It's Bizarro Me...

This is incredibly frightening. Thanks to t.error at the happy academic for pointing this out...

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...

"then bring the ruckus"

Finally, my labors as unsanctioned troubador of the academic labor movement have been recognized. Oh, wait. Maybe not.

Nobody noticed its strike after the first few weeks, so GSOC adopted a new tactic in its valiant struggle for recognition: point out the fascist power structure at NYU whenever the university or its administrators do anything. This strategy is at its ugliest when GSOC members personally attack NYU President John Sexton.

"Nerds wonder why Sexton’s high-priced lawyers have not told him that hugging people without their permission...could constitute sexual harassment," wrote "Bread and Roses" on the blog Nerds on Strike.

There’s even a song about his hugs circulating Facebook and pro-strike blogs.

"I don’t want no hugs/when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy," it says.

Hugs are a symbol of patriarchy, uh-huh. At this point, GSOC members sound a lot like Dennis, the famous anarcho-syndicalist peasant from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

"Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed," says Dennis, after King Arthur politely asks about the local feudal lord.

I can’t imagine how painful it must be to reach out to students, as Sexton does regularly, and have those efforts tossed back in your face by a handful of whining malcontents. He’s a nice guy; he gives hugs. Don’t be an asshole because you disagree with his administrative decisions. Sexton could walk into the street and toss $100 bills in the air; someone from GSOC would shrilly denounce him for flaunting his personal wealth.

I wouldn’t be surprised if GSOC members attacked NYU for purchasing wind-generated energy. The ivory towers enslaved wind; Sexton expects the breeze to do his dirty work. And why’s this autocratic patriarchy have to put petroleum out of work? Even if wind energy is cleaner and cheaper than petroleum energy, NYU is only doing it to improve their image — and distract attention from the real issue threatening international survival: Graduate student labor recognition.

That’s the thing: While I don’t know its members personally, as an organization, GSOC acts like an ass. It refuses to recognize that it’s just not that popular.

And I’m not alone in this opinion. I haven’t heard GSOC mentioned positively in months. I recently witnessed an expression of disgust on the face of a former GSOC supporter after I described its role in the St. Anne’s Committee lawsuit. You guys lost, miserably, and your new tactics won’t change that.

But if you’re really living in fear of guerrilla-hugs from Sexton, feel free to move on to another university. Plenty of seniors (this one included) would love to take your place next year.

Immmediately after reading this, and in the midst of a blogging crisis, (should I keep writing this thing if all it is is fodder for anti-union ideologues?) I sent in this response:

As the author of that song, I want to point out the presence of the word "when." The statement is conditional. Sexton's hugs are patriarchical when he employs them to stifle questions about his leadership, when he offers them in lieu of a meaningful dialogue with graduate employees, or while referring to us as a "virus" and vowing to extirpate us from his fiefdom. The song is satire. The problem is very real. I'm sorry you don't like us, Mr. Devlin, but this isn't a popularity contest, it's a struggle for worker justice and for a university not subjugated to the whims of megalomaniac administrators who boast about hugging undergraduates in the wee hours of the morning at public fora. I'm not moving on to another university because I'm committed to making this one better, and because, you will soon find, I suspect, should you decide to pursue a PhD, that the problems GSOC has identified in the structure of teaching and research at NYU are in fact systemic across the US academy and must be confronted everywhere.
Z

For some reason, when posting it, the editor (who may or may not be the same person as the columnist) changed "extirpate" to "extricate," which makes no sense, and changed fora to the singular, which seems like nitpicking to me, but what can you do. I perhaps should have also added that this blog is not a "strike blog" in the sense that it is in any way sanctioned by or the responsibility of the leadership of GSOC, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, or the People's Front of Judea. It is disingenuous to claim that GSOC and GSOC members somehow bear collective responsibility for "No Hugs" or anything else on this blog, including this entry. It's also problematic to argue, as the columnist seems to, that there really is nothing wrong with a university president telling a room full of students and employees that he gets phone calls from undergraduates very early in the morning and then meets them and hugs them. But, for arguments' sake, let's assume that's all on the up and up and is not in itself innapropriate - the real problem with the hugs is then threefold. First, there is the assumption by sexton that he has the right to hug, that a body is necessarily huggable and his office as president empowers him to hug even should members of the NYU community not want to be classified among the potentially huggable. This was the gist of the question asked at the forum. Second, there is the way in which the hug performs a certain liberal corporatist (no pun intended) politics of conflict resolution, trivializes the hugged's objections and instantiates peace sans equal rights or justice (to borrow a framework from Peter Tosh.) "You want a contract? Tough, here's a hug instead." Sorry, not good enough. Third (and extremely tertiary) is the way that said hug as a gesture of pacification then constructs Sexton as "nice guy" and the unwilling, the refuser of hugs, as pathological.

