore isn’t just any liberal arts college … it’s one that’s known for its open and free speech culture. Surely that’s part of the message.”

“There’s still a widespread skepticism about the project, I would say,” Ross said, surmising that a main reason for the continuing skepticism was that the branch campus was a top-down rather than a faculty-driven endeavor. NYU’s AAUP has been working with Human Rights Watch to draft and push for the adoption of a code of conduct to govern labor practices in the construction and maintenance of the Abu Dhabi campus. The AAUP is also advocating for the establishment of a permanent tenured faculty in Abu Dhabi to safeguard academic freedom.

And interestingly Sexton responds:

“We view the faculty as being exactly the same as faculty we have in New York in all respects,” said Sexton. He said that tenure decisions will be up to individual schools and departments, but expects a significant portion of the Abu Dhabi campus’s faculty to be tenured or tenure-track.

This isn't much of an answer, though, because he's not telling us whether the faculty from the middle east and south asia who are not part of the Washington Square Campus's tenure(less) system will be able to earn tenure at NYU Abu Dhabi - the "significant portion" here could easily be a reference to the NYU faculty Sexton wants to serve "tours of duty" at the A.D. Institute. And there's no commitment here to ensure just working and living conditions for the migrant workers who'll build and staff the new campus. For more on the campaign to get NYu to commit to fair labor at branch campuses, check out the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU, sign the petition, and be on the lookout for upcoming events.

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.)

Happy May Day

That's GEO/University of Michigan organizers celebrating their contract victory after a one day strike earlier this semester. I stole it from Youtube.

Here's another one, which takes us from Lawrence 1912, Joe Hill, Lucy Parsons, through the 1934 San Francisco longshoremen's strike, up to Cesar Chavez and the Delano Grape Boycott.


And some footage of the 2006 LA May Day March...:

Marc Bousquet reports on McGill's unionbusting as the strike there continues into its third week.

Meanwhile the Washington Square News, which spent the second half of the strike parroting administration anti-union rhetoric, is welcoming the Kennedy bill and the "return" of graduate employee unions. I welcome the sentiment, and I'm glad the new editors have their heads on straighter, but Prince's comments upon hearing "Sexy Back" seem appropriate nevertheless.

rethinking rethinking the university

Some hopefully constructive reflections on what was overall an incredible experience.

The awesome:

• exciting, brilliant papers from folks like Isaac Kamola and Eli Meyerhoff from University of Minnesota, Tim from the Counter-Cartographies Collective, Eli Thorkelson from U of Chicago. , NYU's own Lena Sze, and Morgan Adamson's autonomist Marxist reading of student debt. And many others. The focus on autonomia was really useful for me - using autonomist theories of the affective and immaterial to think about the university is something i've been thinking about in terms of my own work since my junior year of college. It was really incredible to see the amazing, innovative work folks were doing with this scholarship and these theoretical frameworks.
  
• exciting, inspiring conversations with folks from across the academy.
• It snowed all weekend and I walked across the Mississippi River on a freaking bridge.

The "problematic"

• With a couple of exceptions there was a conspicuous absence of a race analysis in a lot of the panels - the ones I went to at least, and I went to most of them. Indeed race is barely even incidental to my own contribution. This is a bit disconcerting given how racialized the neoliberal university is, the extent to which its projects are racial projects as defined by Omi and Winant. Nor did my recuperation of the virus, as Rana pointed out, acknowledge at all the history of AIDS activism to which such moves owe much. Shout outs to ugly words.
  
• suggestion by one panelist that the future of movements over the rights of contingent teachers & researchers would not be in the labor movement. He dismissed the Yale fight as a fiasco and the GSOC strike similarly. I assume he was talking, with regards to Yale, about the May 1 2003 vote, which may have been a tactical mistake - definitely not for me to say - but was ultimately lost by about 40 votes because of a vicious anti-union campaign. Rebuilding was quick and effective and GESO built back to majority and struck by itself two years later. Fiasco? Not so much. As for GSOC, see the last paragraph of my comments from our panel. There were farcical aspects to what happened but to dismiss the totality of what we did, what we learned, and what's happened as a result as a "fiasco" is too simple. I respect this scholar's politics and I respect his work a lot, but this was frustrating. Not even sure whether I should be posting this. Particularly since i included his name in my last post. Perhaps I misinterpreted his intentions or meaning, but I don't think i did.
  

