Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

ZACHSW@GMAIL.COM

In November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall manager who'd harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she'd worked in the university's dining halls.  Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As a new hire, she had not yet completed the 90-day probationary period that would qualify her for membership in Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees, Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union and thus secure her access to the union's then-flimsy grievance procedure.  Williams’ act happened to occur during a semester in which several members of Yale Students for a Democratic society had taken jobs in the dining halls, inspired by a broader current of “industrializing” – taking working-class jobs in order to organize mass workplace resistance – across the New Left.  Yale SDS in particular was part of the somewhat notorious Progressive Labor faction, which continued to claim the organization’s name following the split at the 1969 national convention (which led to the creation of the Weather Underground.)  The presence of these student radicals in the dining halls made workplace struggles that students might otherwise have ignored objects of widespread concern and political urgency.  Following Williams’ firing, a hundred students, members of Yale Students for a Democratic Society as well as the Black Student Alliance at Yale, marched into the university's human resources office in the basement of Wright Hall to demand the university reinstate her.  The students occupied the office and took several administrators hostage for a few hours.  With the conclusion of the occupation, 47 students were immediately suspended, though all were eventually reinstated.  (One alumnus, who’d taken a job as a university custodial worker, was eventually fired for his role in the occupation.) The occupation was successful - Williams won her job back – or rather, Yale administrators discovered, they claimed, that they had never actually fired her.  But, a month after returning to work, Williams had quit. Subjected to continued harassment from white supervisors due to her newfound notoriety, Williams explained that working at Yale was "agony."

Williams' action, and the actions of her supporters, directly implicated the racist and sexist conditions of service work at Yale in the late 1960s.  Over the last few weeks, a contemporary parallel has emerged in Corey Menafee's decision to destroy with the butt of his broomstick a stained glass pane depicting two enslaved people of African descent picking cotton in the dining hall of Yale's Calhoun College, where Menafee worked as a General Service Assistant.  Although Menafee broke the window this past June, his action has only become public knowledge in the past week and a half thanks to reporting by the New Haven Independent.  Like Colia Williams' defiant glass-throwing, Corey Menafee's window-breaking evokes a long, submerged history of property destruction and direct action by Yale employees.  Much of this activity occurred throughout the long, hard decade of labor struggles between the calamitous defeat of the workers in a truncated 1968 strike, when student scab labor blunted the strike's impact and a weak settlement prompted rank and file rebellion at the contract ratification vote and subsequent threats of wildcat strikes, and the 13-week long walkout in 1977, still the longest at a university with a history of long strikes.  During the 1971 strike workers slashed the wiring and tires of university vehicles.  They and their supporters among a now-radicalized student left also flooded dining halls and blockaded the university' power plants to stop oil deliveries.  (In a speech on campus during one of two strikes in 2003, then-presidential candidate Howard Dean recalled his participation in the blockade.)  In 1977, when a belligerent, right-wing anti-union white student provocateur tried to shove his way through a picket line of striking black blue-collar workers, a striker punched him in the face.  The student required 23 stitches.  (Even senior university administrators agreed that the student was “out to antagoniz[e] or incite violence.”  During the same strike, an unknown party firebombed a university safety office adjacent to one of the power plants, throwing a pair of burning whiskey bottles through a window. Though those responsible for the firebombing were never found, the incident was reported as if it were related to the strike, an act of sabotage by rogue workers or their supporters. 

Most of these actions were directly related to labor struggles, perhaps more so than they directly referenced the university's long history of profiting from and glorifying slavery and the trade in enslaved Africans and their descendents.  Yet these were hardly ever discreet, separate phenomena.  Yale’s labor struggles and battles over its legacy of slavery and genocide have often intersected.  It was three graduate student union activists, Antony Dugdale, J.J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, who wrote the 2001 report “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” tracing the university’s connections to slavery in the midst of its hagiographic tercentennial celebration. There's often been an explicitly Antiracist character to labor struggles at Yale, as true of when the vast majority of the university' black workforce refused to work on the day following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university had made work optional in the hopes of avoiding disruptions) as when thousands of striking workers and members of the New Haven community demanded equitable hiring of Latino workers during a weeklong strike in March 2003, or when the graduate employee union waged a campaign against the university’s investments in the Corrections Corporation of America which culminated with the university’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management LLC, divesting from CCA when Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility refused to do so. 

