addendum to the last post

Couple quick clarifications, because that last post got a bit sprawling and sloppy.  I want to try to clear up some points quickly before I fall asleep.

1. Unoriginal, but I think the role of the student new left in '68 and "the sixties" is somewhat overemphasized.  What does the broader "revolt against work" look like inside and outside of the university?  How might Russo's arguments be recast if we place them within the genealogy of the "long 1960s" which begin sometime in the late 1930s and end, depending on whom you ask, somewhere around 1973?

2.  I edited the stuff on the salt metaphor to remove or at least mute somewhat the active/passive binary as a frame for the distinction i'm trying to draw, since that binary smacks of masculinism.  I'm not sure I redeem the metaphor, but it felt kinda glaring to me as it was.

3.  I feel lately like I'm always a) defending politics organized around the point of production to poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites and b) defending, in both the abstract and in reference to historical and current contexts particular forms of unionism as radical and deeply important struggles.  I am sick of this, and I hate it when people look at me like I'm a trotskyist or something.  I mean, really, let's have a more nuanced understanding of the political and its molecular and capillary operations.  Or can we think in Gramscian/Stuart Hallian/ terms about the many sites and forms of struggle and contestation?  Which isn't to say I'm not in solidarity with poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites or people who get organizing around work but want to see the union as an always already compromised form or something.  I'm just not a fan of sectarian squabbling.  Well, unless (and I'm going to get shit for this) the ISO is involved, in which case I tend to have a rather short fuse based on past offenses, like lying at membership meetings, threatening to punch me in the face, etc.

I may have more to say on these subjects later.  For now I postpone Harvey & my diss in favor of Ruthie Gilmore's Golden Gulag.

Academic Neoliberalisms, comparative and otherwise

I just finished, this morning, Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart, which is a really brilliant account of the history of feminized labor and evangelical reformations of gender in the making of christian capitalism.  The first half adeptly sketches out the ways in which it's the immaterial, affective labor of entry-level Wal-Mart employees which makes possible the Ozarks' shift from the anticorporate populisms of the fin de siecle West to the christian corporate familial politics which obtain in the cultural politics of the world which Sam Walton stood as an imperfect metonym for.  Moreton's an excellent labor historian, and her grasp of how these transformations occur and the implications of her rereading of the history of the late twentieth century U.S. are profoundly important.

The second half of Moreton's book deals largely with the role of the corporate-religious-university nexus in the nationalization and globalization of Wal-Mart's corporate presence and (and through) its increasingly evangelical mode and ideology of "free enterprise," its connections to the surging new right, missionary evangelism and free trade neoliberalism in Latin America, and accumulation by dispossession and enclosure on an increasingly global scale.  The university - actually three universities - University of the Ozarks, Harding, and John Brown (not the militant abolitionist) - serve as sites of social reproduction, suturing the products of Wal-Mart workers' affective labor to the Republican Party, the New Right student movements (especially Students in Free Enterprise, or SIFE,) missionary christianity, and the origins of neoliberal globalization.

Moreton's description of the relationships between these universities and the growth of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. resonates for me with this week's readings in two important ways.  First, it offers an account of the kinds of classed destinies of the university and their relationships to students and study which are very different either from the kind of subversive criminality of the latter gestured to by Moten and Harney in the interview i discuss in a previous post, or in the episteme-wrecking shifts Alessandro Russo makes the case for in his essay "Destinies of The University."  Like Eli M, I have some difficulty with the rather broad rejection of "classism" as a social analytic for post'68 academic capitalism-or-whatever.  My problem, I think, is that there's too much slippage, Russo's "classism" is too broad and unwieldy a term, conflates neoliberal rearticulations of class into racialized and biopolitical representational frames with a political dissappearance of class as political demand, something I don't really see evidence for.  If the New Right found rather ingenious new ways to articulate race and class, the two were hardly strangers before 1968, and in both the U.S. and in Europe, new social movements have often transformed and expanded rather than discarded the class and labor politics of earlier movements.  Moreton's book, in fact, suggests how even in the absence of a labor metaphysic, the politics of class and the surplus labor of proletarianized women service workers lie at the heart of the rise of the largest corporation and employer in the U.S. and Mexico and do so in part through an ideological state apparatus organized around evangelical conservative universities which offer an important new explanation for but do not in any way debunk the ways in which class and the social relationships of accumulation and exploitation which class constitutes, structure both the social and the university.   Clearly the borderless subjects of Gokce Gunel's insightful ethnography of folks whose lives are affected by a U.S.-inspired, corporate, private university with a secluded, gated campus in northern Istanbul, are also relevant to the ways Moreton traces the movement of students, from Panama and Honduras and Mexico to the Ozarks and back, filtered through evangelical universities daily prayer meetings and Wal-Mart's corporate expansions into the global South.