Finally, I want to argue that the neoliberal university 's ever increasing involvements in finance capital, real estate speculation, biopiracy, and the casualization of academic labor constitute something to be worried about and to organize against. The U.S. academy is in a very real crisis now precisely for this reason. In so arguing I am not claiming the primacy of graduate student unionization over other struggles, but instead calling for a perspective which understands the entanglements of the "global university" or "enterprise university" or whatever you want to call it in a more nuanced and delicate way than "universities are liberal oases that do good things full of ridiculous people who are way too radical," which i take to be the gist of Devlin's objection.

I will apologize for the title of this post, inspired by my listening to 36 Chambers on the way to campus this morning. Additionally I want to reccomend that everyone track down Eccentric Soul: The Mighty Mike Lenaburg, a complation of music from the Phoenix, Arizona soul scene from the mid '60s through 1980, and also check out The New York Sound: From The East Coast to the Future, which is a compilation of NY boogie music in the years surrounding the rise of hip hop. You can get both from other music.

As always, I and I alone am solely responsible for everything in this entry and on this site , except for comments and block quotes. Ok, back to work.

No Hugs

The final question of the evening came from Andre -----, a student senator and a graduate student, who asked, “Why do you feel entitled to hug everyone?”
- Washington Square News. 9/28/2006 (surname witheld to protect the innocent.)

This song is about John Sexton. It is dedicated to andre, but he holds no culpability in it. For that, blame me and the ghost of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes.

"No Hugs"
To the Tune of "No Scrubs, of course."

John Sexton tells a lot of lies
and he's a union buster
always talkin' about what he wants
no negotiations, just impasse
so (no)
I don't want your embrace
no I don't wanna give you mine
and no I don't wanna meet you nowhere
no I don't want none of your slime and no
Chorus:

I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me
I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me

Yeah your hugs freakin me
and your logic's kinda weak
and i know that you cannot approach me
cuz I'm teachin' my class and you treat me like trash
Sittin' in Bobst on your rich ass

So (no)
I don't want your embrace
no I don't wanna give you mine
and no I don't wanna meet you nowhere
especially at an innapropriate time and no

I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me
I don't want no hugs
when a hug is a gesture of patriarchy
and I simply won't abide
all the times he lied
trying to intimidate me

If I'm on the picket line walking
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
If you thrive on megalomaniacal drama
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
Yeah we have a union but you show no love
Oh Sexton I'm talking to you
Wanna quiet me with no contract
oh no I don't want no hugs
No hugs
No hugs
No No
No hugs
No no no no
No no
Chorus (until fade)

Pat Benatar, ON STRIKE

(to the tune of "Heartbreaker.")


With this strike we're trying to save
What you keep claiming is dead
Sketchy hugs, empty promises
We won't be misled

You're the wrong kind of leader to direct a university
The neoliberal schemer, hiding behind the NLRB
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around with me.
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around, no no no

You've proved yourself to be a huge liar
Hoarding real estate gold
But your behavior only inspires
organizing tenfold

You're the wrong kind of leader to direct a university
The neoliberal schemer, hiding behind the NLRB
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around with me.
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around, no no no

You're the wrong kind of leader to direct a university
The neoliberal schemer, hiding behind the NLRB
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around with me.
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around, no no no

You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, don't you mess around with me.
You're a strikebreaker, pay taker,
big faker, strikebreaker!

A song of social significance.

This is a work in progress, the latest in my ignominious attempts to rewrite popular songs to pertain to labor struggles at universities. Here, i've done something I've generally shyed away from recently, in attempting to rewrite a song i actually love, and not in a hipster "Journey Rulez" kind of way. I'm still trying to figure out the last line of the final verse. If you have suggestions, I would welcome and very much appreciate them. Anyway, without further adieu, i give you "Bastards of Young," GSOC style. Original lyrics and music by Paul Westerberg, as performed by The Replacements on the classic 1985 album Tim.