Make no mistake; Yale’s involvement with slavery far exceeds its continued honoring of John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery ideologue, senator, and statesman.  As Dugdale, Feuser, and Castro Alves noted, the labor of the slaves who worked George Berkeley’s Rhode Island plantation provided the capital for Yale’s first scholarships.  The slave-trader Phillip Livingston financed the university’s first endowed professorship.  (Yale, in turn, trained Livingston’s children in the management of his transoceanic enterprise.)  The profits from slave labor funded the university’s library and laid the groundwork for its endowment, which now exceeds $25 billion.  Besides its close ties to slave-trade merchant capitalists, and the West Indies plantocrats in particular, Yale was itself a site of slave labor.  “Slaveholding,” notes the historian Craig Steven Wilder in Ebony and Ivy, his 2013 history of US universities’ relationships with colonial genocide and racial slavery, “was common among Yale’s early faculty and governors.”  

But if Yale’s legacy of slavery stretched back to its earliest days, the slave pastoral stained glass window Menafee broke is of a much more recent vintage.  Like the residential college in which it was until recently installed, it was constructed slightly more than eighty years ago, in the early 1930s.  Not only has Yale been slow to reckon with its past; well into the twentieth century, it was actively affirming the central role slave capitalism played in its origins and development.  Until 2007 the room where The Yale Corporation (the university’s board of trustees) meets prominently featured a painting of Elihu Yale, the notoriously abusive official of the East India Company whose name the university has borne since 1718 and who may have himself profited from the sale of slaves.  The painting depicts Yale with a dark-skinned child at his feet.  Around the child’s neck, an iron collar is clearly visible. 

Yale University has mostly avoided substantive discussion of its history, choosing instead to emphasize conversions to abolitionism or early African-American graduates.  But one is constantly reminded.  In some ways, conditions for dining hall workers are very different now than they were when Williams worked at Yale.  The three long strikes of the 1970s, the ten-week long strike in 1984, the two strikes in 1996, and the landmark settlement of the second strike of 2003 increased pay substantially, slowed the administration’s attempt to undermine the union by subcontracting and casualizing the labor force, ended the practice of routinely laying off hundreds of workers each summer, and won unparalleled job security language which prevents layoffs during the duration of the contract cycle.  But, in other respects, things haven’t changed that much.  Many food service and custodial workers still work 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat.  Several stories about Menafee include the detail that he can’t afford a cellular phone.  Yale remains an institution soaked in and celebratory of a long history of white supremacy.  It is impossible to walk through, or by, the university’s many service entrances and not understand this, to not sense how interlinked white supremacy is with the everyday experience of work and/or study.  Indeed, Menafee's action might itself serve as a reminder of the continuities between racialized service work and slavery, at a university that slavery funded, a university where slaves labored, in a city profoundly shaped by the history of slavery and abolition as by the confluence of deindustrialization and capital flight, university tax exemption, real-estate speculation, and expansion, and a mode of racial capitalism which conjoined them through the labor of a predominantly African American workforce of food service and custodial workers whose history of struggle produced Yale's unprecedented history of strikes - as many as twenty between the early 1940s and 2005, depending on what and how one goes about counting.

Corey Menafee's act of refusal, the refusal to continue working under the symbols of Yale's history of chattel slavery and colonial genocide, punctures the hypocrisy which has suffused so much of Yale's recent hand-wringing over its white supremacist past and present, a hypocrisy which led it to try to fold Menafee's broken window into an ongoing "art survey" launched in response to student discontent over the decision to keep John C. Calhoun's name on one of its residential colleges.  Perhaps it also kept the matter quiet to discourage other such acts against other symbols of Yale’s racism and imperialism, of which many remain.  The tinted glass which quickly replaced the smashed panel could just as easily be read as a small form of counterinsurgency, rendering the university’s interior once more opaque to the New Haveners whose congress along Elm Street, the major thoroughfare adjacent to Calhoun College, has been so heavily monitored by the university’s police department, and projecting a pristine, undamaged facade to the world.