I guess this has been more about Moreton than the polygraph journal.  That's in part, I think, because the essays in the journal I was most struck by were Morgan Adamson's great essay on "The Financialization of Student Life," the tail end of which I saw her present at the Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis in April of last year, and Eli M and Isaac Kamola's piece on enclosure and struggles over the university's commons, which I also first encountered as a presentation at the same conference.  And I've been thinking about that roundtable with Marc Bousquet and Fred Moten and Stafano Harney some more, thinking about study and how it might or might not be in excs of labor.  I've been thinking about the claim Moten and Harney made in a fantastic essay on professionalization and exodus in the university, that the "only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one," that the radical intellectual comes to steal from - and to escape to - the university, which is always a deeply compromised space.  Professionalization within it is thus cooptation, labor discipline, etc.  I'm not sure it can't be denied that the university is a place of refuge - the assumed subject here has to be an academic or at its furthest plausible limits an undergrad.  Non-academic employees at universities, particularly folks who are subcontracted and outsourced service labor, often have very different relationships to the institution.  But I also think that the false premises on which one comes to the institution need not necessarily be those of criminality.  Some unions ask militants who want to organize to take jobs at particular workplaces and to help organize from within.  Folks in the labor movement call this practice "salting."  The national right to work committee condemns it as a form of sabotage, destruction from within.  I think, whether deliberately or not, that this is more or less how I approach(ed) graduate school.  Not particularly interested in entering the profession, I came in large partha to organize.  This was probably stupid, and I don't think I've been as effective, whether as an organizer or as an academic, over the last four years and two months, as I would like, but I still think it's worth recognizing this as another possible subject position for the subversive intellectual within the university - not just to form gypsy encampments, but to constitute instead the undercommons as a site of  ferment, constant organizing and insurgency, and refusal of the university's modes of control and accumulation in ways which affirm rather than disrupt the prophetic modes of the undercommons' nomadic, liminal subjection.  I guess one could argue that this is a more authoritarian and hierarchical mode of being in common than the more affinity based coterie of criminals and gypsies and, most provocatively, "maroons" Moten and Harney envision, but I don't know that I see that as necessarily the case.  Nor am I sure that one model is more politically effective than the other.  Anyway, it's a conversation to continue in the future, but this post is losing steam and I need to return this rented laptop to the work-study undergrads who run the laptop rental desk in the basement of the library.  I do want to think more about what it means, though, to approach the academy as a salt, and as assault.  But that sounds like the social war stuff, with which I have issues which I may address in a later post...

comparative academic neoliberalisms, part deux

Okay, I'm typing this on my iPhone keyboard since the laptop the nyu library just rented me doesn't seem to have functioning Internet access, I need to prepare for my diss proposal defense Tuesday, and I woke up at 4 this morning because of a car horn sypmhony outside my window, so this is probably going to be both bad and short. That said, I did want to get a post up about the articles we read this week from Inter-asia Cultural Studies on university rankings, corporatization, and locally useful knowledge production.

It was initially interesting to me that Myungkoo Kang's discussion of the neocolonial predicament of South Korean universities, in his "'State-guided' university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production" mentions not at all the significant movement against neoliberal globalization which Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sechin Y.S. Chien describe in that country. Chen and Chien ("Knowledge production in the era of neoliberal globalization: reflections on the changing academic conditions in Taiwan") claim that the alterglobalization movement in Korea "has attained such a level that the National Alliance of Progressive Professors is engaged in organizing a labor union of university teachers.". (224). This "relatively massive progressive force within the South Korean academic community," has been, they note, thus far unable to stave off the colonizing tyranny of the Social Science Ciation Index (SSCI). Presumably even some of these "progressive" faculty endorse the SSCI as marker of scholarly distinction and rigor. Yet Chen and Chien are sanguine about the possibilities for such an organization as that which the NAPP has undertaken to build.

Kang ignores such a project altogether. One could ascribe nefarious motives here - he is, after all, a dean, and deans tend to have a rather dim view of academic labor organizing, at least in the U.S. But I think there are other, equally salient questions to be raised here about Kang's findings and argument.

First, what might more locally oriented knowledge production mean? What's at stake in this call? Is this import-substitution academic knowledge production, academic nationalism, or qua Walter Mignolo, an attempt to trace the local histories which limn, demarcate, and traverse what Quijano calls "the coloniality of power"? Is it some combination thereof? Certainly the SSCI's reign marks 'colonial conditions' of knowdge production for South Korean universities, but is it a cause or a symptom? Can the research university ever not be a colonial apparatus? To whom would "locally suitable" knowledge be "suitable," and for what uses?

More when I get to an actual computer, maybe...

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

some thoughts on comparative academic neoliberalisms

My sense of how neoliberal restructuring has obtained in countries other than the U.S., and, uh, Abu Dhabi, and to a much lesser extent Italy and (from Slaughter and Leslie's accounts) the U.K and Australia is very spotty, so I'm thankful to Eli for bringing me in to a conversation oriented thusly. In thinking about neoliberal reforms and student responses to them in New Zealand, Cameroon, Mexico, and Latin America more broadly, I noticed some interesting overlaps and lessons for the work I do, which focuses on service workers at U.S. universities and hospitals and universities' roles in urban development and renewal. This is sketchy and not particularly well-thought out, but i'm having a pretty hectic week, and it's all I've got right now.

First, I think the differential and multivalent, historically contingent nature of "neoliberalization" which Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron describe in their account of the respatialization and global integration (one might call it the Australization, as its into the Oceanic cycle of academic capitalization that New Zealand higher education gets initially and most directly affixed) of the New Zealand higher education system, is instructive. Talking about the "corporatization of the university" or certainly "the corporate university" masks a much more complex set odf institutional and regional convergences and ruptures. Andrew Ross, in his contribution to The University Against Itself, as well as in his contribution to the edu-factory listserve, talks about "corporate university" as "lazy shorthand" for the incomplete, tentative articulation of knowledge corporation and the university as a generator and incubator of intellectual and other forms of property, a formulation I've found valuable mostly because it opens the conversation up to recent autonomist work on the diffusion of informatized production, cognitive capital, and immaterial labor, in short, the general intellect, across multiple social strata and nodes throughout the coloniality of power. But if Ross is right, then I think we can take from Larner and Le Heron the caveat that such convergences are always historically and geographically specific, that "neoliberalization" can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations. More needs to be said about the relationship between neoliberalization and massification in both Larner and Le Heron and, say, Bernasconi's work on the decline of the "Latin American Model of the University," but while I'm intrigued by the subversive potential the former claim to see in the reorganizations which neoliberalism initiates, I'm not really sure they adequately explore the relationship of such openings and opportunites to neoliberalization policies nor convincingly map out what "possibilities" are being produced by the restructuring. I do appreciate, though, the corrective here against the kind of simplified, pat nostalgic lamentations for the moment of faculty governance and the hegemony of what we might cheekily call paleoliberal governmentality in higher education and its presumed utility for and place within the social.