John, what a mess, tenure ladder no redress
And so on picket lines your name is sung
Dreams unfulfilled, graduates deskilled
And so we'll keep on walkin' and refuse to be forgotten

We are contingent teachers, GSOC on strike
We are contingent teachers, GSOC on strike
the labs and the sections

We won't teach no Hume or lecture on Khartoum
Our drums we'll sound, until we win this fight
health benefit reduction, voodoo economic suction
And so we'll keep on walkin' and refuse to be forgotten

We are contingent teachers, GSOC on strike
We are contingent teachers, GSOC on strike
the labs and the sections

John Beckman tries to frame us, NYU's Class War defames us

The ones who made this mess are the ones whom we protest
justice doesn't demand anything less
They walk down Wash. Square East and they call us a disease
But we'll win negotiation, whatever they try we'll beat 'em..

We are contingent teachers, GSOC on strike
We are contingent teachers, GSOC on strike
the labs and the sections

Take it! It's Yours!

"Don't Stop Believin'"

The following represents the latest in a long series of attempts at rewriting popular music songs to be about academic labor struggles, a series which began way back in 2003 with "Knockin' on Levin's Door." I mean here not to ridicule or diminish the seriousness of what is at stake in our fight, to which i am deeply committed, but rather to add some levity and suggest one potential, if not particularly useful, form cultural production influenced by the strike might take. This particular attempt is inspired by an inexplicable recent fascination with Steve Perry and a desire to create something which, unlike, say, RUN-UOC, can be sung on picket lines. Also deserving of credit is The Revolutionary Army of California, whose inspired cover of the song on which the following is based turned my attentions away from "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" for long enough to write this.


"Don't Stop Believin'"
S. Perry/N. Schon/J. Cain/This Blogger

Banner we'll unfurl,
in this neoliberal world
your threats and intimidation, well we ain't scared.

Fill the city with noise,
our international's in Detroit
We picket decked out in union flair

long meetings in the conference room
more productive than we'd assume
we are united in this fight
It goes on and on and on and on

Strikers chanting,
up and down the picket line
John Sexton cringes at the sight
Striking teachers
fighting for a resolution
fighting, striving for what's right

Their PR flacks are pretty shrill,
and so we struggle still
Follow mother jones' advice,
yeah -- we organize!

Gotta win, can't afford to lose
assure you this ain't no ruse
Yeah the struggle never ends
it goes on and on and on and on

Strikers chanting,
up and down the picket line
John Sexton cringes at the sight
Striking teachers
fighting for a resolution
fighting, striving for what's right

Don't stop Believing
Send john sexton reeling
Striking teachers


[shout outs to Alyssa and to Josh, whose version of "Time after time" was so good that i still think the line "Flashback '84" is in the original.]

Ask me about the strike, part 4.

Today marked, depending on who is counting, (me or Phil Wheeler,) the 78th or 79th day of the strike. This strike is now officially longer than the one I wrote an 82-page senior thesis about. It's the longest ever TA strike at a private university in the U.S., possibly the longest at any university - i don't know the history of the strikes at the U.C. schools well enough to make this claim, though. We are fairly sure that it is also the only academic strike in the U.S. which has ever tried to bridge the semester gap. Rather than see this as daunting, i hope folks are finding it inspirational. Like the semi-situationalist banner said, back on day 1, "make history right now."

On Tuesday three GAs - including one person i went to college with - received letters notifying them that their stipends would be cut and that they would be barred from teaching for not one, as promised, but two full semesters, lest they return to work by today. They're staying out. So are the three folks who found out yesterday. These folks are all stand-alone instructors. Some of them are in departments in which lots of people are international students or have gone back to work. Others are in departments in which they were, from the beginning, the only people out. I'm sure there will be more letters in the future, as NYU carries out what seems a bit like a last-ditch effort to scare us back to work with the threat of extended retaliatory lockouts. I do not think this is a wise move on NYU's part. First off, even if they could break us with this, what they are doing is going to wind up dooming Sexton's whole "upwardly mobile University" agenda. This strike is being watched very closely, by union members in New York, by graduate employees across the country (and in Canada!) and certainly by faculty. The administration has now recieved hundreds of letters from professors across the country saying that they will be unable to reccommend prospective students to the university should the retaliatory threats be implemented. Now that these threats are not only being implemented, but doubled, I wonder if we can start conjecturing about what this says about the university's commitment to graduate education (not to mention undergraduate teaching.) Second, i do not think, particularly coming out of the discussions in the union over the past several days and today's massive demonstration of support from across the labor movement, that this is going to break us. Strikers were prepared for this eventuality coming into this semester, even if the threat has metastazized and violated the "contract" offered in President Sexton's infamous letter of November 28, to which the new letters deceptively refer. For comprehensive coverage of this, read the mother of all GSOC strike blogs, Nerds on Strike