Menafee's act further makes transparent three fallacies: that recent campus protest over cultures of racism and white supremacy on US campuses speak more to the coddled nature of millienial students than the actual political economy of US racial capitalism, that the continued presence of such celebrations of the university’s racism is permitted only for educational purposes, and, above all, that service workers are not themselves implicated by and participants in those debates and struggles.  Maybe nowhere more than in their role as employers of racialized service work do US universities suture old and new forms of white supremacist racial capitalism.  Through studying the history of that labor and those who have performed it, we can gain better insight into how universities have continued to occupy slavery's afterlives.  Standing in solidarity with Corey Menafee and with those who have come before him requires both an unflinching and rigorous critique of this relationship between university service labor and the American college's debt to the enslavement of and trade in people of African descent, and a collective commitment towards its overturning.

"Yale is Elitist in Its Basic Design"

Yale is teaming up with the Department of Defense to teach aspiring tortucrats how to interrogate brown people in New Haven.

That YDN op-ed i just linked to is, I think, pretty good about the racial politics of such a move, though in at least one respect I take issue with it.  I am certainly in solidarity with any attempts to obstruct the university's use of working class and poor New Haven residents to further the knowledge/power couplet of the neoliberal security state.  But I think it's important to historicize the longue duree of the university's mutually beneficial relationship with the state to hone such techniques on those very populations, and to recognize that the university has all too often used those communities for its own purposes - that this program is not evidence of the security state corrupting the university's curriculum and social mission, but is instead the latest development in a long and mutually constitutive relationship between the university's governing corporation and local, state, and federal police and military power.  

Writing in 1970, amidst the tumult of the New Haven trials of nine members of the Black Panther Party for the murder of suspected informant Alex Rackley, the authors of "Go to School, Learn to Rule: The Yale Method"  - a collaboration between the American Independent Movement and the Africa Research Group (the former was a dissident New Haven labor-left organization which formed in 1966 around the congressional campaign of a Yale sociology professor named Robert Cook, whose members included local radicals like the Yale grad student Rick Wolff and alumnus turned labor organizer John Wilhelm, and should not be confused with the American Indian Movement) recognized that the university was itself "the vanguard of liberal repression," that it "exercised its power to control and exploit the local community", that it's hospital resembled a "colonial outpost where the doctor is the colonial administrator."  AIM (and ARG) traced the university's "constant policy of abusing and exploiting the New Haven community" through the university's relationship with and role in the city's powerful urban renewal machine, which displaced thousands of New Haven residents during the 1950s and 1960s.  

The pamphlet is important for my research for the ways it links an analysis of the university's labor politics to its imperial spatial practices within and beyond New Haven, themes which have recurred throughout the long and often bitter labor struggles between the university and diverse groups of its employees between the 1930s and the present.  But I bring it up here for its analysis of the university's relationship to and interest in what it described as the machinery of state repression.  In the late 1960s, Yale was already training the New Haven Police Department in its interactions with the city's growing Puerto Rican population which had been at the center of the city's riots in the summer of 1967.  How far this went beyond the instruction of rudimentary cop-Spanish I don't know - not much, I imagine.  But by 1970 the university's relationships with the Department of Defense and its Social Science Research Center had eclipsed its collaboration with the NHPD for most New Haveners.  For the authors of "Go To School: Learn To Rule", the university's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) represented the "right of the university to train officers for an army whose main function is to suppress wars of national liberation, ghetto riots, strikes, and other interruptions of the smooth running of the capitalist order."  The university's ROTC program, which was recently restored after having been driven off campus by student militants in the 1970s, was, the pamphlet's authors were careful to note "not an alien intruder at Yale," but rather, "in a Yale which is run like a corporation by a corporation for the corporations," it was "only natural for it to train the defenders of these corporations."  Thus, noted GTSLTR, "the movement to abolish ROTC was not a movement to purify an otherwise unsullied temple of learning, it was, instead, a direct blow to American Capitalism."