Piet Konings' "University Students' Revolt, Ethnic Militia, and Political Violence during Political Liberalization in Cameroon" offers a stark timeline of the bloody suppression of anglophone migrants' student movements in 1990s Yaounde. The scale of violence and repression here is remarkable, but what I think I find most interesting is the relationship - and Rhoads and Mina remark upon this as well - between the university and the regime, the way in which the professoriate serves as a corps for directing and helping to foment the consolidation of the regime's power over economic liberalization, as well as the ways in which the campus becomes a site of violent jingoist political reaction allied to the regime and the exercise of state brutality to defeat threats to the ruling party's grip on the universities as sites of the reproduction and training of the nation's technocrats.

Rhoads and Mina (in comparative education review, vol 45 no. 3) attempt an analysis of the 1999-2000 UNAM occupation and strike via Gramsci and Mannheim. Unfortunately Gramsci is both underutilized here and utilized in a clumsy and unhelpful manner, quoted at legnth, but in ways which don't really address the central problematics of the strike particularly well, and mobilized, as he so often was by the eurocommunists of an earlier moment, to preclude more radical possibilities and the kinds of dangerous and potent connections that are the most powerful implications, for me, anyway, of Gramsci's work - (I'm thinking here of 'Americanism and Fordism,' of the beyond of Taylorism, the biopolitics before biopolitics of the fordist worker, etc.) UNAM's "ultras" here could do with more careful and complex parsing and critique even if the results are the same, and I wonder what gets lost in the clearly vanguardist orientation of the authors' engagement with both university and strike in a context which is perhaps too heavily electoral, but here I may be displaying my inner anarchosyndicalist a bit too obviously.

I think I'll hold off for now on comment on Andres Bernasconi's "Is There a Latin American Model of the University" until I've had time to digest it a bit more. It is in many ways the most complete and rigorous work of the four, evincing both a broad historical sweep and perhaps both a firmer and more transnational grasp of the history and transformations of higher education institutions than some of the other articles. Perhaps most valuably, its complex situating of the contradictory and problematic export of academic neoliberalism U.S. style to radically different political and economic contexts deserves wider comment and circulation. What does the export of the kinds of entrepreneurial and convergent modes described by SLaughter and Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades, and Etzkowitz et al. mean in the context of states which are historically outside of the global North and have not really been party to either the rise of the service sector (except as a source of migrants to staff it) or the shift to value-added production in the postindustrial economies of places like the U.S. and southern Canada's urban belt?

"Nothing is what it appears to be."

These are the first lines of the pilot of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, the sixth episode of which will largely be ignored tonight, what with Battlestar Galactica ending and stuff, but Alyssa's written an interesting and thoughtful critique of the show for the Atlantic Monthly's website. (Awesomely, she interviews Whedon, who sounds exactly like Joss Whedon, which, as I already noted in this sentence, is awesome.)

Thus far, five episodes into the series, escapism has dominated the plotlines. In the premiere, Echo spent a hot weekend racing motorcycles, dancing, and having sex with a good-looking young man who treats her like a treasured girlfriend. In the second episode, she went rock-climbing and hunting with another hunk, who turned out to have a Most Dangerous Game fantasy. That’s a step closer to the risks of violence and coercion in human trafficking and sex work, but it’s not exactly realistic. And in the fourth episode, Echo pretended to be an abused prostitute to gain access to a vault full of valuable art she intends to steal. There’s something disturbing about using sympathy for victims of sexual violence to commit crimes, but the episode doesn’t explore whether we ought to be disgusted with someone—Echo’s client? Her handlers? Echo herself?—for designing and carrying out the con. There is no hint of the grubby realities of human trafficking, or of the intriguing alliance between feminism and evangelical Christianity that drives a great deal of anti-trafficking work in both the government and non-profit sectors.

Dollhouse could be a fascinating exploration of prostitution if Echo was able to consent, if she had a decision-making process we could assess and evaluate. And sex has been so large a part of Dollhouse that it threatens to drown out other facets of what once made Echo a person.

I share some of Alyssa's concerns regarding the sexual politics of how Dollhouse represents bodies which are, essentially, trafficked. Particularly in the non-Whedon-penned episodes, there's a very thin line between the revulsion and discomfort we're supposed to feel at the utter commodification not just of the "actives'" labor, or their bodies, but of their very identities, what someone more schooled in late twentieth century philosophical traditions than I would probably caution me against calling their "being." Alyssa's conversation with Whedon highlights these tensions to great effect. That said, I also want to map out some quick points of disagreement.

First, Alyssa says that Whedon and Tim Minear's Firefly " lacks a central conceit that ties it to contemporary American problems." I disagree with this. Firefly, produced in 2001 and 2002 and aired intermittently if at all over the course of 2002 before an abrupt and unjustified cancellation, was a space western, yes, but one which focused heavily (the 2005 follow up film Serenity even more so) on (inter)global corporate capitalism, on empire, on war, on piracy and margins and core-periphery post-wallersteinian world(s)-systems. Through subtle allegory, I want to argue that Firefly spoke and speaks directly to conversations about trade and development, rogue states and corporate power, the rule of experts and the tasking of bodies, which dominated political discourse in the decade before it aired, which recur in Dollhouse, and which remain deeply relevant seven years on.