The rally was pretty amazing. Amy, the sociologist who got a letter on tuesday, with the other five letter recipients standing behind her, spoke powerfully about why she decided to strike, what the letters represent, and why she's staying out. Christine Quinn and other city councilmembers promised to stand in the way of any NYU projects until Sexton is ready to resume negotiations with us. Adam Green said something about breaking out his old GESO t-shirt, apparently. Roger Toussaint led some very spirited chants.

I screamed through a pink fake megaphone until my voice pretty much completely gave out. That's happening to me more and mpore, and i'm feeling like i'm never going to have that singing career I've always dreamed of, and will be henceforth restricted to belting out "November Rain" (dedicated to all the strikers, of course) on karaoke machines from Avenue U to Moshulu Parkway for the rest of my life. While i'm skeptical of the rhetoric of sacrifice, that's one i'm willing to make.

Also on the personal side, It was great to see all the folks from the federation (all the busloads of GESO folks and Local 34 folks, especially Laurie and Beth, and Andrea,) and Rose, who i guess is now a former federation folk. And there was a UOC contingent (Thomas and Josh, to boot,) which made me happy. And Saqib was in town. And one of the Goldman Sachs cafeteria workers i met several years ago when i was an intern with Local 100 gave me a Unite-HERE pin.

I think that's all for now. I have some coursework to do.

what do you think? (some insomnia-fueled solidarity forever verses)

It is we who grade the papers
teach the sections, yes its true
we do our advisors' research
and we also lead reviews
and until we get a contract
we will shut down NYU
for the union makes us strong

Sexton tries to hug us,
but we tell him "No way, John"
He tells us that it's over
that our union is all gone
but we know while we stand together
we can roll the union on
and the union makes us strong

EDIT: changed a line in the second verse to make it slightly less cheesy.

And here's another verse

Dean Catherine Stimpson,
define responsibility
but know that such pedantry
has a bad effect on me
we're the ones who'll save this
university
for the union makes us strong

2nd Edit: The first verse above is obviously a blatant rip-off, err, homage, to the first of four verses written about the 1984 Clerical & Technical workers' strike at Yale. Local 34 members produced their own songbook. Maybe i'll post the verses they wrote later. I just wanted to give credit where credit was due. Any suckiness in the verses above are due to my own crapulence.

3.a little bit louder

Asad has a fantastic post on the strike, dealing particularly with the ramifications of the new policies for language and literature teachers as advancing rather than molliating casualization and thinking about the strike's relationship to the humanities. In the process, he gets Bordieuian:

Here I might return to the theme of "collegiality." The picket line, with
its chanting, drumming, singing - in short, its performativity - is by its
nature often carnivalesque: not only the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the
very habitus, or social and bodily disposition, of university life is suspended
by it. The result is an unleashing of pent-up energies and frustrations of many
kinds, including elements that exceed the basis of the conflict, such as the
offensive nature of the university's communications with graduate assistants.
This is why the defense of collegiality has become an important high ground to
the administration: harping on it allows the picket line's symbolic excess to be
depicted as a form of reactive immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also
seen to be a form of belatedness: Sexton's euphemistic corporate terminology of
an "Enterprise University" and "University Leadership Team" leaves no room such
"dated" practices as strikes and protests, and the supposedly expired sixties
radicalism from which they are thought to stem. Just as the domain of the
humanities is linked to anachronistic countercultural protest, so then is the
social practice of picketing. On both counts, we're both too young and too old,
past our sell-by date before we grow up. This argumentative tack, however,
allows for the obfuscation of the original conflict. Even so, analyzed as a
cultural form, the picket line performs an important function: it inscribes and
instantiates the strike both to observers and in the minds and bodies of those
striking. As Louis Althusser might have said, it "interpellates" (roughly,
allows the self-recognition of) those who take part, and thus functions as a
radicalizing action. Insofar as it refuses collegial dialogue and substitutes
the implacable presence of the bodies of strikers, picketing only belongs more
purely to the category of action.