The relevance of this critique to the present moment is pretty straightforward.  The same is the case, I argue, with the conflicts over the creation of the university's Institute of Social Sciences, which was a target not only for radicals like AIM and the city's Panthers, but also for more institutionally acceptable segments of the city's political spectrum.  For its AIM critics, the ISS was, like ROTC, counterinsurgency, "an attempt to reinforce the organizations and institutions of a repressive capitalist society precisely at the points where they are weakest."  The institute represented a colonial model of expropriating knowledge from, and producing technocratic mastery over, the people who lived in Yale's shadow, a population which was, throughout the 1960s, becoming both poorer and more disproportionately racialized.  (As New Haven's industrial decline continued throughout the next two decades these trends would only accelerate, as would the relative importance of the university as employer and landlord in the political economy of the city and region.)   

None of these ventures likely involved the deliberate instruction of state agents in interrogation tactics to the extent that this new venture will - though here the 1967 post-riot partnership with the NHPD does seem an appropriate analogue.  But all of them used New Haven as a laboratory and a playground.  All of them understood and appropriated the city and its inhabitants as instruments of and appendages to the will of university administrators.

In their condemnation of the new center, Batraville and Lew write

As a university, Yale purpose’s is to forge a global community of scholars working together to produce, share, debate, question, challenge and reformulate knowledge. Its purpose is not to promote the agenda of the U.S. political elite.

 The authors of "Go To School, Learn To Rule," and the histories of struggle over the relationship between Yale and New Haven from which that document emerges, offer us the profound insight that Yale's purpose is and has for quite some time been in part "to promote the agenda of the U.S. political elite."  I don't even think that the university's current President would substantially disagree with that claim.  My purpose is not to scold Yale activists for naivete and bourgeois idealism.  I think it makes a great deal of sense to organize against and resist such measures as this new center.  But I think part of that organizing needs to incorporate a recognition of the long history of the university's imperial relationship to its workers (today's the 21st anniversary of one of the university's many strikes) and neighbors, its entanglements in human terrain mapping avant-la-lettre, and the long complicity of its academic departments in imperial and intelligence projects such as CIA recruitment and Cold War exceptionalism.  (For this last point, see also Michael Holzman, "The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale," American Studies 40:2 Summer 1999.)

PS: Oh, BTW, the very name of this blog originates in Yale President Richard Levin's role on the Bush administration's sham of a WMD inquiry following the invasion of Iraq. As noted, Yale's purposes have been aligned with US empire for a long time.

PPS: I hope this doesn't come across as too critical of Batraville and Lew in a dickish and academic sense.  I don't know them but I support their work.  Here's a link to the petition they and others are circulating.

Resist, Occupy, Grade Papers

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

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

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

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

YNHH, the state, and the post-fordist city

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

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

Reason #347 Why Pitchfork Sucks

No way is Pleased to Meet Me a better album than Tim!

The former has four great songs and a lot of mediocre ones. The latter has three terrible songs and a lot of great ones. I love them both, but the idea that "One good dose of thunder" cancels out "here comes a regular" seems suspect..., as does the fact that an album that sounds as canned and as crappy as Pleased to Meet Me sometimes did (although i have not yet heard the reissue) could be the one cited as having better sound.

Also, it's kind of amazing that six plus years on, there's still a UOC for the YDN to complain about.

I've been meaning to blog about this and this and this. Unfortunately, i'm swamped and sick, and i don't know when i'll get around to it. So let me instead briefly commemorate this, which happened six years ago today, and which i have been thinking about even through my post-nasal drip haze. That was a little too graphic and doesn't do justice what the movement did that day and in the years since. Not much can, which is why all the media accounts of that action, particularly the snarky one in the NYT to which i will not link here, completely misunderstood what was at stake and what was going on.

