Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

None of you know this, but there are several unpublsihed draft posts for this blog i never finished.  I have been otherwise ignoring it though, I admit.  But I've been doing some other writing elsewhere, cranking out a dissertation chapter draft, co-writing an essay for an edited volume (more on that in a future post,) and writing an essay on occupation and student struggles for this e-book dossier on the Occupy movement edited by Rana Jaleel, A.J. Bauer, Cristina Beltran, and Andrew Ross and published in cooperation with the Social Text collective.  Many other friends and comrades contributed to the volume, and I urge anyone still aware of this blog's existence to check it out.

dispatches from the dissertating.

Yes, this blog still exists.

ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope.  I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota.  In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities.  It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal.  The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability.  So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus?  I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.

You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.

Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931

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.

make NYU not abhorable

I was never entirely comfortable with the slogan "take back nyu," if only because NYU was never ours, always anathema to the university i have spent much of the last decade trying to create, always the enterprise university, the engine of gentrification and commoditization fueled by precarious labor and massive debt burdens. That is, until wednesday, when dozens of students took over the 3rd floor of Kimmel, took the space not "back" (this was not reaction) but for the purposes of a wide-ranging but interconnected set of demands - disclosure, divestment, recognition, collective bargaining, justice, openness, transparency.

Just before noon today, the NYU administration, in a strategy built entirely upon lies and fear, summoned the negotiators under the pretense that it had come in good faith, but instead secluded them from the other occupiers and told everyone they were suspended, a group which included friends and former students of mine. Then the security guards rushed the Kimmel Marketplace, and it was over. (What better site for an occupation at a university so explicitly ruled by neoliberal logics of profit maximalization, privatization of public space and resources, and ruthless disciplinary repression of workers and other movements?)

A couple scattered thoughts as I try now to focus on my dissertation proposal. First, this outcome has the potential to be extremely demobilizing, which is certainly what NYU intends. Let's not let this happen. Too many people put too much on the line to let this be anything other than a beginning, a point from which to stage new struggles to transform the university into a space of justice and democracy rather than the finanicalization of immaterial and service labor, the accumulation of cognitive and other capital. NYU is trying to suspend and unspecified number of protesters and evict and ban them from its residence halls. The university is trying to forclose upon its future, to eat, as the old New Left would have put it, its young. So I think a task for those of us who share with those who went in a vision for a transformed university is to develop strategies for countering these attacks and moving forward, building stronger movements and expanding our reach and our demands.

"2,4,6,8: John Sexton is an asshole"
"3,5,7,9: Where's my fucking contract?"
- psychology graduate student, GSOC strike, 2005-2006

convenient abjection?

In a rather craven and transparent move, the NYU administration is attempting to 'disown' and thus disqualify the protesters by branding them as outside agitators.

Take Back N.Y.U. has been a vocal presence on campus for the last few years, said Lynne Brown, the senior vice president for university relations. Ms. Brown said that she believed only about half of the protesters were from N.Y.U. and that the rest probably included students from the New School, which had its own student occupation in December during protests over the school’s embattled president, Bob Kerrey.

Ms. Brown said the university will allow the students to remain in the cafeteria through the night and will give them access to restrooms.

The notion that NYU, a "private university in the public service" is only accountable to those who pay tuition to it, its "customers," if we are willing to traffic in the neoliberal frame which has governed the institution for well over a decade now is not only specious but indeed evinces the logics of administration and governance of which Sexton fancies himself the greatest ideologue and his administration the zenith. (Disclaimer: i couldn't sleep last night for the second night in a roaw, so i am not sure if anything i'm writing makes any sense.) This is the logic of the university against which the folks in the cafeteria are actively in revolt.

That said, there were folks from CUNY and the New School and Columbia there last night, mostly, i suspect, on the outside, but the occupation is not the work of "outside agitators," arising instead from very real antagonisms and structural conditions produced by seven years of rapid tuition hikes, administrative fiats, questionable investments, and imperial hugs. That the occupiers have declared solidarity with comrades in the UK, Greece, Italy, Rochester, and on fifth avenue in no way exculpates the NYU University Leadership Team for its venal neoliberalism, its arrogant attacks against the academic and urban commons, and its evangelical fervor for the bottom line above all else, that is, the superexploitation of precarious and transient labor in the form of undergraduate work study, graduate employees, adjuncts, and postdocs, not ot mention migrant construction labor in Abu Dhabi, etc. This occupation, as VP brown would realize if she knew any of the students who are behind the barricades, is very much in and of NYU even as it participates in a larger transnational conversation about the spatial politics of the global university and the future of the city.

one more thing

An update from the folks inside, at least four of whom are former students, (I have had some awesome students) and many of whom are friends and colleagues. I feel conflicted about not being there with them, but i have to perform my labor. I think this is important enough to merit conversation in section tomorrow. Regardless, I'll be back on the west 4th street sidewalk tomorrow afternoon (after i teach) shouting loud so the folks inside, and the city, and John Sexton and Marty Lipton and Ken Langone and Catherine Reynolds and Barry Diller and Anthony Welters can hear.

well, we finally did it.