I find Asad's description of the picket line as a performative and carnivalesque space which deconstructs and disrupts the quotidian dynamics of academic labor explooitation compelling. The radical possibilities implicit in this kind of interruption were, after all, what fueled actions like this one, which I return to again and again because it was such a formative moment for me in how I think about what we are fighting for and how universities work (and how we can build new configurations of knowledge production and create new conversations and new ways of having them which challenge the neoliberal frameworks of University Leadership Teams and Roland Betts-led 15 Billion Dollar corporations. What is particularly interesting to me about Asad's argument is the move it makes to look at the polemicisists and polemics of collegiality as profoundly reactionary in a way which invites useful scrutiny of what's at stake in the idyllic phantasm of the university's proud (tacitly imperial) pastness and tradition and ownership of a bright, rich future raised by the Sextons and Stimpys and their analogues elsewhere.

We need to understand the strike as more than simple refusal to work and disruption of "business as usual." What new kinds of arrangements of academic labor, what radical reimagining of the university does the strike produce, and how do we create that new university "from the ashes of the Old Campus?" (As Ralph Chaplin might have put it were he still alive and had he not become a raving anticommunist in his later years.) These are questions our organizing will have to answer somehow. I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Call Me Alan Lomax.

Dredging up some old classics- first, Alyssa's briliant "New Haven Pie," then, my vastly inferior "Sucker PhDs." Both written just over two years ago. (Hey Alyssa, if you want me to tale this down,please let me know.)

New Haven Pie
Not such a long time ago
I can still remember
When the unions, they first made me smile
And I learned that if he had the chance
Slick Rick would screw them in a flash
And that left me conflicted for a while
But if March snowstorms made me shiver
Levin's letters made me quiver
Flat lies on the doorstep
They made me take one more step
I know that there were times I cried
And days I really had to try
But Meg's words touched me deep inside
The day Yale's honor died

So... Bye, bye to this Rick Levin guy
He's a craven in new Haven, and nobody will cry
And the Federation will raise their glasses up high
Singing "For the Social Contract we'll strive!
To make New Haven come alive!"

The Daily wrote the book on strikes
Chased down UOCers on their bikes
To find out what they thought we'd know
Now do you believe in recognition?
Will you raise a sign, sign our petition?
And will you teach Woodbridge not to act so slow?
And we all know I love leftist guys
Whether organizers or in PR guise
'Cause they do their jobs so well
I love helping them give Levin hell
I was a lonely freshman liberal
Prime UOC organizing material
And Zach helped show me what was real
The day Yale's honor died

I started singing... Bye, bye to ONHSA's clever disguise
There are problems in New Haven and I want to know why
And the good old boys can stop telling me their lies
This'll be the day that they die
And for the real story I'll try

Now for decades Yale's been in a snit
Organized working people give them fits
But that's not how it used to be
When kids from Hillhouse went to school here
And Bulldog victories raised townie cheers
(All this came long 'fore you and me)
But while Yale improved itself all around
Manufacturing left this town
Redevelopment failed
And town-gown relations ailed
And while Rae wrote his book called City
Life for his subjects wasn't pretty
And he must not have felt so witty
The day Yale's honor died
We were singing...

Why, why, can't our school even try?
This is lame, I'm quite ashmed, some days it just makes me cry
When pensions and benefits are only pie in the sky
Why do they even bother with lies?
Why do they even bother with lies?

Sit-down protests in the August swelter
The police made arrests to give freshmen shelter
The riot cops were moving fast
While we camped out on the grass
Betty T. tried to sneak on past
And to keep us on the sidelines to the last
And all the plans we'd made since June
Got carried out to chants (off-tune)
We were ready to advance
But we never got the chance
'Cause though they tried to deal and wield
By September Yale just had to yield
Do you recall what we concealed?