Back to preparing for tomorrow's sections, in which we'll discuss racialized and gendered service work and affective and emotional labor in Mary Romero's Maid in the USA, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Domestica, Robin Leidner's Fast Food Fast Talk, and Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart.

serendipity.

In the process of trying in vain to track down an old article from the Yale student publication The New Journal on the 13 latino replacement workers who joined the September 2003 picket lines, I came across a scholarly article on the '84 strike that I'd never heard of before - Pushkala Prasad's "Organizing Culture in a Union," from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1991. I guess the reason I hadn't come across the article before is that it's disciplinary sociology, which is not where I'd locate my own research methods, and it came out significantly later than most of the scholarly literature on the strike, from Herbert Janick's "Yale Blue" to Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Women Workers and the Yale Strike" and Linda Anderson''s article in Fronteirs to On Strike For Respect. By 1991, GESO had already struck once.

But Prasad's article's pretty interesting. There's a discussion of tensions between HERE officials and strikers over whether singing on the picket line removes focus from the economic issues, which is fascinating. And the early 90s social constructivism approach does interesting work to resolve some of the questions Josh Eidelson raised in an excellent term paper he wrote about the strike a million years ago and was nice enough to share with me when I was doing some research on the clerical worker labor movement shortly less than a million years ago.

Back to work.

Happy May Day

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

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


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

random ten for 3/30

The Cake - "Baby That's Me". Not to be confused with the 90's alternative rock band. This is late '60s female-fronted soul drenched in instrumentation, Phil Spector style. I found it on a blog somewhere.

The Coup - "Santa Rita Weekend."

look around theres hell of motherfuckas that i recognize
oh whats up man im back again
but its a temporary situation
taking weekend vacation
government incaceration
i call myself working on a pay hike
they calling me working on my third strike
sike i cant go forward
and motherfuckas cant ignore it
cos all my peoples on parole
in the pen gotta warrant
so its some shit i done leaped in
damn another santa rita weekend

Bad Religion - The Quickening. I have this album?

Skull Snaps - "Ain't That Loving You"

Os Mutantes - "Ave Lucifer."

El-P. "Accidents Don't Happen. Pretty sharp critique of post 9/11 NYC

now they check their bags with a staff claspin' Uzis
who deserves the wrath without warning
the same sky for the martyr with a spork scorch New York forfeits
run among the poppy fields order some more clips
store trips are weird but the fear is forceless
Bloomey bought the city of Lego and shitty metal hull
jitters to the floor boards burnt almost aborted
flight of the accidental tourist, morbid
the advertising gods so oddly courtship
godly corporate squads plot these tortures
holiness is hard and it's costing god fortunes
(guess he took a second job on the force to afford it)
I don't want a part of these self fulfilled prophecies

Deerhoof - "You Can See."

Lord Rhaburn - "More Love Reggae." From the Numero Group Belize City Boil Up compilation. Good stuff.

Sister Love - "Blackbird." 70's NYC funk/soul Beatles cover. Not bad, either.

God, Gays and Guns. - "Sally." This is Thomas Frampton's "disco-punk" song about how we need to stop organizing and just revolt already (a gross oversimplification, i admit.) I'm not sure who "Sally" is here, but I definitely had this argument with Thomas on numerous occasions in a variety of iterations. In other words, I'm so vain I probably think this song is about me. That said, it's pretty good, and chock full of handy situationist references and a catchy chorus which smacks of Ralph Chaplin in a good way. I like Thomas a lot.

On getting over before we go under.

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

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

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

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

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

This was five years ago this week. More on that later. For an earlier meditation on such matters, see here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here and myriad other places all over this blog. Like i said, thoug. more later.

Who let this kid on Youtube?

Another quick link, this time to Thomas's insistently non-travelblogical account of his journeys across Asia, which currently find him in the Negev, beset by curious performances and imperialist relativisms.

If anyone can rescue the travelogue from its colonial origins, resonances, and effects, it's probably Thomas.

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

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

Phonebanking tomorrow. That and writing.