This may seem like a nitpick, but I hope it also points us at a different way of reading Whedon, taking into account the warning that Olivia Williams' Adelle DeWitt, the Dollhouse's CEO, offers Caroline/Echo/Dushku in the series' opening moments. Alyssa is right to point toward the ways in which Dollhouse fails as an allegory for human trafficking, an important and deeply problematic form of labor arbitrage and migration in 21st century securitized global regimes of trade and work. But I want to argue that we also need to think about what it would mean to take Whedon at his word that he does not intend Dollhouse to be a show about trafficking, that trafficking operates in the show as a red herring for Agent Ballard to pursue in his attempt to discover the "real truth," something which is perhaps more sinister than and certainly altogether different than trafficking (a displacement Alyssa rightly identifies as uncomfortable) or which at least can not be easily represented and allegorized only under the sign of the human trafficking industry. That is not to say that I think it is wrong to consider the trafficking parallels, as Alyssa does very well, and to which Whedon himself admits, but, in light of the more tenuous, subtle ways in which Whedon and company have mobilized allegory in the past - i.e, not in the ripped from the headlines style of Battlestar Galactica (suicide bombers and cylon torture, etc) but instead through setting and how broader questions are framed, a more subtle and sometimes more effective symbolic politics than the law and order spin-off Whedon references in Alyssa's article.

I want, then, to suggest that we try, and hope that the show's writers will invite us (as they did in the pilot but not much since then), to read Dollhouse for the questions it raises about the gendering of digital virtualities, the commodification of life, the sexual politics of subject formation. What work does Whedon want mindwiping to do? What about it interests him as a story to tell, as, presumably, a metaphor for some contemporary cultural or social phenomena? What does this show, with its mindwiped pleasure dolls and action heroes, have to say about labor and knowledge, about how the corporation and the body and the computer are articulated together? And there are the broader questions of what Whedon et al want to achieve by destabilizing selfhood, placing us in a world where identities are in flux, cannot be trusted, are constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed in the most literal of ways. (And then of course, there's the theme, common to so much of Whedon's work, and which I am fascinated by, of the perverse politics of geek masculinities, feminized bodies as action figures, etc.) What if what's radical and important about Dollhouse is how compromised, how impossible "the real girl" is to recover? Wouldn't this radically decenter the kinds of privileged first world femininities Whedon's been criticized for reproducing and valorizing at the expense of, say, Kendra the short-lived mimetic Jamaican Vampire Slayer? I'm sure someone more versed in gender theory than I could rip me to shreds right now, and I have a lot of work I need to do (not sure when I'll even be able to watch either the dollhouse episode or the BSG finale,) but I'll end by saying that I think Alyssa has done us an enormous service by critically engaging Whedon's latest work, and I look forward to seeing what happens both with the series and with the critical dialogue which surrounds it.

EDIT: Further troubling any attempt to define "the real girl," for me, is the extent to which the show, at least in the pilot, frames itself as a direct critique of reality tv - the dollhouse itself as something like a combination of the real world house, with jobs assigned depending on the producers' whims, and the big brother house with constant surveillance and intrigue, etc. The reason the real echo is so elusive is that representations of reality are precisely what the show is trying to tackle.

Taking its cues from the same group that held a "find the illegal immigrant" debacle here two years ago, the NYU University Senate has voted by a slim majority to lift the ban on Coca-Cola products which it imposed in 2005 in response to Coke's complicity in the murder of trade unionists at its bottling facilities in Colombia by paramilitaries.

There is no evidence that conditions are any better or that coke has taken any steps to ensure the right to organize free from fear, intimidation, murder, or torture. A recent report by the International Labor Organization failed to even call the question and one of the the organization's trustees is also on Coke's board. Meanwhile, the yearly death toll in Colombia has remained high since Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. This is what NYU is welcoming back onto its campus.

I can't say that I'm surprised, given this campus's abominable labor record of late. Sexton et al clearly do not care about the rights of working people, especially not those in far flung subcontracted corners of the globalized division of labor/coloniality of power.

But I am apalled. Apalled that a university that claimes to be in the public service would so blithely traffic with militarized terror against rank and file union members, apalled that with no justification 28 NYU senators decided to affirm their sudden support for a status quo they had voted to reject less than three and a half years ago, a status quo of torture, terror, and murder. Today the global university just became even more compromised by its imperial entanglements than it was yesterday. Today NYU has a body count.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barf.

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

this is saturday.

you should go to it. Judson Memorial Church 12-3. That's West 4th and Thompson.

And the NYT reports on the outsourcing of the financial aid office to lending corporations.

Herrenvolk Plutocracy, or It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like GATTACA

The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected.

The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in a little-noticed amendment to a January 2006 renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections and assistance for victims of sexual crimes. The amendment permits DNA collecting from anyone under criminal arrest by federal authorities, and also from illegal immigrants detained by federal agents.

Over the last year, the Justice Department has been conducting an internal review and consulting with other agencies to prepare regulations to carry out the law.

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

The law has strong support from crime victims’ organizations and some women’s groups, who say it will help law enforcement identify sexual predators and also detect dangerous criminals among illegal immigrants.

