some thoughts on comparative academic neoliberalisms

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

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

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

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

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

Last night I finished reading Model City Blues. Last year, you may recall, I came down against Paul Bass's criticism of the book without having actually read it. Now that I have, I want to talk a little bit about the text itself.

Model City Blues is an important and fascinating book, one which speaks volumes about the history of New Haven, its people, and its social movements, about the struggles over the right to the city that defined the last half of the twentieth century and continue to define this moment, about gentrification and dislocation, recuperation and organizing.

My undergraduate senior essay was about the relationship between the forms of resistance Jackson writes about and the emergence of Local 35 as a militant force in the city by the early 1970s, so I knew some of the story Jackson tells here. I knew about HPA and John Wilhelm's involvement with them. I knew about AIM and Rick Wolff and the ring road, about Oak Street and Trade Union Village.

But I didn't know about the origins of the Freddie Fixer Parade in the urban renewal machine's attempts to produce consent for Dixwell slum clearance. I didn't know that Malcom X spoke in New Haven's first mosque on Dixwell ave, didn't know that the half empty shopping areas on lower Dixwell were themselves products of renewal policies, or about the rent strikes led by the Hill Neighborhood Union or that so many people were arrested during the riots that the NHPD renditioned people to Farmington and other fairly distant cities. I didn't know about State Street's Bread and Roses Cafe, or Dixwell's "sit-outs" against renewal. New Haven has a long history of people sitting in the street as a form of protest and a way to reclaim contested, policed, and "planned" space, a history Jackson evokes quite powerfully. This is a theoretically rich but deeply grounded work of scholarship. The breadth of Jackson's archives and interviews are astounding, and the careful way Jackson situates the events of thee Lee era in relation to New Haven's present and more recent past (NHSB redlining, YNHH unionbusting, University Properties expansion and Yale's technocratic (and biopolitical) optic of urban development) is skillfull and politically resonant. I would have liked some account of why Edward Logue, the first staff organizer of what's now Local 35, becomes a Robert Moses disciple and one of the betes noires of New Haven social history as the grand poobah of renewal and dislocation - his younger brother later became mayor - or the role of union leaders like Vincent Sirabella, a hero to the Yale Unions and the former organizing director of HERE - in supporting renewal policies and the Lee machine. But this isn't their book. It's a book, instead, about the Fred Harrisses and James Gibbses, the residents of the Hotel Strand and the folks who fought against Yale's expansion into the Hill many years later, about the people who collectively imagined and fought for a different mode of urban existence than that held by the planners and highway builders on church street, and it's a valuable and insightful account of those movements and their place in urban history. Go read it. Now.

Ok, next up on this blog will be the first in a series, hopefully, of posts in a conversation with Eli on international crises in and contours of academic neoliberalism. Yeah, that's right. This blog is back. (Maybe.)

Books I have read so far this semester
Martha Biondi: To Stand And Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

Hardt and Negri: Commonwealth

Bethany Moreton:  To Serve God and Wal-Mart
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Endnotes No. 1  Gilles Dauve, Theorie Communiste, etc.
Polygraph 21

Books I Want to read by the end of this semester:

David Graeber - Direct Action: An Ethnography

Odd Arne Westad: The Global Cold War

Stephan M. Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University

Anti-Oedipus and a thousand plateaus, finally.

Juno Diaz's Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union

The Canal Builders

Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement

Security, Territory, Population: Foucault
Charles Payne's I got the light of freedom

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia
Giovanni Arrighi 0 Adam Smith in Beijing
Achille Mbembe - On The Postcolony
to be amended and appended as things develop.

Just finished an edit (there should be more but may not) of my last incomplete of graduate school. I'm an article revision away from being able to actuallyt work on my dissertation, though I've spent much of the summer having nothing to do with my academic work, instead walking an average of between 14 and 17 miles every day around brooklyn. I've walked to mill basin, to bergen beach, to Canarsie and east flatbush and brownsville, to flushing meadows for the colombian independence day celebration with Johana, through the hasidic triangle of Boro Park/Crown Heights/South WIlliamsburg, down Ocean Parkway and up Utica and across Linden Boulevard (cue a tribe called quest reference, though I haven't yet walked as far as jamaica) down gerritsen and through marine park and into mud puddles, bensonhurst benches and Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay and Flatlands and Middle Village (Queens) and Parkville and Homecrest. It's been amazing and i don't really want to stop, but I need to devote more time to work, to performing my academic labors...

I walked up 45th street from my apartment across sunset park and the whole of Borough Park to where it ends at the junction of 18th avenue and Dahill, then up 18th to Ditmas Park, up Marlborough Road to Caton Ave and the Parade Grounds, to Parkside and Ocean and into the park, along its eastern edges to grand army plaza, up to 5th and flatbush and then back home, about 10 miles. I'd forgotten, until recently how much i prefer walking places i don't know that well to retracing the same route everyday. I hope this isn't my farewell to Brooklyn or this apartment, that I can stay here after august and stay in my apartment for at least the next year. But I'm also thinking about next steps, about what I do and where I go when funding runs out, about what to make of the second half of the summer.