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

I just pulled a Josh.

transit

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

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

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

In solidarity and struggle,

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






photo:YDN

Two, Three, Many 425 College Streets

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

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

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

This is fairly amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

Let's get to work.

Inside Higher Ed reports on university mobilization against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Several officials who represent or work for private universities said that there was nervousness about the bill, but also anxiety about opposing it in a prominent way. Private universities stated repeatedly during the battle over T.A. unions that they weren’t against all unions, just those for graduate students, and the institutions don’t want to be identified with other employer groups that are more actively opposing the bill. At other institutions, campus leaders are aware of strong student protest movements on campus in favor of the rights of custodial workers to unionize. Several officials who have been watching the legislation and who oppose it said that they didn’t want to be quoted, but were happy that one higher education group had publicly come out against the bill.

That group is the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.

Josh Ulman, chief government relations officer for CUPA-HR, said that the group was conflicted about the legislation and might not have opposed it except for the provision that authorizes union recognition based on union cards signed by employees, rather than requiring a secret ballot election. “For any democracy, we feel it’s important” to have a secret vote, he said. “Employees need to cast their votes in a private setting, without the knowledge of their employer, the union or their co-workers,” Ulman said.

He also said that CUPA-HR had worries about the mandatory arbitration called for in the law. “We’re concerned about terms of employment being forced on both the employer and employees by a government official, rather than rising organically out of negotiations,” he said.

Mike Mauer, director of organizing for the American Association of University Professors, which is among the groups that have been organizing adjunct faculty members in recent years, said that while the AAUP has not taken a stand on the issue, he personally supports the legislation and thinks it would help organizing drives. He said that there have been “such severe restrictions” on organizing that a card majority system would greatly speed up the process and allow more adjunct faculty members to have unions.

Once a union is recognized, he said, the arbitration process would help adjunct faculty members win gains. First contracts — not just in academe, but generally — are notorious for taking a long time to negotiate. “If there is no time limit, the employer can just play it out,” he said.

If the bill becomes law, the most immediate impact may be on union drives and contract talks on behalf of custodial workers. Union activists have been pushing hard to organize such workers, both those who work directly for universities and those who work for companies that universities hire for such services.

Renee Asher, a spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union, which has been involved in several efforts to organize college employees, said that the concern about secret ballots is “the standard industry line used by those who don’t want unions.” Asher said that the problem with intimidation today comes after employees have turned in a majority of union cards and an election is scheduled. At that point, she said, it has become common for employers to scare employees about the impact of a union. The system called for in the bill “is how unions were formed for years,” she said.

Asher said that higher education, when acting as an employer, has “a special responsibility” to promote good employment practices. If college leaders truly aren’t hostile to unions, she said, they would embrace the bill. She noted that several universities have in fact changed policies recently to improve wages and benefits for custodial and maintenance workers — a trend she applauded.

To those higher education leaders who fear the bill, if enacted, would lead to more unions, she said that the working conditions of the workers are the relevant factor. The reason more colleges have seen protests and organizing drives, she said, “is that they have employees making poverty wages and without health insurance.”

Just Ask Marna: Stories From The Ground of Shameful Union-Busting Tactics

This is profoundly dirty and wholly demonstrative of just how committed to anti-union terror tactics Marna "The Borg" Borgstrom really is. I want to write more about this, but have to read some Capital Vol 3. and Limits to Capital and write a 2 page response paper and get to Manhattan all before 11 AM, and last night's protracted HOD meeting left me a bit drained but also excited for our "conference committee" to finally start "conferencing" with the administration on the terms and conditions of our "not-work." So I will be back, sometime after my class and some time before this weekend's birthday celebrations for both my nonagenarian grandparents, for which i will wear a tie and jacket for the first time since my senior prom, I think, and for which i am told my awesome cousin Kyla has returned early from the antarctic. Thankfully, as always seems to be the case in New Haven, that movement Sherman Chickering saw in the picket signs and faces of the local 35 strikers in 1971 remains very much alive.