Coming soon, hopefully, once I get some sleep (I've had almost none in the last two days):

• An in depth response to the anti-GSOC column in today's WSN
• Something else I've since forgotten

For now I give you first humor and then outrage.

Humor:

"I want to get to the fetish, obviously." - Marxist Historian, Capitalism and History seminar today.

Outrage:

On Wednesday, January 24, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers(ICE) arrested 21 Smithfield workers from the Tar Heel plant. The arrests come on the heels of the company announcement that it will fire up to 600 people next month primarily those who walked out in protest last November over the firings of fellow employees allegedly for receiving social security no match letters. This is yet another attempt on the part of Smithfield to terrorize the workers who have been struggling for a collective voice on the job for over a decade. As we speak, families are torn apart; children coming home from school do not know where their parents are and workers are afraid to show up to work. Today, the day after the arrests, Smithfield's production was cut in half as workers did not report to work, fearing they would be next.

The arrests may very well be in violation of ICE's own guidelines which prohibit ICE from facilitating the use of immigration laws of enforcement to intervene in a labor dispute.

The UFCW is supporting the establishment of a humanitarian fund to assist workers and their families who are unfairly terminated.

For more information on the arrests and the November walkout, please check out:

Toys R' Us discriminates against the children of undocumented restaurant workers

The baby girl, Yuki Lin, was an American citizen from the second the ball dropped in Times Square, where the Toys “R” Us flagship store draws thousands of shoppers from around the world. But like 6 out of 10 babies born in the city — including at least two others born in Brooklyn about the same moment — she has immigrant parents. And according to the contest’s fine print, the chain decided, she was ruled out because her mother was not a legal resident.

The first baby of the year is usually a one-day story. But Albert H. Wang, a corporate lawyer who read about Yuki Lin’s lost chance on the Web site of the Chinese-language newspaper The World Journal, was outraged enough to start an e-mail campaign that is enlisting the ire of prominent Chinese-Americans like the president of the Asian American Business Development Center and officers of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Their criticism, and threats of a media campaign against the company, come just a month after the chain opened its first store in China, in Shanghai.

“They want business from China,” said Mr. Wang, 39, adding that most of the chain’s toys are made by Chinese workers in China. “But when it comes to this Chinese-American U.S. citizen, she was deprived of $25,000 intended to be used for her college education, because of who her parents are.”

Kathleen Waugh, a spokeswoman for the company, confirmed yesterday that Yuki Lin, born at 6.5 pounds and 19 inches long, had been close to winning the prize. The baby won a random drawing to break a three-way tie with hospitals in Gainesville, Ga., and Bay Shore, N.Y., which also claimed a baby born at midnight.

But, Ms. Waugh added, “in working with New York Downtown Hospital to verify the potential winner’s information and obtain a signed affidavit of eligibility — which is required under the official rules of the sweepstakes — the sweepstakes administrator was informed that the mother of the baby born at New York Downtown Hospital was not a legal resident of the United States.” Contest rules say that only mothers who are legal residents are eligible, Ms. Waugh said, adding that such requirements are common in sweepstakes.

The award went instead to the runner-up in the drawing, Jayden Swain, born 19 seconds after midnight at Northeast Georgia Medical Center to Renee Swain, 20, described by her mother as “a black American.” “She’s an American all the way,” Ms. Swain’s mother, Janet K. Keller, said in a telephone interview.

The baby at Bay Shore was born to a couple from El Salvador.

Mr. Wang and other Chinese-Americans say the winner was to be the baby, not the mother, and they see implications of second-class citizenship that strike an ugly chord. It only seemed to add insult to injury, they said, that the baby was instead given a $100 gift basket, just like all the others the chain gives to the first New Year’s babies born in any hospital that signs up for it.

“People are just pretty much outraged,” said John Wang, president of the 13-year-old Asian American Business Development Center, on Wall Street, adding that he was perplexed by the company’s actions.

“The schools accept children whose parents are illegal aliens in this country, so why is Toys ‘R’ Us taking this kind of position?” he asked. “They’re supported by many people, whether they’re legal or illegal, shopping in their stores, and they’re injecting themselves into this debate.”

This is distrubing on many levels. First, the baby in question is of course a U.S. citizen, as is anyone born in this country. The curtailment of a citizen's rights based on the legal status of her parents suggests a two-tiered citizenship structure, in which some are once again less equal than others- not that this is anything new. Pitting any African American baby against the child of undocumented Chinese immigrants is also particularly disturbing. And of course, fundamentally, "no human is illegal:" by claiming that "legal residency" or lack thereof of the baby's parents should define a U.S. citizen's rights, Toys R' Us is not only foreclosing the citizenship rights of the baby but also instantiating the exploitation of the parents. And that's fucked up.

Financial Times: U.S. Army Might Break Goodyear Strike

Two and a half months ago, 17,000 USWA members struck 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants. The Financial Times reported Friday that the Army is "considering measures to force striking workers" at at least one plant "back to their jobs" via Taft-Hartley injunction. Right now the plants are running way below capacity with managers and scabs for hire replacing the strikers.

So, does this derail or at least complicate the whole "labor aristocracy" theory in which the metropolitan proletariat benefits from imperial conquest? Granted, there's the whole question of oil, but it's not like people wouldn't by hummer tires if the U.S. weren't occupying Iraq, and while defense spending may mean pork in the form of jobs, it seems like there are some serious strings attatched...