ACTUALLY, THAT'S MINE.
or why we finally, really took back nyu.

WHAT’S MINE? THE UNIVERSITY, OF COURSE. IT’S YOURS, TOO!

A group of student-empowering, social-justice-minded rabblerousers have occupied the Marketplace at Kimmel and we refuse to move until our demands are met. All are encouraged to join us on the third floor and help us sustain this occupation until NYU complies with our demands. Our demands are as follows:

-Full, annual disclosure of NYU’s operating budget and endowment.

-The election of a student body whose purpose is the socially

responsible investment of NYU’s funds and all of whom are full, voting members of the Board of Trustees. That this body investigate NYU’s investments in war and genocide profiteers, specifically the Israeli occupation of Gaza.

-That tuition be stabilized; that no student pays more tuition than they did their first year. That the University meet 100% of students’ government-calculated financial need.

-That all NYU employees, including graduate students, are granted union rights, and that work study employees are allowed collective bargaining rights.

-That NYU provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, and that it offers scholarships for 13 Palestinian students annually.

-That NYU grant public access to Bobst Library and that student groups get priority when reserving space in all NYU-owned or –leased buildings.

We apologize for inconveniencing the loyal lunchgoers of the Kimmel Marketplace, but we are not sorry for causing a disruption! Established channels have been insufficient to make our voices heard by the administration, and we have waited too long to be taken seriously. By disrupting the University’s functioning now, we are forcing the administration to deal with those people it depends upon the most—we, the students!

Our demands, though many and varied, are united by the desire to empower students to take part in the governance of their University.

By making public the endowment and budget, and establishing a student voice in the investment of funds and on the Board of Trustees, we are creating a means for active student participation in the administration of the University. By providing union rights for graduate students and collective bargaining rights for work study employees, we are guaranteeing that the students upon whom the University depends for labor are treated and compensated fairly.

By drastically reducing the amount that tuition can increase, we are forcing the University to reassess its spending and cut back appropriately (instead of making a low-income student take out more loans, perhaps the University can build one less abroad site). By forcing the University to meet 100% of students’ financial need, we are ensuring that students spend less time working multiple jobs to make ends meet and more time making the University a place where active minds flourish.

By demanding investigation into war and genocide profiteers, providing aid to Gaza, and offering scholarshipts to Palestinian students, we are demanding that the University heed our own voices immediately. Through these demands we are also stating our solidarity with the students who have occupied their universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere demanding aid for war-torn Gaza.

By demanding students have priority in reserving space in NYU buildings, we are literally making space for ourselves in the University, and putting students above groups who rent out space in our buildings. By allowing the public access to Bobst Library and the wealth of knowledge it contains we are building a bridge between NYU and the community it so often displaces, while empowering students of all universities (as well as alums of our own) to take part in information that is too often consolidated in the Ivory Tower.

We have waited too long for the University to respond of its own volition. We have let administrators push us around through endless red tape, through never-ending tuition hikes, through unfair labor practices, through secrecy and lies, through power being consolidated in a tiny group of (mostly) rich white dudes who know nothing about our lives as students. We wrote John Sexton a nice letter and struggled to contain our rage in Town Hall after Town Hall; we’ve agitated and tabled and built our coalition. Our demands serve and concern all students. We refuse to dignify the University’s lack of response with our own inaction.

So we take action! We’ve got food and sleeping bags and good friends and we are not going anywhere. Join us! This is a sleepover for student empowerment, a party for participation in the University, a disruption for democracy, an occupation for all!

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.

I spent most of the day in the panopticon, reading Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty instead of grading. Watched the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on the long subway ride home, and holy fuck (I had to sit down on my couch and not do anything for like five minutes after i finished it to let my heart slow down), and then read the kakistotle (that's a greek joke. aristotle from aristos, best, kakistos=worst, also a demon in buffy season three.) I like the Sugrue book a lot, narrative but also theoretically grounded and both deeply enmeshed in the archive and demonstrating widespread knowledge of recent historiography of the long civil rights movement. I would like to see him engage more directly with some of Nikhil Singh's critiques of a few of the figures and movements he discusses, but maybe that's another book?

The ontario provincial government has ordered striking York U graduate employees in CUPE 3903 to return to work, and the workers are returning without a contract. This is no resolution.