It's now - barely - officially March 6, 2007. This means that my grandfather joins my grandmother in the ranks of the nonagenarians, so happy birthday to him.

It also marks four years since my grandfather's 86th birthday, and this:

On March 6, 2003 hundreds of workers and students and other members of the New Haven community came together in the middle of a snowstorm to demand a new relationship with the university and a new set of contracts for each of four bargaining units - five if you count the new social contract, which you should, though the picket sign on the back of one dog read, if i remember correctly, four legs, four unions, one contract, and that was kind of awesome. Folks came to teach each other about what education and justice can and should mean, to articulate and bring to birth - to use Ralph Chaplin's gestational-apocalyptic metaphor - a new university from the ashes of the old, radically participatory and indeed performative, but with a tone firmly (sorry) rooted in histories of the transnational labor migrations - forced, nominally volitional, or otherwise, which built - or at least completely reordered New Haven and constituted the movements which had struck Yale eleven times before March 3 of that year, and have done so three more times since then. I haven't really felt that sense of possibility and, um, power - in a subversive, non-Foucauldian, liberatory sense, since then. I hope to soon. Because i think actions like the AJH-masterminded E.I.T.S. are so powerful because they articulate on the ground organizing and demands (and this foreshadows a response to Alek which I may or may not ever get around to dealing with more formally) with the simultaneous eruption of the Harney-Moten undercommons into a realm in which the "criminality" of the subversive academic "refugee" is however momentarily displaced and utopian possibilities become plainly illuminated, from the undercommons the spectre of a new commons, perhaps - and concretize a shared vision of what it is we are fighting for, which cannot be contained in Harney and Moten's formation of the Cary Nelson-Bill Readings reformist impulse in even its strongest iterations. Also, we need a fucking contract, but that demand isn't just about reforming something gone awry, or stopgap measures meant to slow the erosion of job security and labor rights and the forward march of casualization, because we can't let it just be that. We have to always demand and imagine more.

Wow. (And the Herald used to be the decent one.)

Worse, the article quotes the three employees — Walter Bailey, Kristie Lavorgna and Ann Terranova — without mentioning that they are a part of the organized anti-union campaign, called “Just Us.” Bailey, in particular, is often quoted in the media representing the anti-union side. The reporter presents her subjects as if she encountered them almost by chance. Rather, the reporter told me in a phone interview, is that she got the names of the three workers from Vin Petrini, the hospital’s senior vice president for public affairs. In other words, the Herald called the hospital’s PR officer and got the names of three hand-picked anti-union activists, and then proceeded to quote them knowingly without including their credentials.

To be clear, the problem here is not that the reporter quoted Bailey, Lavorgna and Terranova, but that their backgrounds are misrepresented. It would be equally wrong to quote a union organizer without mentioning her affiliation. If I interviewed a spokesman for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, I would identify that person as such, and not equate his opinion with that of the average voter.

Looking for examples of Sexton hyperbole, eh? How about "the union is a virus" or "the union can either die a quick death or a slow death" or "We are witnessing a palpable decline in the public’s appetite for nuance, complexity and critical thinking, which in turn has spawned a virulent secular dogmatism and an alarming devolution in both the substance and style of public discourse," not only a hyperbolic jeremiad, but a hypocritical one as well? How about when he publicly claimed that only six people were on strike during the spring of 2006? (Though that's more of a flat out lie than an exaggeration.) What about "None of the striking graduate students will have their ability to continue their own studies affected. In all cases, their tuition and health benefits will remain in place, and where the suspension of stipend would create economic hardship, loans will be provided to students upon their request." (Not true, though again not hyperbolic so much as simply mendacious.) "There was a time during the summer when GSOC and the union might have emerged as the collective bargaining representative of our graduate assistants." (Ditto.) "We are a community of principle and reason, and all of us, no matter what our views, have a part in advancing that ideal." (What principle? principal investment? This seems hyperbolic in that it vastly overstates NYU's commitment to a model of the university long since, in any case, expired.)

How is this not hyperbolic?

Edited for snark reduction and clarification