I'm skipping my department holiday party and neglecting emails i should be writing and i missed The O.C. too, in order to research a paper on Postcolonial Marxisms, The United States, and the long 1960s, for which I am in the midst of reading Cynthia Young's Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, which I like immensely. Young's articulation of race, gender, class, New Left aesthetics and their vanguardist omissions, and labor in the formation of what she terms a "Third Worldist" structure of feeling, her historicization of the Internal Colony in lefts old and new, and her account of the prison and third worldist theorizations and activism concerning it are valuable interventions into the historiography of the 1960s, deindustrial urban spaces, and post-Cuba social movements. What i find particularly valuable reading this today, though, is the chapter on 1199 and its cultural programs as a central component of Third World subjectivity, looking at the lifeworlds of the working class black and puerto rican women and men who constituted the rank and file of the insurgent union's social movement organizing during the late 1950s and on, and giving us yet another vantage point from which to historicize and understand the struggle currently taking place at a hospital in New Haven where 1199 has left its imprint more than once. (Of course, Young knows this, given her own involvements in New Haven labor history, as, among other things, one of the three women made to appear before the university's kangaroo court tribunal in the aftermath of the grade strike which she helped lead.)

Alright, back to work.

Hungry For Justice

The Purdue Hunger Strike reaches day 25.

The hunger strike is the latest — and by far the most dramatic — action in an 18-month student effort to encourage a new strategy activists say will facilitate better labor practices in the factories that produce garments with the Boilermakers’ logo. After a handful of rallies, a “dance-in” and a number of other informational events proved ineffective, about 15 members of the labor equality group, an affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops, and the Purdue Alliance of Libertarian Socialists chose to raise the stakes, wagering their academics and their health, as they wait for the administration to reveal its cards. A few, including Franciose, have been starving themselves since November 17, although the bulk of strikers, said Alex Cheng, a senior, joined in November 25, the Monday after Thanksgiving.

A total of 30 different colleges have signed on to the spirit of the Designated Suppliers Program so far, and have pledged to attempt to implement it, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a factory monitoring organization that counts 162 college members and has sponsored the DSP. Among those colleges that have endorsed the program are the institutions in the University of California system and Duke University.

Nova, who does not have any position on the Purdue hunger strike, said a task force of representatives from participating colleges is working to hammer out the details of the program. It would require that, after a three-year phase-in process, “licensees” that purchase apparel production rights from participating universities would receive 75 percent of their products from factories that pay their employees a living wage and recognize the right of their workers to unionize. The “crucial difference” between the DSP and the current codes in place, Nova said, is that for the first time, companies like Nike and Reebok would be required to pay their suppliers a price sufficient to ensure that the standards are met. A “modest” price increase of 1 to 6 percent would likely be passed along to consumers buying their favorite institution’s products in malls or college bookstores.

“Because the DSP, if it’s implemented, will go much further toward actually achieving good worker conditions in these factories than any previous program, I think it will have a profound impact on the broader industry, to demonstrate that better conditions can be achieved,” Nova said.

“You Can’t Stop the Signal,” or Preserving Our Television Future: Firefly, Serenity, and the politics of televisuality and cinema

(A paper i just handed in. Felt like it belonged here. Rereading it, there's some stuff that I didn't do particularly well. The stuff on Star Trek is indebted to a conversation i had with a colleague a few weeks ago, who actually works on and deals with the subject critically, and rather brilliantly.)

In the fall of 2002, the Fox network premiered Firefly, a new one-hour drama from writer, director and producer Joss Whedon, who had created and written the original screenplay for (but later disassociated himself from) the postmodern b-movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer and created the one hour WB/UPN drama of the same name, which was critically acclaimed for its feminist explorations of the horror genre’s metaphorical relationships to the spatiality of high school and suburbia, and the emotional and affective politics of adolescence and beyond. Whedon, who also spun off from Buffy in the fall of 1999 the pseudo-noirish Angel, which, according to audiocommentaries by Whedon and cocreator David Greenwalt, attempted to explore the experience of urban 20something aporia, again through genre horror conventions, is the son and grandson of television writers, and has been depicted as a pop auteur by film critics – the New York Times called him “the king of Geek T.V.”[1] Buffy aired for seven seasons and remains in syndication multiple times a day on the FX network. Angel was canceled in 2004 after five seasons, the last of them without Buffy to inflate its ratings, and is syndicated twice a day on TNT. Only 11 episodes of Firefly ever aired in the show’s (original network) run. Three more episodes made it onto the series’ posthumous DVD collection. Last year it was made into a $39 million dollar sequel of sorts, the Universal Studios film Serenity, and the series is now prominently featured as a digital download on Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com’s Unbox. That a television show canceled after half a season, its episodes often shown out of order and haphazardly, interrupted by multi-week or month hiatuses, was ever issued on DVD, let alone made into a wide-release feature film demonstrates starkly the power of DVD and new technologies of viewing, consuming, and participating in visual culture.

Firefly is a sci-fi/western drama centered on a group of rogue smugglers navigating the poor, anarchic, underdeveloped fringes of a galactic empire in a syncretic, postwar moment of inequality and repression. The captain and first mate of the ship Serenity are veteran ex-soldiers on the losing side of a rebellion against the Anglo-Sino Alliance in the far future, in which humanity, having long since exhausted earth’s natural resources, has colonized and terraformed the galaxy, with the rich and powerful living in an corporate utopia of technology and abundance on the core planets, and the destitute and downtrodden unceremoniously deposited on the barely terraformed fringes of the system, left with next to nothing and forced to survive however they can, and menaced by the spectre of the unnasimilable Other, the crazed, psychotic, maniacal reavers – people who have been driven inexplicably and homicidally insane on the edges of space. (We learn in the film that this “something” which has produced the reavers is in effect the horror of modernization, of modernity itself.) The series often employs tropes of the frontier, and genre conventions of both science fiction and the Western, to explore themes of imperialism, colonialism, globalization, and terror. (The first episode aired just over a week after the one year anniversary of September 11, 2001, and the construction of the reaver as the enemy of civilization driven mad by its violence and haunting its edges seems particularly potent when read in such a context – the reaver as an iteration of the monster-terrorist-fag invoked recently by Jasbir Puar and Amit S. Rai[2], a “screen for otherness” through which a “multiform power operates”.)

