convenient abjection?

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

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

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

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

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

quo usque tandem abutere, Zache, patientia nostra

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

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

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

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

social entrepreneurship?

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

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

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

Rat, commodified

The most bizarre moment of the GSOC strike was when a group of "counter-protestors" (actually actors hired by an advertising agency) set up a huge inflatable businessman in Washington Square Park, along with a nice, cuddly inflatable rat to protest the UAW's fangy, menacing protest rat. Wearing t-shirts and equipped with a web site that called on passersby and strikers alike to respect rodentia, and attempting to rebrand the rat as the "great pointed archer," (initials GPA. Get it? I just did...) threatened by villainous human supremacist trade unions, these ad agencies used our strike for some free publicity. The whole thing came out in MetroNY the next day. This was really my first interaction with an attempt to commodify the symbols of labor insurgency, other than asshole Yale undergrads wearing picket signs to frat halloween parties, and it's what came to mind immediately when I saw this in my subway station this morning.Yeah, that's an HSBC ad. the text beneath the photos reads "Different Values Make The World a Richer Place" You take the people pissed off at finance capital and you turn them into an advertisement for finance capital. Brilliant.

EDIT: Unless I'm being stupid and this is some culture jam a la adbusters, which would make some sense, but also points to how easily those tactics are incorporated into actual corporate strategies.

EDIT 2: Nope, it really is an HSBC ad. Incredible.

Social geography 101

WSN:

Concerns over acceptance rates and quality standards also extend to our potential takeover of Polytechnic University, which seems imminent. An engineering school holds great promise. Realizing its potential will require patience and wise stewardship. Imagining what Poly can be also emphasizes what NYU might yet become: a school giving out too many diplomas to too many students, diluting the university's name. We're not arguing that NYU should aim to be an urban Yale or that the university should be selective for the sake of selectivity. But we hope that being more selective in admissions will translate to a more gifted student body and that a smaller pool of more qualified students will make our degrees that much more valuable.

Profound elitism aside, where do they think Yale is, Kennebunkport?

It's Bizarro Me...

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

questions for the Yale Herald

Yet the visits of Chinese President Hu Jintao last April and Reverend Al Sharpton in October—both potentially divisive figures—passed more quietly than anticipated. In fact, many controversial but liberal figures seem to face little criticism, purely for their politics. “Occasionally, when a speaker like Sharpton comes, there are concerns over race riots,” said April Lawson, SY ’09, who, as the vice-president of the Yale Political Union (YPU), was responsible for bringing Sharpton to campus. “The administration was concerned. Obviously nothing happened, but there were actual contingency plans.” During Hu’s much-awaited visit, entire streets were shut off and security was at an all-time high—there were even whispers of snipers. Over a thousand protestors gathered, mostly visitors to New Haven. But despite numerous accusations of human rights violations leveled against China, Hu’s visit lacked the massive fallout that surrounded that of Baraka. “I think there was a ruckus,” Etra said. “Hu’s visit made students question the University’s alliance with China.”

But whatever political reservations some students had, student protest was overall remarkably restrained. Kirchick believes that in general, this speaks to the political bend of the Yale campus: “I’ve never seen an instance in which a left wing speaker has been met with calls, shouting, or attempts to drown him out,” he said. To him, the liberality that prevails on so much of Yale’s campus explains the lackluster protest surrounding Hu’s visit. “Here we were welcoming and celebrating a tyrant who tortures people—but since Hu’s a left-wing tyrant there was a completely different standard,” Kirchick said.

Question#1: So Al Sharpton's very presence is now an incitement to riot? For whom? Is the fear that Sharpton's presence will inflame the tempers of the hordes of angry white men pouring out of Payne-Whitney to set Dixwell aflame in reaction to the good reverend's provocations? Or is the administration afraid that Sharpton will make all those black folks who live so close to all those neighborhoods Yale's bulldozed get "uppity?" If Yale's fear was the latter, then this is deeply disturbing. Either way, Sharpton's hardly provocative enough to warrant such concern.