The day Yale's honor died
We started singing...
My, my, wasn't that a good try
When labor joins with neighbors then the management cries
And 'cause John Wilhelm helped us organize
Now GESO'll be recognized
And the hospital prioritized

And we got together in one place
To discuss wages, gender, free speech and race
After three days we started again
Marissa and Helena wrote some scripts
Noah and Josh called the press real quick
'Cause the Register isn't always labor's friend
And though Bruce tried to be quite sage
His promises hit the front page
No more equivocating
Their racist policies got done in
And as we celebrated that fight
A victory for what was right
I saw Levin cowering with fright
The day Yale's honor died

He was moaning why, why, am I this town's fall guy?
We're good neighbors, do some favors (at least sometimes we try)
So we're good old boys, why did their goodwill run dry?
Now out of Tweed their airplanes can fly! (Even if in poverty workers
die...)
I met a guy who did some press
All autumn long he made me guess
Although he never turned away
I went down to the office doors
Where I'd found justice, months before
And they said there that we wouldn't take it any more...
And in the streets, the workers chanted
Levin issued statements, then recanted
And with the contracts settled
Bank hearings we bedeviled
And the organizer I admired most, Meg Robertson, got a new post
She and her partner hit the coast
After Yale's honor died

I started singing... Bye, bye, now I'm not going to cry
We've got battles, can't get rattled, and we've tactics to try
And thanks to your committment, now I can organize
Fight for justice 'til the day that I die!

"New Haven Pie" was probably the best of the song rewrites we did, though "Forgot about Pay," "Strike Strike Baby," and Josh's take on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" were all pretty enjoyable. I especially love the line about the YDN chasing us down on bikes. That was hilarious. I conclude with "Sucker PhDs," which was my best contribution. I have redacted a couple names and changed a few particularly bad lines around, but left most of them intact.

RUN-UOC is BACK.
"Sucker Ph.Ds"
To the tune of Sucker MCs, from the album "RUN-DMC"

[RUN: Revolutionary Underground Network]
Two years ago
some friends of mine
asked me to stand up and organize
cause it is time to make a better day
yale's fascism is not ok
so we founded the UOC
and fought for justice in our city
Yale's gentrification is totally wack
Of light and truth there's a serious lack
they bled the workers down to the bone
And their bank will not give anybody a loan
Yale's money is its golden calf, workers starve, Yalecorp laughs
Champagne caviar, and bubble bath
That's the "life" that they lead
And those greedy CEOs are who they please
But they better move back cause we're on attack
Because there's nothin in the world, that could ever hold us back
I cold chill at the strike tent in a pissed off stance
And when I march through the streets I just wanna dance
Take off kid gloves, we attack from above
You capitalist pigs don't know the meaning of love

We rock this city from Morris Cove to The Hill
And [organize] the hospital with [EDITED]
Levin's cruisin for a bruisin',; he best move or step aside
I cannot even count all the many ways they lied
can't wait to see the looks on their faces
When they hear bout the class action suit cases
well it's been [five] years since i got in this fight
And all you sucker PhDs, you just ain't right
Because you're causin' all this strife, you're cheating us of life
You strut around town where such poverty is rife
showin off what you have, actin' like a fool
And everybody knows what things you do

Yeah you oppress me, and it ain't fun
You don't even care, like Linda MaSON!
We're all up in your face with steel toed boot and lace
We're buildin 'our committee put a movement on your case
You live Uptown in your cap and your gown
But we're cellular like Susan Crown!
You better start running now just as fast as you can
Get out of New Haven, take Mike Morand
You are out of time, your corporate crime
is passe like [Bob Culver] or like Meghan Clyne
Exploit black neighborhoods, and the brown
Try to deceive us but your scheme is found
Around your finger you think we're so tightly wound
You're just a sucker Ph.D you fascist clown

So UOC and if you're ready
The people rockin steady
Drive through Yale's lies like Mario Andretti! (Respect to Q-Tip)

[U.O.C.]