Those Firefly episodes Fox did air in 2002-2003 were presented out of order. The two-hour series premiere, which introduced the characters and world of the series, was jettisoned in favor of the second episode, which had to then be reworked as an auxiliary pilot. This left viewers and critics like the Times’ Caryn James thoroughly perplexed.[3] The pilot was only aired after the series had been dropped, five days before Christmas and while the rest of the network schedule was on hiatus. Nevertheless, the series was cancelled despite outcry from loyal fans, who found something compelling in the show’s characters, dialogue (peppered with idiosyncratic witticisms and mandarin expletives,) and dystopian vision of a sci-fi future in which the enemy is not some alien menace or mystical force, but rather injustices and inequities which are very much human and very familiar to twenty-first century viewers (as Whedon has pointed out on DVD audiocommentaries.)

As with fans of Buffy, Firefly aficionados were disproportionately women in a genre often understood as a masculinist space in which relationships to texts, themes, and characters have been (problematically) understood as hypermasculine, and infused with “testosterone” – specifically the pleasure of watching characters engage in activities suffused with antifeminine gravitas, often in the form of fantastic or hyperreal violence.[4] Perhaps this is because of the (arguably postmodern) rejection within the series and film of salvific and progressive grand narratives more common in standard genre fare. In the Star Trek franchise, the Intergalactic Federation’s explorations of terra incognita form a heroic liberal narrative of discovery and encounter. In Firefly and Serenity, the Federation’s analogue is a sometimes tragic and sometimes malevolent agent of empire, suffering, and catastrophe. Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg has hailed the film as an exemplar of Randian objectivism,[5] but if Malcolm Reynolds is a “capitalist,” where is the surplus value? The crew of Serenity is constantly flying by the seat of its pants, barely scraping together enough fuel and parts to stay afloat on the long routes of interplanetary travel, and kept in the air largely because of the ingenuity of its pilot, engineer, and captain. While often trying to acquire capital, such money is almost always spent on ship maintenance and food, and the crew often works pro bono or gives what it has earned to the needy, existing on a criminalized continuum between “independent contractor” and migrant worker, frequently inhabiting a “robin hood” identity, which, if libertarian and anti-state, is also profoundly anti-capitalist. The film is more productively read through the lenses of postcolonial theory, autonomous Marxist historiography (a la Linebaugh and Rediker, -- the western outlaw as insurgent pirate,) and perhaps radical anarchist political theory, as a chronicle of a hybrid, syncretic, motley crew of rogues and misfits struggling against not only the state, but the sinister Blue Sun corporation, (which performs hideous experiments on one of the main characters in order to transform her into a living bioweapon,) and “progress” itself, embracing an anti-utopian, immanent praxis of permanent rebellion.[6]

The series was released as a four-DVD boxed set less than a year after the pilot finally aired, in part because of, and in order to capitalize upon the demand from fans. To date, half a million copies of the DVD have been sold, and the series is ranked #29 in the amazon.com dvd store.[7] The robust sales convinced Universal that the show might be worth resurrecting as a feature film, and Whedon prefaced special preview screenings of the film for activist fans with an emotional “thank you” later included on the DVD release of the film. But lest we rush to attribute these sales and this activist relation to televisual culture to Whedon’s authorial virtuousity and exceptionalism, we would do well to remember that this sequence of events occurred in the context of a booming business in Television on DVD[8] – and not only Kompare’s nostalgia-saturated “old” shows from previous decades. It is now commonplace for seasons of current series – like The O.C., Grey’s Anatomy, and Veronica Mars to be released on DVD only three or four months after they finish airing. Similarly, there has been a steady demand for TV shows which were critically lauded or cult successes but canceled by their network – Firefly is exemplary, but so are Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and Wonderfalls. Fan mobilizations, mostly internet-based, to prolong or resurrect series like Family Guy, Veronica Mars, and Arrested Development have been widely chronicled in industry press and major newspapers. This activist relationship between fans and networks/studios evinces a new dimension of the increasing importance of home viewing and an aggressive fandom centered not on the theatre, but on practices of viewing centered in domestic spaces which Barbara Klinger explores in the first two chapters of Beyond The Multiplex. The success of Family Guy in DVD and reruns led to the production of new episodes after a several-year hiatus. But the story of Firefly and Serenity is in part the story of a repackaging so successful and powerful that it invaded the multiplex, imagining and enacting a reversal of the usual trajectory of cinema release to home video and possible TV spinoff (as was, after all, the case with Buffy.) Fans of the series and film are now clamoring for either a sequel film or new TV episodes, possibly distributed over the internet or via a netflix-like mailing system.[9]

One final point that must be raised in relation to the DVD reissues of series like Firefly is how the interpretive schema of the DVD boxed set as a repackaging of history and attempted legitimization of the cultural product at hand as artistic masterpiece or cultural treasure must be reconfigured given the circumstances of their reception – many, if not most viewers of the DVDs encountered the show for the first time in their rerelease, particularly before the Sci-Fi Channel began re-airing the entire series (in the correct order) in July, 2005. The popularity of the DVDs may have less to do with the fetishization of television “heritage” as national past-ness than with a desire to instead resist the foreclosure of possible futures for television and employ complex practices of meaning-making (fan sites, fan fiction, and the fan-produced scripts for “Buffy: Season 8”[10] floating around on the internet) and activist tactics to extend the lives of favorite characters and series on and off screen. I don’t mean to be utopian here – (whatever would the crew of Serenity think?) – but instead to suggest, or rather confirm Klinger’s suggestion, that the Networks have either sufficiently colonized fan cultures or been sufficiently colonized by them that these processes are anything but alternative, and instead very much a part of how TV studios measure and produce success.

