education in the streets!

I meant to post this yesterday. I got sidetracked.

Three years ago today, thousands of workers at Yale University were on strike. It was a thursday, the fourth day of a weeklong walkout staged by unions of graduate teachers, clerical and technical workers, food service, maintenance, and custodial workers, and hospital dietary workers, and it was a day themed around the classroom. GESO held a teach-in (moderated, i believe, by BC) with Gordon Lafer and GSOC's Kitty Krupat, and rallied the superexploited folks from the professional schools, and, cutting my Spanish class yet again, I started out the day as the snow began to fall on the 1199 picket line as people did the electric slide on the line and chanted stuff like "We're freezin, we're freezin', we're freezin' for a reason!" But for me and lots of other folks the most powerful thing that happened that day was the action originally brainstormed by one Abbey Jane Hudson, in which shut down College Street between Elm and Grove and created six classrooms at which strikers, undergraduates, and members of the New Haven community would come together, demonstrate our support for the movement for justice at Yale and in New Haven, teach each other about what was at stake in the fight, and enact a vision of a radically democratic and constituent politics of a university situated in the movement we were building together through struggle and organizing. Capped off by the inches of snow accumulating on Cornel West's head as he told us that "we still hold up a blood-stained banner, and a tear soaked banner, of Light, of Truth, of Justice...,"[1] Education In The Streets, as we called it, was incredibly powerful for me because it was not simply a demand for something from the administration, not just a display of force in the eternal war of position that is Yale's labor-management conflicts, though it served both of these purposes well, not just another reactive gesture to Yale's continuing attempts to colonize New Haven, the globe, and workers' lives with the logics of neoliberalism. What made this action a watershed moment for me in thinking about the work that i do in every sense of that term was the ways in which it, in addition to being an incredibly powerful gesture of support for the movement and the strike and the workers and the unions and the social contract, also was an attempt to create the kind of community and university we all want very much to be a part of. I post this not solely to commemorate, much less to memorialize, but because I think we need to understand what's at stake in this strike in similar terms, to think about the possibilities the strike creates, create structures of organizing and protest in which such possibilities are immanent, and use this to fuel the fight for a/n other/better university.

[1]Thanks to Thomas Frampton for transcribing West's speech.

Taking a break from other work, yesterday I reread Cynthia Young's essay "On Strike at Yale," from The Minnesota Review vols 45-46, 1996, which is the definitive account, i guess, of the 1995-1996 grade strike at Yale. I'd read Young's essay once before, years ago, and had forgotten some interesting details - i'm not as familiar with this essay as I am with the account Michael Berube gave in the Social Text "Yale Strike Dossier" (which was reprinted in Will Teach For Food,) because back issues of the Minnesota review aren't available via jstor or anything like that and I own will teach for food and have for years. But Berube et al were drawing on Yong's account even before it had been published, and Young, as one of the leaders of the union, gives valuable insight into the strategic decisions made by organizers in the years before and then during the strike. Some things i'm struck by on this reading:

• When TA solidarity formed in 1987 in response to the Kagan-Pollit plan, TAs discussed and planned for a grade strike which apparently never materialized
• The retaliatory "penalties" threatened by the Yale administration against grade strike leaders Diana Paton, Nilanjana Dasgupta, and Young - who had been informed on by David Brion Davis, Thomas Carew, and Sara Suleri-Goodyear, respectively, are remarkably similar to those which the NYU administration is levying against GSOC members.

Young does something I've seen nowhere else, - she charts the prehistory and early history of GESO from TA solidarity to affiliation with the federation and the shift towards unionization, through the three strikes of 1991, 1992, and 1995, and into the grade strike and beyond. While i do disagree with her brief treatment of local 35's shift from moribund to militant (Young dates this to the 1968 strike, which others have tended to read a s a failure on the part of the union to command sufficient strength to pressure the university. I have argued, with somewhat tenuous evidence, that the crucial shift really seems to occur between 1968 and 1971, when Local 35 really emerges as the militant union which spends more than half a year on strike between 1971 and 1977,) i find this history of GESO itself, and of the specific organizing structure that union developed - (departmental OCs-CC-staff/steering committee-leads) invaluable in constructing a history of academic labor movements in the last two decades.

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Speaking of GESO, last night the Revolutionary Army of California made its NYC debut at the Parkside lounge. A bunch of GSOCers turned out to support our colleagues from New Haven. They sound much better without David Sanders, which I say not as an insult to David (he's twelvety feet tall and six hundred years old and could totally kick my ass, and he scares me, but it was also kind of hilarious to watch him sing "I think we're alone now",) but more as a general observation that the band has actually gotten pretty awesome.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the U. of Miami janitors' strike Donna Shalala has helped force... (In the interest of neutrality, she claims.)

Janitors at the University of Miami, most living at or close to the poverty
level, have taken concerns about their working conditions to the next level — a
strike. Many have said they are willing to forgo days of pay they describe as
meager to raise awareness about low-income workers. And since Tuesday evening,
an increasing number have taken to the picket lines, demanding action by both
university administrators and the company they work for.

“Too many people are suffering and don’t have money or health insurance,”
said Darrell Francis, a member of the janitorial groundskeeping crew, who joined
the strike on Thursday. “I’m not only in this for me — so many people are living
from paycheck to paycheck and don’t have a decent salary to get by on.”

Speaking of strikes at universities, today happens to be the three-year anniversary of the first day of the March 2003 Yale strike, the coldest picket line I have ever been on and the first strike at Yale i was actually around for. The highlight was the community "Tear Down The Walls" march for job desegregation at Yale and the rest of the Social Contract, with the Nation Drill Squad (i'm pantomiming flying around the corners as I write this) marching right in front of us and Julie lending me her gloves, and thousands of people marching in the freezing cold for justice from the city's largest employer and private landowner, in solidarity with the thousands of workers on strike.

That's coffee. Get your mind out of the gutter

On strike! NYU brass never knew what hit them.

Inside Higher ed. asks

"If the Harvard University faculty can rise up, why not other
faculties?"

Before There Was GSOC, There Was Newsies. (posted by request of the great folks from GUS.)

Before there was GSOC, there was...NEWSIES!
"Wrongs will be righted, If we're united"

The 1992 Disney cult classic musical NEWSIES, starring a young, svelte Christian Bale, recounts the efforts of teenage newspaper peddlers to form a union in turn-of-the-century New York City.

Join Graduate Undergraduate Solidarity (GUS) for dinner and a screening of NEWSIES!
Friday March 3rd, 6pm to 8pm Vanderbilt Hall 216 at the NYU Law School
Free CHINESE FOOD and Open to ALL!