We're U.O.C. and you know that we
Do go to Yale University
And while organizin' we acquired the knowledge
One usually cannot receive in college
they have sinned, stole workers means
But we'll dethrone these capitalist fiends
They take their fill, rob us through guile
but they can't stop us - we're versatile
Behind closed doors you call us retards
But we're more like the parisian communards
This town you exploit is our home
You won't find that in any Doug Rae tome
We are sticking in this fight
So you had better start doing what's right
or come time, you'll throw a fit
when we bury you up to you neck in Shhhhhhh
You will quake when you hear our refrain
you'll jump around just like HOUSE of PAIN
[You think that you're a classes shop]
Your union busting ways have got to stop
Cause you have lost any semblance of sense
And things are about to get real intense.

revolutionary slash nutcase

When i finish "November Rain," I'm thinking about moving on to "Wild Side" (Hey babe, take a walk on the strike line,) and, even better, reworking the Tribe Called Quest song which sampled it as "Can I Picket." I like Kweli's shout out to Octavia Butler on the (somewhat odd, but endearing) song about Lauryn Hill.

I'm feeling like I'm being totally ineffective as an organizer, if I can even call myself that right now. Whenever anyone hands me a list to phonebank i get seized by this irrational terror of the phone, and the conversations i have are all tentative and badly organized and generally not productive. Maybe i need to keep practicing. Maybe i need to find someonbe to do some roleplays with me - the problem is, we don't necessarily talk to the same people all the time in our organizing, so roleplaying might wind up being imprecise and less helpful than it is for folks who are talking to the same six people every day or every week. It's possibile that i just generally suck at this, but there have been enough moments in my life where i've felt competent enough at this to be of enough use to somebody's organizing to continue to do it. Part of me would like to see us do more face to face stuff rather than phone-based conversations, as a potential means of countering some of the atomizing aspects of the experience of being a graduate student in New York City. But i'm not sure the same shit wouldn't be holding me back if we did that. Plus, sometimes it's hard to grab a cup of coffee with someone when you're on strike. And we'd still have to phonebank anyway. Anyone have any ideas?

Echoes

Like alek, i've recently gotten some bizarre search hits.

My favorite: "Feminism AND 1970s AND waitressing AND Grease the movie." I'm the number 1 hit for this google search, thanks to my senior essay, which has nothing to do with John Travolta or Stockard Channing, but go figure.

Tied for most sketchy: "eliana johnson" father
and (ignoring for the moment the dozens of search hits concerning Chloe and its author)
"Breakup Poetry." Who searches the web for breakup poetry?

There have been weirder hits than this, but i have now forgotten them.

"I better shape up
cause i need a job
and the lack, it makes me blue
I better shape up
i am such a slob
and i always act the fool
I don't know what i want. Doo doo doo
I don't know what i want...."
(To the tune of "You're The One That I Want." Get it? Grease? Ok, shutting up now...)

Weapons of Class Instruction V

 

I see this richard levin/he rules like chairman mao/he'll legislate you into oblivion/if you don't silently bow/with his friends on the labor board/he'll milk you like a cow/from the comfort of his luxury home (to the tune of ballad of a thin man)

I walked up to Columbia hoping to find someone wearing a GSEU pin with whom i could rant about the Bush regime's experiment in catastrophic nostalgia, but had no such luck.  So instead i sat on the steps i used to always sit on in hiughschool when feeling depressed and self absorbed and i thought about how the capitalists and the state crush and repress social movements, the site at which, some thirty six years ago, the New York Police Department brutally beat students protesting Columbia's gentrification tactics in Morningside Heights and in the scientific and research apparatus fueling the Indochina wars and the development of new tactics of state repression in the turbid streets of America's racialized urban spaces being, of course, a prime location for such thoughts.  The decision means that elections at not only Brown University, but also Columbia, Penn, and Tufts will probably be thrown out.  This excellent Steve Greenhouse-Karen Arenson article asserts that even the already recognized union at NYU is now in danger of dissolution should the administration simply refuse to bargain after the current contract ends.  Phil Wheeler's comments are heartening, and i doubt that this is the end for the academic labor movement, both because of the sheer partisanship of this decision and because GESO, for one, was organizing for a decade prior to the NYU decision, (and TA Solidarity existed three years prior, and the aforementioned TAO activity was scaring provosts left and right by January of 1972) and no matter how "magnificent" the Sheldon Steinbachs and Richard Levins and Ruth Simmonses and Lee Bollingers and Judith Rodins may be feeling right now, i hope that GESO and GSEU and GET-UP and GSOC's members keep fighting for the vision of the university that we built in the streets fourteen months ago, because it's too important to let a bunch of fascists destroy it. 

Just lemme know where to stand during the mass arrest.  Or who ya want me to organize.