Question 2: Since when is PRC Technocrat Hu Jintao remotely left wing (or certainly any more so than Jamie Kirchick?) Whatever Amiri Baraka's "offensive" statementsa may have been, did he or any other "left wing" speakers Kirchick has seen ever make the kinds of racist claims about millions of people that Daniel Pipes did in 2003, when he was met with SILENT protest by students wearing black gags around their mouths, or that Shockley certainly did when he was shouted down in 1974? Did any "left wing" (and again, Hu Jintao, not "Left Wing") speakers perpetrate the forms of colonial racism and murder mobilized by the Israeli state under Peres's watch? And hasn't Kirchick himself been part and parcel of attempts by the far right (David Horowitz/Campuswatch) to police what is said in the classroom and on campus and publicly assail those who question right wing dogma in a manner that Jim Sleeper, no lefty himself, publicly called "Neo-Stalinist?"

And of course we should note that while the students involved in the action against Shockley were expelled, the university has yet to account, four years later, for its detention and intimidation of UOC leafletters during Parents' Weekend 2002.

pathetic peoplehood and computer lab ettiquette

It's been a busy week. Presentation tuesday, and i just finished a paper about five hours ago. Tuesday afternoon, around 1 PM, I was sitting in the ITS computer lab in the school of ed. building finishing up my presentation on CLR James for my postcolonial Marxism class. Because of the ADD, i get all sensitive to noise when i'm trying to write stuff i have to ocncentrate real hard on (not like blog entries,) and sometimes people in that lab are very loud, in which case sometimes i do my little mutter-scowl barely passive-aggressive schtick for a few seconds until I catch myself, reqalize I'm only an old man in Julie Math (fast approaching the big 9-0) and then get back to work. Tuesday was different.

An undergrad - a woman with long curly hair in hipster/olsen twin garb sat down immediately next to me and started a very loud and clearly unimportant conversation. Nothign worng with unimportant loud cell phone conversations. I have many of them myself. Just not in computer labs where phones are banned. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic than I was, but given her response, in retrospect, I really doubt it would have helped. In a slightly frustrated tone, I said, "You know, you really can't talk on the phone in here." This was an accurate claim. I've seen ITS employees say the same thing to offenders numerous times. The woman, not missing a beat or averting her eyes from her screen, said loudly and ina disgusted tone to whover was on the other end of her telephone conversation, "Ok, a pathetic person just told me to get off the phone. He thinks he runs the place."

I kinda did a Stephanie Tanner ("how rude") at this point, and was mildly shocked by the rudeness and self-centered nature of her response. I trieds to explain that this was the lab policy as i had seen it enforced and that I was not trying to be rude, but she did a non-verbal "talk to the hand" motion and hung up the phone.

Thankfully, not all NYU undergraduates are this spoiled and obnoxious - many of them are really great but it's the hipster ennui, the dissafected, post-gentriification sense of yuppie entitlement to urban space - which is certainly not unique to NYU students (although at Yale, there's much more of a technocrats of the future thing going on)- which i find so disconcerting.

Wish fulfilment

“The House of Delegates is a unique and potentially revolutionary structure
among institutions of higher education,” the statement said.

Actually, no, it isn't. It's a company union. There's nothing "revolutionary" about that.

"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.

On Strike For Respect!

At one point late in the GSC Community Meeting Wednesday night, Dean Katherine Stimpson inserted herself onto the line for the microphone and proceeded to lecture the assembled striking graduate teachers and researchers on the nature of respect and the need for mutual respect in the Graduate School of Arts and Science. (This reminded me of the clause in the Yale Undergraduate Relations based upon which Thomas Frampton orchestrated the filing of 77 undergraduate complaints against President Richard Levin during the buildup to the 2003 strikes, in which we charged that Levin had, by curbing free speech rights and concducting vicious campaigns against the unions, violated the requirement that faculty and administrators preserve "mutual respect and charitable relations".) Anyway, Dean Stimpson was met with incredulity at the ignorance and arrogance she displayed in presuming to lecture hundreds of strikers who have been threatened, patronized, insulted, and referred to by our univeristy president as a "virus" on appropriate decorum. And rightly so. What she said was absolutely ridiculous, given the ways in which the administration has conducted itself since this summer. But it seems to me that on one matter, at least, Dean Stimpson is correct. What's at stake here is all about respect.

re·spect:

1.A feeling of appreciative, often deferential regard; esteem. See Synonyms at regard.
2.The state of being regarded with honor or esteem.
3.Willingness to show consideration or appreciation.
[Dictionary.com]