---

[1] “The King of Geek T.V. Gets Big Screen Comeback,” NYT, September 25, 2005

[2] Puar and Rai, “Monster, Terrorist. Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 72, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2002.

[3] Caryn James, “TV Weekend: Fantasy of Future and the Here and Now,” NYT, 9/20/2002, and http://imdb.com/title/tt0303461/episodes

[4] See Klinger, Beyond The Multiplex, 148-149

[5]

[6] An anarchist reading of Whedon’s work is suggested both by scholars like David Graeber, (“Rebel Without a God,” In These Times 12/27/1998)and by dialogue in Buffy itself, when a military colonel refers to the slayer and her friends as “anarchists,” and Buffy’s boyfriend Riley does the same, reclaiming the term in a positive light. (This is in the Season 4 Episode “New Moon Rising, which aired in 2000.)

[7] “Firefly alights on big screen as Serenity” USA TODAY, 9/21/2005 and amazon.com

[8] As evinced and supported by websites like tvshowsondvd.com

[9] i.e., http://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/ and http://www.fireflyseason2.com/index.asp

[10] See Buffyworld.com. The show ended after the conclusion of the 7^th season.

Taped to a bus stop kiosk on fifth avenue a few blocks south of my apartment, I found an ad for a house for sale in New Haven. The house was clearly run down, and judging from the make and style of the arcvhitecture and the demographics of the neighborhood I live in, I'm guessing the house was either in Fair Haven or maybe the Hill, with the former more likely. I find it really interesting that someone would post a home for sale notice on a bus stop, let alone in a city eighty miles away. The flyer raises interesting questions about the connections and links between two working class latino neighborhoods in very different cities, something I might want to look into more if I were an ethnographer, which I am not. Of course, the fact that we are talking about buying and selling property (and because the flyer was in English) means we're talking about folks in the upper economic echelons of both neighborhoods - probably not the old women who stand on street corners here in the freezing cold every weekend and sell homemade churros outside of the clothing and shoe stores and taquerias that line fifth avenue between the park and 63rd (where Bay Ridge begins) but that doesn't meant there aren't circuits of exchange, communication, and community between these cities - whether of kinship, of common origin in the regions of central and southern Mexico from which a lot of migrants are coming to the Northeastern U.S., or other connections of which i remain ignorant. I'll stop here, since i do not want the gaze which i turn on my neighborhood to be that of the detatched and imperial social scientist...

How not to solve the immigration "crisis"

Making it harder to become "legal."

DALLAS (AP) -- The fees immigrants pay for citizenship and permanent residency petitions will rise as officials try to prevent more backlogs in the system, the director of the nation's immigration service said Tuesday.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Emilio Gonzalez said the amount of the increases is still being determined, but expects it to be significant.

''I envision that it'll go up a fair amount,'' he said during a visit to Dallas. ''We're a business. We're not allowed to be deficient.''

Currently, immigrants applying for citizenship pay $330 or $325 for permanent residency documentation known as a ''green card.'' Applicants also pay a $70 fingerprinting fee. They could see the new prices for immigration petitions by April, Gonzalez said.

Citizenship and Immigration Services processes applications for citizenship, permanent residence, work permits and other immigration documents. During the past few years, the agency has been working through a backlog that kept some immigrants waiting up to three years for green cards or citizenship.

Good Medicine? (Party like it's 2001)

Yale bows to student pressure on another patent (this time Ed4t instead of d4t - go figure) and agrees to permit generic manufacturing of an aids drug in "low and middle income countries." (Does that include this one?.) Now these activists are trying to pressure the drug company that jointly holds the patent to do the same.

UAEM member Shayna Strom '02 LAW '09 said Yale should take the initiative in enabling drugs based on university research to be produced more cheaply for use in low-income countries

"We're glad that the University has made the decision not to patent in low-income countries, although we think there are further steps to be taken," Strom said. "The University had more leverage before it licensed the drug, but President Levin still has a great opportunity to set the tone and set the agenda."

Strom said the move would give Yale credibility as a leader in promoting drug accessibility, similar to the way Harvard recently received credit for being a leader in early action reform.

"Yale has a brief opportunity here to decide whether to lead or to follow," Strom said.

But Robert Alpern, the dean of the medical school, cautioned that if universities excercise too many restrictions on their licensing partners, they could lose them altogether.

If the drug sells well, the University will receive financial returns on the product as compensation for its research efforts in discovering the chemical. But School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern said the benefits of discovering Ed4T will only be realized if Yale allows the pharmaceutical company to exercise its international rights over the chemical.

"We try to work with pharmaceutical companies to give the drug away in poorer countries," Alpern said. "In general, with these drugs the pharmaceutical industry is very good. I don't think the solution is to tamper with the licensing."

The specter of corporate retreat mobilized here seems somewhat phantasmic. Clearly pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be interested in the drug if they didn't think money could be made. And the fundamental question seems to me how or if university researchers can free their work from the yoke of the logic of the boardroom.