The organisation of university labour creates a new relation between dissenting academics and oppositional social movements. Negri and Lazzarato suggest that when universities were more marginal to capitalism, academics engage themselves with political movements from a position of apparent exteriority. Today, when university teachers find themselves unequivocally involved in capital's appropriation of ‘general intellect', possibilities emerge for academics to make more ‘transverse' connections. (21) Rather than descending from the heights to commit themselves to a cause largely external to their daily experience, academics become the carriers of particular skills, knowledges and accesses useful to movements - for example, those against the privatisation of public facilities, or in ‘living wage' campaigns supporting service workers on campus and in local communities - in which they participate on the basis of increasing commonalities with other members of post-Fordist ‘mass intellect'.
-Nick Dyer Witheford
"GESO's alliance with Locals 34 and 35 also signalled an important (albeit fragile and even transitory) ideological shift. If most graduate students at Yale saw themselves as budding members of the professional-managerial class, their fight for a union alongside clerical and service workers complicated that imagined class identity. In becoming part of the Federation of University Employees, graduate teachers redefined their status within the university: they would not be middle managers-in-training... Yale's very vision of the academy as a g(u)ilded realm wgerein graduate students apprentice under mentor-professors was itself brought into question." - Cynthia Young
"And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people — how great and close would that future be!" - Che Guevara
This is fairly amazing.
This blog turns an improbable and sometimes unbelievable three years old today, which is coincidentally the five year anniversary of the "Building an Equal Partnership" march and rally at the medical school. The ironies and continuities of organizing work on an academic calendar rarely cease.
I spent this august anniversary in New Haven, attending GESO's latest reworking of the Education In the Streets form developed by AJH and the UOC during the March 2003 strike, a Teach Out about/against/past casualization, which featured powerful contributions from Mike Palm, GESO members, a local 35 casual employee, Cary Nelson, Michael Denning, etc. It was the first action in New Haven i had been to since the 2005 strike. Turnout was excellent, but neither that, nor that it was awesome to see EF, EJ, NDB, ML, HH, GA, PR, etc., seems particularly important.
What is important is College Street, that site where imperial Yale borders what Wilhelm in 1971 noted was
the force which had demonstrated to New Haven that said behemoth could be beaten, was vulnerable. (“Union Upsets Yale, 35-0,” Modern Times, 7/1/71.) If, as David Lee was so often quoted as claiming during the 2002 campaign for an alumni fellow seat on the Yale Corporation, the university administration had "met its Waterloo" in the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, then College Street is (only the most visible) battlefield of that struggle, a site enveloped by Yale's tendrils of capital, of gentrification, of biopower, but never subsumed into it, always threatening to destabilize yes, but also to transform, to augment, to radically reshape and reconstitute.
This is because of 425 college street, because of the movement that flourishes there, among clerical and technical workers, service and maintenance workers, graduate employees and hill residents, community organizers and undergraduates, hospital workers and (a proud few) faculty. This movement has grown amidst and despite 14 strikes in 66 years, fierce repression from the disciplinary apparatus of the university (just ask Young) and endless hours of meetings, visits, organizing conversations, and to delve further into questions of tactics would not be appropriate on a public weblog.
Suffice to say that I mention all of this not for the sake of some nostalgia for snow-strewn picket signs, "free the llamas," the nation drill squad, or Josh Eidelson's runaway metaphors involving houses and justice and other brilliant gesticulations, but rather because there is a very real sense in which this is what we need to create at NYU and elsewhere. This is the movement - or the outlines of the movement, at any rate, that we need to spread like a virus of justice and democracy across the university's fascist bodily metaphors, reversing and denaturing Sextonian slurs and Levinian stammerings. It is not that this model must be exported fully and without change. I am not even calling for "repetition with difference" but rather for a deep critical and political engagement with the kinds of organizing and tactics that have emerged in New Haven over these past seven decades. This is a call to work within that tradition, to build movements like those we glimpsed in the snow on March 6th and in the sun today, clogging the arteries of New Haven's power elite on September 13th and lighting candles on October 5th, in backyard meetings throughout the summer of 2003 and in 55 Whitney on August 26th, in the Financial Aid Office in February '05, blockading the power plants in '71, and screaming "BEEP BEEP YALE'S CHEAP" in '84.
Let's get to work.