The completely terrifying

• The Big Red Box. From Elizabeth Kissling's paper on branding campaigns and contract negotiations at Eastern Washington University. Check out those fucked up neoliberal identity politics.
  

I was, on the whole, humbled as well as deeply excited by the conversations talking place and the kinds of interventions people were making. I'm excited to see where this all goes.

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

Dream School, Deferred.

The Washington Square News finally picks up a story the Chronicle's blog reported last Thursday, that NYU, after five straight years of inspiring the young with dreams of gentrification, Must-See-TV sitcom-y verisimilitude, and endless shopping opportunities, is no longer the nation's number one dream school, replaced by Harvard.

The reason? While NYU's bumped tuition over 5% every year for the last seven, and in its "restructuring" plan promises to do so even more in the future (in addition to job 'attrition' and a massive speed up and an increased centralization of power in the hands of the ULT,) Harvard just announced massive financial aid reform targeted at middle class households - problematic in that it's more of an admissions lure and financial risk game than aid to/for those who really need it, but anything that ends student debt peonage has its merits, and NYU, where undergrad financial aid is almost non-existent, should pay attention.

Also, there's an interesting piece in IHE today about how unions are thinking about and organizing around the issues of full-time adjuncts and another piece, particularly important given NYU's recent pronouncements, on increasing and excessive workloads for university clerical and technical employees...

On getting over before we go under.

Title taken from James Brown's "funky president," which was playing in Chipotle at around 11 AM today as i wolfed down a burrito before running off to the GSOC-organized forum The Future In Question: NYU Graduate Students Two Years After The Union Contract. (I wasn;t sure whether it was an omen of neoliberal cooptation or as ghostly encouragement for our continuing endeavors.

So five years ago Thursday, just after Education In The Streets, GESO hosted a teach-in in First & Summerfield's main chapel. I remember all the speakers, and Brenda Carter's introductory remarks. i have a pretty sick memory when it comes to FHUE events and UOC meetings. (1199 has another move!) But what I remembered most from that panel (and most of that day after EITS remains a euphoric blur, albeit possibly because of the "Trash Yale" controversy) was Gordon Lafer's comment that an undergraduate education at Yale was deeply an "education in cynicism." This stuck out so much that it made it to the quote page, alongside David Lee's radical churchspeak and Mark Wilson's declaration that if Yale continued to push Local 35 members out of the picture (by subcontracting jobs,) then union members would "take the camera and make our own damn picture."

I think what struck me about Lafer's words was the radical possibility inherent in them - the contradictions of faculty and administrative liberal rhetorics and the practices of union busting, neoliberal expansion, globalizing yale, all foment cynicism about the way the university works, but also posit a direct relationship between the political economy of the neoliberal university and the subjectivity of undergraduates that at a moment when 500 undergraduates had just taken to the streets in the middle of a blizzard to participate in a very different vision of what the university could look like, was deeply intriguing.

I raise all this not for nostalgia's sake, but rather i'm reminded of it because of today's forum, which GSOC's been working on planning for months and from which i just returned. Lafer spoke on the first panel of the day, along with Joanna Holzman and Randy Martin. Joanna gave a general and personal history of GSOC, spoke eloquently, as she often does, about how the contract and the union radically changed her graduate school experience. Randy Martin performed a really useful analysis of the financialization of the university, talking about the speculative logics of financial aid reform or lacks thereof, about the ways that NYU's endowment and expansion plans solicit alumni donations which produce the endowment as a hedge fund analogue, as a high risk investment in the university's real estate futures, and the implications of the denial of the presence of labor (the installation "of labor in the center of every curriculum".) Lafer talked about that cynicism again, about student government as either a game or a pun, about the ironies of the Sextonian erasure of faculty governance, about the difficulties of rebuilding after bitter strikes and defeats and moving forward in the "university of broken people." Lisa Duggan, speaking on the second panel, after Monika summarized the really important arguments she and Mike Palm make in their essay in The University Against Itself,) spoke about the broader agendas to which we should aspire, the power of unions as sites from which to launch movements unwilling to cede to the university all terrain not comfortably relegated to the parochial domain of business unionism, although Stephanie Hsu raised an important point about how this labor towards something other than a contract gets remunerated and valorized. It's an interesting point that Stephanie made, but i think we're weaker as a union if we don't figure out ways to organize around what Rick Levin once scorned as a "broader agenda" - which includes thinking about labor and difference in complex and careful ways.

