I don't believe in false consciousness...

but if I did, i'm pretty sure it would look like this.

education in the streets

Ten years ago today, on the fourth day of a one week long strike of Yale food service, maintenance, clerical, technical, hospital cafeteria workers, and graduate employees, undergraduates set up blackboards and classrooms on College Street in downtown New Haven, along the university's boundary and just in front of the church where the unions' offices were situated (and remain today.)  Somewhere around five hundred undergraduates showed up, in the middle of a blizzard, to join the picket lines of striking cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, secretaries, and teaching assistants in teaching each other about our collective struggles and simultaneously offering an alternative, constituent form of what education at the university could look like.  Also, we completely shut down a busy campus thoroughfare in the middle of a snowstorm.

There's been a great deal of contempt on the radical left for symbolic activism, a contempt which yokes such tactics to representation, to postmodernity, to neoliberal multiculturalism.  I'm increasingly sympathetic to these arguments, but the "Education in the Streets" action, created and, I think, named by my friend Abbey during a brainstorming session in her dormitory common room a few days before the strike began, was, for many of us who organized and lived through it, both a potent capstone to years of organizing and a promise of the ways in which our practices of solidarity and collectivity might rewrite our campus's neocolonial spatial practices and relations of domination.  What made it a useful action was in part the disciplined organizing that brought five hundred undergraduates out to a picket line in a snowstorm during the height of midterms and kept hundreds more teaching assistants and thousands of service and clerical workers out on strike, in part the kinds of exchanges made possible by the format - workers and community activists and student radicals recast as teachers, and in part the expansive vision of another university, of another city, which those practices embodied.  It wasn't an insurrectionary occupation, though we were planning one of those too (the university caved before we could do it,) but it wasn't "mere" representation either - and our refusal of representative politics shouldn't blind us to the ways in which representation and discourse mediate and structure the exercise of power.  Anyway, that's partly why I'm thinking about it ten years later, this morning, even after all photographic traces seem to have vanished from the internet, and it's why I'll continue to think about both the action and the organizing that made it happen in the years to come.

Edit: I was wrong about the disappearing from the internet thing.  Alek has saved a bunch of photos and posted them on facebook.  Here's one from the "community" classroom.  The woman standing before the board is New Haven community activist Bea Dozier-Taylor.

Some links.

1.  First, everyone should read this intervention by some Michigan folks into the the politics of the general assembly-form.  I really appreciate both the substance of the authors' critique, ("Ultimately the long, drawn out, romantically declarative GA felt like a fetishistic performance of what we imagined politics to be") and the way in which they raise it, which I think provides a sympathetic but also rigorously critical account of what kinds of political imaginary is at work in the general assembly and the role it was understood to play by many participants in the post 9/17/2011 occupy movement.  I'm particularly appreciative of the position of critical solidarity the authors chart, which strikes me as a less abstracted (and certainly more charitable) but equally valuable critique of the GA to that found in, say, The Coming Insurrection.  I do have a couple criticisms of the piece, neither of which pertain to the four hypotheses which constitute the main argumentative thrust of the article and which are, I think, entirely correct.  First, as someone who spent most of the fall of 2011 hanging around Occupy Boston GAs, I think the authors are a bit too quick to let the large urban GAs off the hook in drawing an early contrast between the Zuccotti Park GAs and those in smaller and more intimate locales such as university campuses.  As the authors themselves note, neither “better facilitation” nor “bigger GAs” would have changed the political valence of the Occupy model."  Second, the article concludes with some more general conclusions on campus organizing.  I think there's much to agree with here, especially the insistence that the university is a "trap" which our struggles must escape.  But, for the moment, the authors cast the student as the privileged subject of radical organizing.  There may be sociological evidence for this as a demographic reality, (fuck if I know) but I think it forecloses some escape routes by unintentionally erasing the other political subjects of the university and/or positing them as secondary to the students' struggle, to be organized by the students at a later date once the students have organized themselves.  Without fetishizing trade unionism I would like to note that noninstructional university workers and other members of the "communities that surround us" have their own histories of struggle against and beyond the university we need to learn more from.  Nevertheless I think this reflection and its hypotheses are exciting and I.m definitely looking forward to seeing what conversations and/or occupations follow them.