Congrats to the PTAIs at Western Michigan University, "part of a growing trend." And the long stella doro strike in Riverdale has ended, though the greenwich hedge fund that owns the factory is now threatening to close in october. More on this later, perhaps.

FAR 4 : the new frontier of academic class war.

We won't pay for NYU's crisis, but that won't stop them from trying to force us to.

Last week NYU finally confirmed to the graduate student body that it planned to implement its "FAR 4" restructuring this fall. FAR 4 purports to abolish, formally, the category of teaching assistant in favor of mass adjunctification of TA labor on a putatively voluntary basis. Theoretically NYU grad employees would now be able to join the adjuncts union, or so the deans claim - in fact they still have yet to discussFAR-4 with local 7902 (the adjuncts' union) and have offered only flimsy explanations for how grad employees would be able to meet the contact hour cutoffs for adjunct union membership.

That's the least of folks' worries, though. FAR-4 would, in the short term, free up some time and give folks in their first five years a small amount of extra cash. Maybe 8,000 bucks for two semesters of teaching, depending on what it is you're teaching and how much time you spend in the classroom. But there's a rigid five year funding cutoff replacing a somewhat more fluid, if nonetheless exploitative in itself current arrangement where full TA appointments are often still available to 6th and 7th year students in many departments. So few PhD students ever finish in five years - something that a modest decline in teaching "responsibilities" - and the email sent by the deans to department chairs and DGSes two weeks ago suggests that all current PhD students will be expected to fulfill all remaining "obligations," despite the fact that FAR 4 supposedly completely disambiguates teaching labor from the conditions of graduate employee "financial aid" (i.e. pay) - that FAR 4 will likely create a permanent corps of liminal, superexploited, "superannuated" grad employees teaching 3/2 loads for less money than i get paid to teach a 1/1. In the labor movement, we call that a speed-up. A pretty gross one at that. And it's a speed up which may only be available to non-intl students: despite vague administrative promises to "work around" f-1 Visa working hours/week and demonstrated level of support restrictions, the math just doesn't compute. If one teaching assistant gig is supposed to be twenty work hours per week, as we're all told during our teacher trainings, and twenty hours per week now pays about $4000 per semester, how do I demonstrate I have $20,000 dollars of support if I can't work more than 20 hours per week as a condition of my VISA and am not independently wealthy? Dude, it's like herrenvolk exploitation!

FAR 4 has been framed explicitly as an anti-union measure by the deans, a way to "finesse" an expected reversal of the National Labor Relations Board's 2004 Brown Decision, to preempt expected actions by the federal government to restore federal labor protections to graduate employees at private universities. Even if they aren't lying about the possibility of joining the adjunct union, NYU administrators know full well that FAR 4 would, by rendering much of our labor and compensation invisible under the sign of "financial aid," dramatically reduce and circumscribe what aspects of our work and compensation we would be able to negotiate. Health care, for instance, would be off-limits, still subject, as it has been for the four years since GSOC's last contract expired, to administrative whim and fiat. That's not an acceptable alternative to a GSOC contract, clearly. And one doubts that local 7902 is particularly jazzed about the creation of a subclass of pseudoadjuncts who can take bargaining unit work (though adjunct positions formerly known as ta jobs will supposedly be reserved for graduate students) but won't be on equal footing with the rest of its membership in several important respects.

"be careful what you do, because the lie becomes the truth."

Oh, and then there's the fact that the whole thing appears to be a sham. Not only will we be doing the same work, but at least if administrative communiques to department chairs and dgses are to be believed, the very disambiguation between teaching labor and graduate employee "funding" is nonexistent. Everyone admitted to the graduate school prior to the spring of 2009 is still "obligated" to teach as a condition of our funding. So what FAR 4 means for us is a continued attack on our union rights, a speed up both of our labor and of our time to degree with no relaxing of either requirements.

Merry crisis, indeed.

(This is but a sample of FAR 4's implications. Others of note include the reliance on the "moral authority" of the faculty to compel grad employees to teach after/if ever the disambiguation actually takes place i.e., the hypermanagerialization of the faculty/grad employee relationship, and much more!)

Folks I've talked to over the last three months (since this plan was initially made public - sorry for not blogging, by the way) have been both highly skeptical of the administration's claims that FAR 4 will allow us to teach less but also initially pessimistic and defeated. Thankfully, the more we learn about what this plan is and what it does, the more people seem amped up to fight it. It's going to be an interesting year. But hey, if you wanna be starting something, you got to be starting something.

(give me points for not slipping in "they don't care about us" or "scream," both of which are relevant, or babbling about Manu Dibango, except in praeteritio. As always, only I am culpable for the above blog entry and its many failings, hypertext links to michael jackson videos, and the opinions expressed and claims made within.)

Deleted the post about last weekend, since it didn't seem all that useful or well-written, but i will soon write a longer piece about GSOC's recent travails, so keep reading. kthxbai.