I'm inspired by the turnout, excited about the fact that GSOC just had our first large public event since the strike ended, excited to see where this new organizing takes us, what we can build together, what struggles we can undertake together. And in the spirit of this week and what it means to those of us who were in New Haven in March of 2003, "mountain, move out of my way."

I just found this on the old Ga/Ta issues propaganda OPA site. (Created during the strike, invisible since.)

"RHETORIC"

Without union representation, graduate students will have no recourse to voice their concerns to the administration.

"REALITY"
The University has put in place an interim grievance procedure, and a representative group of graduate students is now working to create a new, permanent grievance process.

Additionally, the University has asked the GA community to design a statement of rights and responsibilities for the graduate student body.

Man, that interim grievance procedure sure worked well. And the "GA Community's" statement of rights and responsibilities for the graduate student body? I'm sure it'll be along any day now. And when it comes, it'll fix everything! Or was that one of those throwaway Randy Washington/Bryan Levine emails I haven't looked at in two years and which did absolutely nothing other than accord the union busting a very small veneer of fake legitimacy?

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?

I have recently come to believe that The Impressions' "Meeting Over Yonder" is among the most brilliant attempts at an overt linking of vernacular and popular musical forms and social movement organizing. What interests me and excites me about Mayfield's very simple, understated song - far moreseo than later work like "We're a Winner" and "This is my Country," let alone "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go" or "We Gotta Have Peace," is that it is a song that is about an organizing conversation - "hey, let's go to this meeting." That's basically the song. It's a song about an organizing conversation which is itself an organizing conversation. Not pedantic lecturing a la Dead Prez or "You Must Learn"-era BDP, just "After talking it out you all will agree that the best thing for you and me is going to the meeting over yonder." It's dialogic. And it participates in the kind of movement building it seeks to depict, and vice versa. (I wish I had a youtube clip, but there's only a video of Paul Weller's Style Council band covering it in 1984.)

Anyway I raise this because I just got back from Amherst and CGEU a couple of hours ago. It went well. Our panel on the lessons of the NYU fight was both too long and too short. I think my inexplicable migraine led me to gloss over things i wanted to stress. I hope we were still effective in communicating our message - on the way our understanding of whatr constitutes organbizing and how to do it has shifted radically since the contract expired, what role the strike played, what we;ve done since, and what the terrain on which we now organize looks like. There was a pretty interesting discussion of how contingent academic worker unions (the UAW jargon is "Academic Student Employee," which strikes me as a)redundant, b)a somewhat patronizing way to distinguish TAs, Research assistants, et alii from adjuncts and postdocs, and c)phonetically annoying like those ridiculous abbreviations everyone at stanford was throwing around when i visited in 12th grade. But that's really beside the point. I was struck this year by how many very, very good organizers there are in so many of the different unions that currently constitute the graduate (and undergraduate) employee labor movement, how important it is to create spaces to promote collective action and concerted strategies across unions and federations, how much potential there is in the movements of casualized academics to strike at the heart of the university-hospital-real estate-postindustrial complex and help chart a better future for schools, cities, and workers.

Phonebanking tomorrow. That and writing.

To get to Amherst, MA from NYC the quickest route involves taking 95 (or Hutch/Merritt/95) to New Haven and then getting on 91 for about 85 miles. Driving home I noticed the Montowese exit. This reminded me of driving back from the worst movie ever in Julie's Range Rover, when Alek for some reason decided to pronounce this supposedly native american name as one might pronounce a certain affectione sobriquet for the cash money millionaire lil' wayne. This in turn animated some vestigial feelings of fond resentment and lingering dissapointment that my friends actually wanted to see Wolfgang Peterson's two and a half hour neoclassical rape fantasy over Mean Girls, which, i will grant you, has problems of its own.

I just pulled a Josh.

transit

The entry below seems as good a time as any to hang up the spurs, so to speak, and devote the time I've spent blogging these past four plus years, here and elsewhere, to other pursuits.

Perhaps I'll reappear here if i find something worth talking about. Regardless, I feel good about Tuesday's post as the last one of substance to appear on this blog, because I think it encapsulates much of what I have tried to do both on this blog and on the streets and in the labs, jails, etc, for the past two or so years. (Not to mention the six and a half years since i first stumbled into a USAY Leadership Conference at La Casa.)

Blogging's been an interesting experiment, particularly since the buildup to last year's strike, and I've found the community of commenters that's popped up around this blog and the networks in which it travels and participates extraordinarily important to my politics and my sanity. So thank you all for reading, commenting, and critiquing, and let's continue in our collective mission to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old (campus.)