2.  Another must-read: Prima Porta on austerity and/as the crisis of the social reproduction of the wage relation

The fight against austerity can only go in one direction: towards supplying ourselves with the materials and tools necessary for living together, reproducing ourselves as an ensemble: a commune. At the very least, we might start by rejecting the model of the nuclear family tout court - personally, but also politically (in this sense, queer theory and communization theory align on the question of the family). Patriarchy is at issue here, but is not the only issue; the persistence of the family-form has long served to atomize and contain proletarian communities, branding the inclination to socialize as a leisure activity without political standing and applying the mold of the nuclear family as a means of disciplining the poor, preventing extended families and expanded societies from acquiring economic validity. It is therefore not enough to merely laud promiscuity or polyamory; we must also seek to demolish the economic priority of the family-form, replacing it with the commune-form. This means politicizing the decision to separate into isolated families, agitating to subvert the reproductive importance of the heterosexual couple. Practices of communist child-rearing are in order, and also of communist sexuality; we will not find them in utopian experiments, however, but rather in political activity contra capital. There can be no avoidance of anti-austerity struggles, in other words; but only when we refuse austerity in the name of no future will emancipation be possible in the here and now.

3.  Darwin Bond-Graham on the University of California's role in Monsanto's privatization of agriculture

4.  Princeton's suppressed a survey of female students in which 1 in 6 reported being raped during their time at the university.  Rape is notoriously underrated on campuses, and Princeton is neither the only nor the first institution to "juke the stats" in such a manner.  I am not defending Princeton.  Princeton needs to be communized.  Let's all dance in the ruins of its eating clubs.  Etc.  But the methodical disappearing of sexual violence by university administrations seems to be a pandemic condition rather than an isolated or egregious incident.  So, fuck them all.

5. David Price and Marshall Sahlins on Chagnon, military research, and the National Academy of Sciences.

6. nepotism here: my brother's band Krallice, IIIIIIII (Acheron, Brooklyn, 3.2.2013)

Lucille Dickess, 1934-2013

There's a great tribute to Lucille Dickess, the first president of HERE Local 34, Yale's Clerical and Technical worker union, up at the New Haven Independent today. Dickess died last week. After voting no on two earlier organizing campaigns (by the OPEIU and District 65), and scabbing during local 35's long strikes in the 1970s, Dickess, a registrar in Yale's department of Geology and Geophysics, became a rank and file leader of an organizing drive which emphasized constant, one on one, grassroots organizing and worker participation, leadership, and power. As an undergraduate during the long 2001-2003 contract fight, I met Dickess several times and saw her talk about her experiences at panels and at strategy meetings. She was always profoundly supportive of us undergraduate radicals, even half a decade after her retirement from the university. In late August 2003, Dickess and seven members of the Yale Union Retirees Association occupied the offices of the university's million-dollar-a-year investment guru, David Swensen, to demand information about the university's pension fund and why Yale hadn't contributed to it in two years. On the first afternoon of what became an overnight occupation, kickstarting the second of two strikes that year, several of us entered the building with a bag full of sandwiches and pepsis for the occupiers. They were confiscated at Swenson's office by rentacops who, comically, accused us of smuggling contraband, and demanded to inspect the sandwiches, which probably never made it to their intended recipients. But in addition to the sandwich inspectors, we also found Lucille, who had left the occupation to use the bathroom and was brilliantly and adeptly working the rentacops to gain re-entry back into the room where the other retirees had hunkered down. I was impressed with Lucille's bravery - there were, and are, a lot of very brave people in the federation of hospital and university employees - but also with the nonchalance with which Lucille dealt with the intimidating and obnoxious presence of the university's security, and her unshakeable commitment to continuing the occupation of Swensen's office until he agreed to a meeting.

Lucille helped to build and spent decades fighting for a union that has played a pretty formative role in my political and intellectual life, and in that of this blog. Her dedication and ability as an organizer have served as a model for me for almost a decade, and I've always been in awe of the work that she and her co-workers did to create what Jay Driskell (on Facebook) termed, appropriately and powerfully, "the union that created me." So, thank you, Lucille Dickess. You won't be forgotten.

Excerpt of transcript of the episode of Phil Donahue's daytime talk show filmed at  Yale during the 1984 Clerical and Technical workers' strike.  Lucille Dickess faced off against University President A. Bartlett Giamatti.

It seems that while we were all worrying about the DOD, Yale Psychiatrist Charles Morgan was already helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution with its own lengthy history in New Haven, to practice interrogation tactics on New Haven's growing Colombian immigrant population.