Graduate teachers at NYU work hard. Folks regularly work over 4o hours a week for low pay and with no job security. We're casualized, transient academics who've come to grad school because we care about the future of teaching, of the university, of cities, of the planet, because we care about social justice and we care about our students. The administration's rhetoric and actions since I have been here have vacillated between constructting us as bawling infants and as vicious and deluded terrorist viruses determined to destroy all that is holy/profitable. The administration has threatened us with the specter of deportation. They've insulted us on a daily basis, discounting the work that we do. They've tried to sew fractious divisions between us and our faculty, between us and our colleagues, between us and our students. They've blacklisted us from our work and then had the temerity to offer us loans in case their lockout should place us in financial hardship. They have refused to speak to us as the organized agent of graduate teachers, instead attemting to slur us by constantly associating us with base and dirty "auto workers" (gasp!) who cannot possibly have any place in academe. They've attempted to exclude us from all decisionmaking about the future of our work and our departments. They've turned our universities into neoliberal playgrounds/investment machines, and turned our classrooms into precarious and exploitative sites of flexible accumulation.

And then they try to lecture us about respect?

We know all about respect. Over the 95 days of this strike we've formed a deep and powerful respect for each other, for other workers on campus and our colleagues at other universities whose continued support has been incredible, for faculty governance, academic job security, and the people in the city we live and work in who have supported us and stood with us in the freezing cold to help build a new, better kind of university without university leadership teams and apparently inebriated ex-feminists who think it's ok to lecture the people they are blacklisting about mutual respect. Respect is what they are trying to strip from us. It's what we are fighting for.

It's what we are going to win.

The Truth Is A Virus, pt 3/Hit the road, GAC

Three months ago, John Sexton told a graduate student in the English Department, that GSOC was "a virus" that had to be eradicated/extirpated from the social body of the NYU campus. In considering the implications of these words today, after the student recounted this exchange to the hundreds of GSOCers at the GAC town hall meeting, as Katherine Stimpson squirmed and then tried to lecture us on respect (that's another blog entry coming soon to a weapon of class instruction near you) i find myself referring again and again to the graffiti on the high school bulletin board in pump up the volume and the multiple, shifting, rhizomatic forms of organizing it implies.

The meeting was a victory for our side. It began with Matt and Holly, the two locked out creative writing teachers who are facing at least a 3 semester blacklist and the denial of tuition remission and health care benefits, blasting the GAC proposal's useless grievance procedure and the repression visited upon the strikers by the administration. While administrators spoke of a "third way" (one GSOCer pointed out the conspicuous lack of thirdness implicit and explicit in the GAC's comissioning and subservience to the President of the University while a faculty member in the same department has reminded folks that historically, when we talk about a "third way" what we are talking about is generally fascism,) GSOC members pointedly told Provost McLaughlin et al. that they could not be the ones to unilaterally decide whether we should have a union - in fact, that decision is and has always been ours and ours alone (we have built the wide foundation laid it skyward stone by stone) and that we did not need their voice mechanism, we have our own and we have been speaking volunes through it for 93 days now. Susan pointed out that the community which the meeting sought to poll on the GAC proposal was a community which we constitute and a community that had spoken resolutely in support of our union and to demand that the university leadership team negotiate. Provost McLaughlin, responding to Melissa's question about the "human toll" of the strike all but admitted just ow destructive the administration's union busting has been for graduate teachers and researchers here. We all know now who Rodney Washington is. The next question, i suppose, is "who the hell is Frank Hoffensteadt, PhD.?" Sarah Wolf (who's been locked out of her job teaching Spanish, asked this. She also asked if the administration really believed the line that there are only seven of us on strike. Here, flustered and irritated, "Dave" (as the moderator referred to him) resorted to fascist bravado, telling us to give him our names and departments and how we were "failing our responsibilities." Mike Palm took issue with this, and so did I, and i was next on line to the microphone, so what I had originally plotted out as a GESO-style calm and collected explication of exactly why the administration was never going to win this instead turned into a half-shouted attempt to redirect and reappropriate the discourse of responsibility away from the shrill anti-union propaganda of Dean Stimpy and Provost Dave towards a much larger understanding of what GSOCers are responsible for (the future of academic labor and the movement for another university) and who we are responsible to (our colleagues, our students, New Yorkers, union and non-union workers, our companer@s in New Haven and North Hampton, Berkeley and Urbana, Philly and Morningside Heights and Madison and Ann Arbor and in every adjunct cubicle in every university in this country, the labor movement,) and that the only way to fight casualization and corporatization/neoliberalization is through unions, through organizing. We need a strong, independent union because we can't trust the agents of casualization and posterchildren of the neoliberal university to disrupt their own agendas out of kindness. We have a responsibility to eachother. We have a responsibility to the seven folks thus far who have been locked out of their jobs for striking. That responsibility means fighting. It means doing everything we can to win this fight and a new contract and to work towards a better future for universities and the folks who work in them.

Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos.






Oh, and here's some Ralph Chaplin for you.

Solidarity Forever (1915)

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

It is we who plowed the praries;
built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations;
built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Special Interest?

This article was a topic of conversation tonight, so i figured i'd blog it.

"It appears the unions want to take millions of dollars in dues

from their members and use them to rob average Americans of their right to pay

less for the basics in life," Ms. Gallagher said. "You need to ask one question:

Is it fair to ask American consumers to pay higher prices to subsidize a

relatively small pocket of individuals just because they are making the most

noise?"

Which "small pocket" would that be - Wal-Mart's 1.2 million "associates?" God forbid those dastardly unions should like, organize new workers or something. I mean, really. The labor movement clearly needs to listen to James Kirchick, stop organizing, and start helping the government kill trade unionists in other countries, like we did back in the good old days, when the threat of Nucular Annihilation forced the US to come up with slightly better justifications for invading and destroying sovereign nation states, back when we didn't need to invade outright, we could get right wing generals to stage coups and kill all the leftists all by themselves (i.e., with lots of guns we sold them and which they paid for with money we gave them for "infrastructure." (Notice how the "we" of the labor movement clumsily slips into "we" of the masters of war. I am the best writer ever.) Gotta love that AIFLD. Yes, if the labor movement would just get back to celebrating the neoconservative imperial project, i'm sure all Wal-Mart's troubles would evaporate.



PS: Hey James - what happens when your call for "Gay History" winds up clashing with your antihistorical panegyrics to cold war liberalism? (Except without the whole welfare state or civil rights movement part?)

Jamie Kirchick recently posted a rather moronic and semi-paranoid attack on the UOC/pro-levin panegyric in anticipation of a reaction to the fact that Slick Rick The Ruler is in the top ten highest paid university presidents he assumes UOCistas would be predisposed towards. Ironically, the first person to critique Kirchick's piece is the same person who called me a "detatched lunatic" last spring, which probably says something about just how reactionary Kirchick's apologia for plutocracy is. Well, either that, or I'm a detatched lunatic, which is also a distinct possibility given my current mental state.



Evan's critique of Kirchick's argument about Levin's salary is dead on. What Kirchick understands as "the elementary rules of economics" arguably have even less of a role in determining Levin's salary than they do the schema in which workers at Yale make per year working what Levin will take home in a month -- after he retires. (Thank you, Juan Gonzalez.) This isn't about invisible hands, save in the sense that pay inequity is something equally reified and artificial - it's about power, and it's about class, and it's about how the postwar/post Bayh-Dole academy as corporate agent of knowledge production/consolidation/privatization articulates value and "legitimacy." (See Gary Haller's comment to a worker wondering why a worker panel in the JE Dining Hall in Spring 2002 wasn't a master's tea in which Haller responded that masters' teas were aimed at showcasing valid career paths for Yale undergraduates.)



Since no current UOCistas have answered Kirchick's second thesis, which is pure provocatory vitriol and empty wish-fulfilment, (psychoanalysis, here i come -- move over Fred Jameson!) I'll not be the sole respondent to what strikes me as a rather pitiful cry for attention. Though i doubt Kirchick could tell a "neo-Marxist" from a flying squirrel, and his argument that the UOC constitutes solely rich, white suburbanites (news to me, and i was there pretty much from the beginning through last May) is, given Kirchick's own reactionary take on race and class as evinced in so many classic YDN columns (those poor trembling workers beset by their cruel union to turn against their kind master) highly suspect. Kirchick, whose entire weltanschaaung (thank you Ms. Livingston,) is based on his own privileging of whiteness and empire attempts to slander a diverse coalition of student organizers by erasing that which he cannot understand. The failure of that conservative shibboleth that is western reason leads him to turn to a thoroughly postmodern right wing identity politics, an empire of thought thoroughly divorced from the smoldering husk of the 'reality-based community'. In doing so, Jamie admits defeat, however silently. I feel kind of sorry for him.



I probably shouldn't have posted anything on this subject. I'd like to think I tried to take the high road.

here we go again

I got myself into this one, i know.