Some folks from the Republic Window Workers' Strike stopped by Judson yesterday and it was inspiring to hear firsthand abotu what went down and what the struggle and the victory meant to the folks who fought and won it. Kudos to jobs with justice for making folks submit questions on index cards to minimize the sectarian rostrum hoggers. I sat behind the folks from DWU and next to the dissident TWU contingent, which was interesting. Ed Ott is pretty awesome as CLC presidents go. Oh, btw, Boycott Stella D'Oro. The factory, oddly enough, is a couple blocks away from where i went to high school. They tried to force the workers to accept some severe cutbacks and workers have been on strike for nearly six months.

It's been too unproductive a weekend, though mostly enjoyably so. I spent Friday in the great pangatsbycon banging out the latest draft of my proposal, this time with 100% fewer parenthetical phrases and a half assed, if complete, literature review. Hung out with Johana, then saturday read some Autonomia and watched the latest episodes of Battlestar Galactica (OMG Felix) and Damages (not on hulu, and not really very good) and procrastinated more than i should.

More procrastination today. Watched Donnie Brasco, which takes Goodfellas' (failed) attempt to demystify and deflate the mobster several steps further - Pacino's Lefty is a tracksuit-wearing, washed up schlub of a gangster, though Johnny Depp in the starting role sort of impedes this particular project simply by virtue of the fact that Al Pacino! and Johnny Depp! are starring together in a mob movie!. The scene in which the FBI high ups tip off Michael Madsen's character about Brasco/Pistone also makes no sense. Anyway, then I read more autonomia and watched Stepbrothers. concurring with my brother's initial diagnosis after having viewed an advance screening before it hit theaters, that the film is rather bizarre.

Tonight I'll prep for class tomorrow, which means Plato and Aristotle. Neither of whom I've read since high school greek class. This was the most boring blog post ever, so let me refer you to the latest manifesto to have emerged from the New School Occupation. I object to some of the assertions they make about the supposed inherently reactionary or bourgeois nature of meetings and organizing strategy, and the disciplinary chest-beating is similarly a little tiresome, but there's nevertheless much here that's valuable. I particularly appreciate the critique of critique and the elaboration of the university as battleground for a range of social struggles, the refusal to fall prey to exceptionalist, bourgeois accounts of the university's removal from the social, from the "real world." The university is of the real world, is in the real world, and so are the struggles to transform/destroy/replace/your verb here it. The problematization of the university here is eloquently articulated and ably expresses the urgency and necessity of such organizing and such struggles.

II. The university shall never again be merely the lukewarm appendage to civil society that our (hypo)critical theorists so highly acclaim; rather, as our friends in Greece have shown, the university can also be an appendage to civil war, a space in which impenetrable bodies and inflammable knowledges can conspire towards the dissolution of their very condition, that is, separation. Yet it is exactly that sharing between life and thought that is preemptively banned from the territories marked under the sign “university.” Such territories betray their innocence not only in their concrete unfolding, but in their very name. There is nothing “universal” about the university anymore except the universality of emptiness. Students and professors spend their waking lives covering up this void with paltry declarations and predictable nonactions. The void should no longer be avoided; it should be unleashed.

Seceding from the university is no longer enough. One must bring it down as well.

Now back to your regularly scheduled commodity fetishism, which should indicate exactly how divorced I, and this blog, have been from anything resembling the political of late.

Nate Evans - "Pardon my innocent heart"
Tony Donne's Hollywood Quintet - "Micaela"
Andrea Williams - "Love Makes Me Do Foolish Things"
King Django - "What's The Use"
Rufus Thomas - "The Dog"
Sonic Youth - "In the mind of the bourgeois reader" lol
kaleidoscope - "holidaymaker"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Luna"
Outkast - "Decatur Psalm"
Manu Dibango - "Aphrodite Shake"

Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.

This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?

on the logic of budget cuts and hiring freezes

And so the scapegoat mythology of "Hunt the Parasite" - the lynchpin of the crisis ideology - comes to the fore... A sort of vague egalitarianism emerges, which scrutinizes the income of the clerical worker, the student, and the tertiary worker, and says nothing, for example, about the transformation of capital-which-is-productive-of-interest: in its most shameful form, this egalitarianism assumes tones of workerist chauvinism. It appears that it is no longer capital that exploits the worker but the postman, the milkman, and the student. These are the first shots in that "class analysis" which will become the official ideology and the preferred argument of the super-paid editorial writers of the Regime's press. It is a crude and effective ideology...

-Sergio Bologna, "A Tribe of Moles," 1977

This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.

Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.

I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.

Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.

Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)

At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.

Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.

EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer

Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.

Charlie Parker - Donna Lee

Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school

Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?