In solidarity and struggle,

Me (the dude in the blue shirt standing up in the middle.)






photo:YDN

Two, Three, Many 425 College Streets

The organisation of university labour creates a new relation between dissenting academics and oppositional social movements. Negri and Lazzarato suggest that when universities were more marginal to capitalism, academics engage themselves with political movements from a position of apparent exteriority. Today, when university teachers find themselves unequivocally involved in capital's appropriation of ‘general intellect', possibilities emerge for academics to make more ‘transverse' connections. (21) Rather than descending from the heights to commit themselves to a cause largely external to their daily experience, academics become the carriers of particular skills, knowledges and accesses useful to movements - for example, those against the privatisation of public facilities, or in ‘living wage' campaigns supporting service workers on campus and in local communities - in which they participate on the basis of increasing commonalities with other members of post-Fordist ‘mass intellect'.
-Nick Dyer Witheford

"GESO's alliance with Locals 34 and 35 also signalled an important (albeit fragile and even transitory) ideological shift. If most graduate students at Yale saw themselves as budding members of the professional-managerial class, their fight for a union alongside clerical and service workers complicated that imagined class identity. In becoming part of the Federation of University Employees, graduate teachers redefined their status within the university: they would not be middle managers-in-training... Yale's very vision of the academy as a g(u)ilded realm wgerein graduate students apprentice under mentor-professors was itself brought into question." - Cynthia Young

"And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people — how great and close would that future be!" - Che Guevara

This is fairly amazing.

This blog turns an improbable and sometimes unbelievable three years old today, which is coincidentally the five year anniversary of the "Building an Equal Partnership" march and rally at the medical school. The ironies and continuities of organizing work on an academic calendar rarely cease.

I spent this august anniversary in New Haven, attending GESO's latest reworking of the Education In the Streets form developed by AJH and the UOC during the March 2003 strike, a Teach Out about/against/past casualization, which featured powerful contributions from Mike Palm, GESO members, a local 35 casual employee, Cary Nelson, Michael Denning, etc. It was the first action in New Haven i had been to since the 2005 strike. Turnout was excellent, but neither that, nor that it was awesome to see EF, EJ, NDB, ML, HH, GA, PR, etc., seems particularly important.

What is important is College Street, that site where imperial Yale borders what Wilhelm in 1971 noted was the force which had demonstrated to New Haven that said behemoth could be beaten, was vulnerable. (“Union Upsets Yale, 35-0,” Modern Times, 7/1/71.) If, as David Lee was so often quoted as claiming during the 2002 campaign for an alumni fellow seat on the Yale Corporation, the university administration had "met its Waterloo" in the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, then College Street is (only the most visible) battlefield of that struggle, a site enveloped by Yale's tendrils of capital, of gentrification, of biopower, but never subsumed into it, always threatening to destabilize yes, but also to transform, to augment, to radically reshape and reconstitute.

This is because of 425 college street, because of the movement that flourishes there, among clerical and technical workers, service and maintenance workers, graduate employees and hill residents, community organizers and undergraduates, hospital workers and (a proud few) faculty. This movement has grown amidst and despite 14 strikes in 66 years, fierce repression from the disciplinary apparatus of the university (just ask Young) and endless hours of meetings, visits, organizing conversations, and to delve further into questions of tactics would not be appropriate on a public weblog.

Suffice to say that I mention all of this not for the sake of some nostalgia for snow-strewn picket signs, "free the llamas," the nation drill squad, or Josh Eidelson's runaway metaphors involving houses and justice and other brilliant gesticulations, but rather because there is a very real sense in which this is what we need to create at NYU and elsewhere. This is the movement - or the outlines of the movement, at any rate, that we need to spread like a virus of justice and democracy across the university's fascist bodily metaphors, reversing and denaturing Sextonian slurs and Levinian stammerings. It is not that this model must be exported fully and without change. I am not even calling for "repetition with difference" but rather for a deep critical and political engagement with the kinds of organizing and tactics that have emerged in New Haven over these past seven decades. This is a call to work within that tradition, to build movements like those we glimpsed in the snow on March 6th and in the sun today, clogging the arteries of New Haven's power elite on September 13th and lighting candles on October 5th, in backyard meetings throughout the summer of 2003 and in 55 Whitney on August 26th, in the Financial Aid Office in February '05, blockading the power plants in '71, and screaming "BEEP BEEP YALE'S CHEAP" in '84.

Let's get to work.