I like it here at Yale, where I can treat school as my own personal political playground and never pay any serious consequences! Yale has all the ingredients. An oppressed working class and an evil, capitalist stooge aristocracy running the show. Boy! Down with the capitalist robber barons and their imperialist-racialist-genderist-heterosexualist conceptions of society!

I could point out that Jamie treats political conventions at which psychotic fascists espouse homophobic constructions of citizenship and celebrate imperial warfare while hurling metaphoric spitballs at the men and women who actually get roped into waging it as his own playground, for while I (gasp) share his conviction that such events are “political theater,” I ascribe a great deal of significance to the ways in which such pageants construct and define nation, progress, and enemy, whereas Jamie seems more interested in following Jesse Jackson around and hobnobbing with famous people. Kirchick’s ridicule, directed at the notion that campus activism has any validity, and envisioning Yale as political playground (and I think the neo-(and paleo-)conservatives have always been more guilty of this than activists and organizers affiliated with the global justice movement) suggests his own parochial understanding of the political and cultural economy of higher education and the impact which an 11 billion dollar corporation makes upon global capital. The student labor movements, like other nodes of the networks which constitute the global justice movements, have always understood not only the privilege we enjoy as students at universities which must at least, unlike the secret service, pay lip service to freedom of speech, open debate, and academic freedom, but how we can target universities as nodes of capital and spaces at which it is both produced and reproduced, linking campus struggles with those affecting the communities around them, and, as in Yale’s case, the consequences of yale’s 3.5 billion dollar investement in an 8 billion dollar hedge fund in the business of employing IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs to hijack economies from Indonesia to Argentina to southern Colorado. No one has ever made the argument that student organizing should be solely focused on campus, nor have any of us limited ourselves to such a focus in practice. It should come as little surprise that Kirchick does the social movement many of us have spent years working with in New Haven a disservice by consigning it to the playground. Try telling that to Scott Marks, Velma Williams, Andrea Cole, or Dale Lucas. The scorn which people like Jamie focus on the movements organized by the folks who clean their bathrooms, cook their food, care for them when they’ve consumed too much sherry or chardonnay, or teach their sections and grade their papers constitutes the real manifestation of privilege and exclusion here, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore.

Right, because things like "Sexuality and Gender conceptions of the 16th Century Native American" are really adding to our body of knowledge.

Guess that depends on how you define "our."

I place no stock in the "coarsening of campus debate" hysteria. Such alarms are raised primarily by neoconservatives upset that new generations of scholars have entered the ivory halls of academe in the last four decades with last names other than Bemis, Buckley, and Brewster and are producing new kinds of knowledge and reshaping and reimagining higher education. Yet if such a "cheapening" is taking place, it's because of interventions like Jamie Kirchick's crass, childish, vicious ad hominem attack on Yale activist Thomas Frampton in today's Yale Daily News. The YDN should be ashamed of itself for publishing what amounts to a right wing hatchet job by one student against another. Whether or not Thomas's actions on monday night constitued the height of narcississm, it's clear that Kirchick well deserves such an appelation, and if i didn't think Kirchick had repeatedly proved himself to be little more than a whining child with aspirations to supreme punditude, i might urge others to question his own pathologies. Kirchick's account of the Coca-Cola protest, at which he was not present, is not accurate - police confronted Thomas, not the other way around (i was with him when they did so,) and then allowed him to pass when he presented his student ID), while his callous dismissal of the comapny's litany of global human rights abuses is simply outrageous. (Kirchick's contempt for "New Haven hangers-on" is elitist and offensive, while his numbers are also wrong - while approximately 20 'died' at the protest, there were at least a dozen others in the audience who were part of the action - designated as corpse haulers or leafleters.) I will not futher refute Kirchick's factual innacuracies here (though there are many) save to note that his notion that indignation at Levin's appointment to Bush's sham WMD panel in February was unwarranted and inappropriate ignores Levin's personal friendship with George Bush, which many feel played a role in last July's National Labor Relations Board decision at Brown University which reversed the 2000 NYU Precedent along deeply partisan lines. Kirchick's claim that Thomas's actions were merely theater deserves to be contested from the vantage point of performance theory - after all, all the world's a stage, and Thomas's improvised attempt to speak the truth to power anticipates a far more inclusive and democratic project than the fascist manipulations behind the convention's staging and the militarized perimeter surrounding it. But we also need to ask what theater Kirchick here performs, and why the Yale Daily News would publish such a self-aggrandizing screed of a monologue. But i suppose we can console ourselves with the fact that no one's really listening, anyway.