Darkness - Gamith

Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.

Specials - Blank Expression.

De la Soul - Supa Emcees

The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.

conrecerca

I'm sitting in the panopticon - which I'm lately starting to think about as the Great Gatsby of academic libraries, its massive empty space (and dearth of books) in the middle of space-starved downtown manhattan as equivalent to Gatsby's shelves of unread volumes, as conspicuous consumption transitions to conspicuous waste.

Anyway I'm trying to finish one of two remaining incompletes, on Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism," and i'm about three pages in.

On the subway in from Brooklyn, i read Nick Dyer-Witheford's peice on class composition and multitude theory in Werner Bonefeld's new Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, (Autonomedia 2008) which Andy hipped me to (did i just say "hipped me to?" This is what happens when you go to grad school. You forget how to speak/write/think because you're so anxious about the academy's pathological, reactionary politics of value and unspoken - at least in public - ethics of competition.) It's a really smart and useful attempt to evaluate the critiques of Hardt and Negri from other autonomists, to think about the utility of the multitude concept in a modified form, and to suggest and highlight forms of inquiry and analysis which proceed from such a utility, like Precarias a la Deriva and Collectivo Situaciones. It's a really useful, synthesis, as so much of Dyer-Witheford's tend to be. I'm already thinking about how to integrate some of the insights into my diss proposal.

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.

ABC news has a lengthy report this morning on the conditions of migrant labor in Abu Dhabi, with particular focus on the NYU satellite campus.

"We don't believe that they are doing nearly enough to avoid the exploitation of workers in their own projects," said Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the organization's Middle East and North Africa division. She said that the institutions have not made public commitments to ensuring that its construction workers are not exploited.

Whitson says that while the UAE government needs to investigate, prosecute and penalize contactors that break the nation's labor laws, these organizations need to take responsibility themselves. These measures, she said, should include reimbursing workers who are found to have paid an illegal recruiting fee (one of the most common abuses that can total as much as $3000), ceasing dealings with contractors who use recruiters who charge such fees, ensuring that housing and work sites are safe and that health and safety records are kept, and guaranteeing that workers' passports are not confiscated and that monthly wages are paid regularly.

quo usque tandem abutere, Zache, patientia nostra

Marc Bousquet has posted video of the interview he did with Andy, Monika, Rana, Steve, and me at last April's Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis. View it here. Monika has many insightful things to say in the latest installment. I am the fidgety bearded man in the back.

I'm feeling ambivalent yet again about graduate school, about professionalization, about my project, about New York, about the skillsets required to perform the administrative labor of the professoriate, and to play the game of marketing my self and my project as a graduate student, but this will seem like whining to folks not in the academy, and, i am sure, many in it so i will stop there. I believe very much that another university is possible, i'm just not sure i want to stick around and wait for it much longer, and, with teaching, my diss proposal, and my incompletes all weighing on me, i'm not really doing enough to bring it about at the moment. Enough about that.

I'm flying to Aluquerque tomorrow for my first American Studies Association conference. My passport is a mess and i really hope they let me fly on it. Right now i'm sitting here in my apartment preparing to return to planning my lesson for tommorow, wanting to go to sleep, and wanting more to figure out a way to do work that has a very different relationship to institutional logics of exclusion, control, discipline, and privilege. I'd rather be (figuratively) storming woodbridge (not as a return, which is impossible and politically useless, but as a continuing ethic) than sequestering myself in bobst, two floors beneath sexton, revisiting two year old trauma.

Cleaning up my apartment a bit tonight i accidentally ripped my picket sign from the March '03 strike. My superstituos side, the side that had to go to sleep with a stuffed animal into my tweens lest Freddy Krueger murder me in my sleep, feels gnawing anxiety about this. The rest of me feels gnawing anxiety about lots of other things.

"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.

social entrepreneurship?

The first in the speaker series endowned by Catherine B. Reynolds, NYU Trustee for Life, student debt profiteer (I'd link, but the WSN site is down,) and purveyor of a $50,000 scholarship to the guy who's responsible for our company union debacle, is none other than (drumroll)

Union-busting anti-union ideologue Whole Foods CEO John Mackey!!!11!1??!1!

That's the NYU vision of social change right there.

On strike for part-timers in Canada

The chroned news blog reports that faculty and librarians are on strike at the University of Windsor.

The union says it is fighting for more money for part-time faculty members, saying they receive the lowest wages in Ontario, according to The Windsor Star. Other issues include salary, teaching standards and concerns over the university’s attempts to introduce “instructional teachers,” who have less experience and, in many case, less-advanced degrees than the current faculty. The union believes such teachers would have a negative impact on teaching, research, and graduate programs. The faculty voted 96 percent in favor of today’s strike.