Local immigrant advocates like Kica Matos are more skeptical of Morgan’s use of New Haven immigrants for terrorism-related or military research. Matos, a longtime Fair Haven-based immigrant rights activist, said she and fellow organizers are gearing up a campaign to urge local Latino immigrants not to participate in Morgan’s research.
Matos said Morgan’s current study at the Gold building “troubles” her because it racially profiles “vulnerable communities of color.” She also questioned the ultimate purpose of the research into how to question and assess responses from foreign-born Latinos.
“Interrogations are inherently coercive,” said Matos, the director of immigrant rights & racial justice for the national Center for Community Change. “The FBI is not a friend of communities of color. They have a long history of engaging in the most subversive and devious engagement with communities of color.COINTELPRO is an example.”

EDIT: Yale responds by disavowing involvement in Morgan's private research, of course.

"Public reports stating otherwise are premature and based on speculation and incomplete information."

Yesterday I argued that the new partnership between Yale and the defense department ought to be read through the historical lens of the university's relationship with the state over the course of the last sixty years and the changing alchemy of the colonial relationship between post-industrial town and globalized gown.  Today, responding to media furor over reports of the new center's intentions to test interrogation on the minds and bodies of New Haven's immigrant population, Yale spokesperson (and former Eidelson nemesis) Tom Conroy puts forth this very history as an argument for why critics should shut up and trust the university's administration.

Volunteer interviewees would be selected from diverse ethnic groups who would be protected by oversight from Yale's Human Research Protection Program. Research would be conducted in a manner consistent with all other research at Yale and with the expectation that findings would be reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In short, the center, if established, would be designed in the best traditions of Yale research and scholarship.

But, as I suggested in my post yesterday, these traditions are themselves at issue.  How rigorously  and on what criteria the university's human subjects review board will screen the Department of Defense's initiatives remains a serious issue, but, as Batraville and Lew noted in their op-ed, there are larger issues at work than how the university and military find uses for poor and working class New Haveners.  We also have to ask why - what are the politics of this alliance, on both a global and metropolitan scale?  What are the forms of coloniality Yale and the DOD trace and reinscribe?  How does this center demonstrate continuities with and where does it break from the long history of the university's partnerships with the military and the state and with its use of the city as cheap labor, real estate, and research material?

Speaking of the university's coloniality, there is a long story in this week's edition of the Village Voice reporting on the current faculty rebellion against the NYU administration's janus-faced expansion plans in New York City and across the globe.  After a long period of quiescence from all but the most stalwart of the administration's faculty opposition, NYU's tenured professoriate's prerogatives have been so abused by the Sexton administration's top-down evangelical neoliberalism that faculty are organizing for a no confidence vote.  I'm skeptical of some of the rallying cries faculty sometimes use in opposing the NYU administration.  Collegiality and faculty governance mean almost as little to most of the university's workers - including the vast majority of its teachers, most of whom are adjuncts and precarious low wage graduate student teaching assistants - as they do to Sexton and his squadron of yes-men and women on the twelfth floor of the library.  More heartening are the ways in which faculty have taken up the question of the relationship between university expansion and student debt, the ways in which they understand the impossibility of an easy return to a mythic golden age of faculty democracy.   

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a vocal critic of the administration, suggests that there's something more systemic going on: The American university may be assuming a strange new role. Ross argues that the "interlocking directorates" of power theorized by C. Wright Mills 50 years ago—corporate, governmental, and military interests—is being updated. Universities like NYU, he says, are becoming "players in their own right."

 Up here in Albany, I feel pretty distant from NYU.  That distance lets me say things like that I think the faculty's success may depend in part on the role that student activists and grad employees (not to mention other groups of workers) will play in this developing movement - some have been working with the faculty.  I do not think that even a sizeable minority of NYU's already small minority of tenured teachers and researchers has enough institutional power at this point to beat the administration.  But I'm in Albany, not NYC, and therefore can offer no responsible diagnosis of the extent to which the faculty have secured alliances with other campus workers.  Victories at NYU - both in the form of the no-confidence vote and on the still nebulously demarcated prospect of a new GSOC election - would be a big fucking deal.

Still, though, given the relations of force within the higher education "industry," the discourse of collegiality, of the abrogation of faculty privilege, seems all the more insufficient.  At a moment when universities are selling naming rights to notorious private prison corporations, nostalgia for a past that was never quite as idyllic as its advocates imagine seems particularly unstrategic.  As university administrators increasingly fetishize MOOCs and other phantasms of a precarious present, academic workers need to think more expansively about what we are fighting for and with whom we are fighting.

Either that, or we should just tear everything down and build something else instead.

Probably both.

"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.