This is the week of UCATS' no confidence vote.
Marty Lipton (and Cyrus Patell) didn't really like this Jeff Goodwin NYT op-ed
Some great comments by Andrew Ross in this hilarious NYU Local writeup of the faculty's celebration of their no-confidence vote.
The AAUP responds to the NYU admin's response to the vote
NYU is not transparent, a point Take Back NYU made many years ago
Tisch could be next.
Questions over the relationship between nontenure track faculty and governance have come to light in the wake of the vote
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
An extraordinary timeline and interview about the Zuccotti Park occupation and its afterlives with some of the Grupo Affect folks has just been published at stress FM and at the affect site. I find its insights into the composition, politics, and conflicts of the past year and a half to be invaluable ones. Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.
For some who showed up to these assemblies what was at stake was simply developing a broad and functioning New York City General Assembly, which at the time seemed a little more ambitious and potentially more radical than simply a failed “day of action,” or demonstration, which many of us expected September 17th to be. These early general assemblies were often pretty small, around 30-65 people each week, which in a city of over 8 million, is not much to speak of. Even in the week before, there wasn’t much optimism that people would actually show up. But of course people did. Some of the initial discussions in the assemblies before the occupation spun around tactics—like whether or not violence was proper, what violence was, etc. Some of us of course pushed for tactical diversity and for communications media that would not be centralized. And some of us did not like the “We are the 99%” slogan which would later become so popular.
Here you can already see, before the occupation even began, a number of contradictions and divergent perspectives. There were those treating the weekly assemblies as autonomous actions in their own right, which should be developed and expanded, and thought of as independent from any calls or dates which did not themselves originate from the assembly itself, or even from New York. And there were others who thought the call and projected date should be taken seriously, that they gave us something specific and material to organize around, which made the assemblies often feel more like planning meetings than an assembly, as such. This split, if you will, would continue during the occupation of Zuccotti Park, as the general assembly quickly became a forum to manage the specific details of daily life in the park, rather than a body to work towards an ongoing revolutionary movement in New York.
Another of the contradictions was that, as mentioned, the general assemblies were not very big, and thus could hardly be said to speak for the population of New York City, never mind the United States. In the end, the online organizing initiated by Adbusters perhaps did more to capture popular imagination, and inspire participation, than did these rather modest and often dysfunctional early assemblies ostensibly meant to organize the city. What this led to was that many of those who would come to occupy Zuccotti Park were not New Yorkers, they didn’t live here, didn’t work here, didn’t grow up here, and as such didn’t have many social or political connections outside of the park. They arrived in New York for Occupy Wall Street, the online campaign, without much awareness of past struggles in New York, experience organizing in the city, or the knowledge or capacity to really spread the movement to different areas of the city, or involve more of its population.
So, the different approaches to the function of the general assembly within the Occupy movement, as well as its participants’ relationship to its online and virtual mythology versus the material struggles and spaces of potential intervention in the city: these might be seen as some unresolved contradictions.
Adbusters’ call seemed to be inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and to a lesser extent the occupation of the kasbah in Tunis earlier that winter. These indefinite occupations in Egypt and Tunisia were the urban communes that came to signal the ongoing commitment to the insurrections which took place in these countries. The call to Occupy Wall Street was not seriously committed to attempting the kinds of insurrections we saw in Tunisia or Egypt, but rather it was like those occupations which took place earlier that spring across the Mediterranean in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Athens—more symbolic, populist expressions of “direct democracy,” as a response to austerity and crisis.
The occupation that began in New York on September 17th, as well as those that spread throughout the United States that fall, though they weren’t explicitly insurrectionary in intent, or in result, did come to represent a rupture in American politics. The experimentation that took place in the occupied parks and plazas—as well as around them at the actions, marches, protests, and rallies which emanated out of the parks, often spontaneously and uncontrollably—went far beyond what could be accomplished at a demonstration, mass mobilization, or even a riot. The occupations experimented with the participants’ social relationships, social reproduction, subjectivity, the temporality of protest, the distribution of food, clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, and other supplies, decision-making, self-organization, etc. For many this living in public space, collectively, became a kind of prefigurative politics, an enacting of the commune to be created in a revolutionary process.
Zuccotti Park is four blocks from Wall Street, and is across the street from the site of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t the first location chosen to occupy, as those were already gated off by police and private security the night before the occupation was to take place. Zuccotti Park remained open as a technicality, as New York’s public parks have gates and strongly enforced curfews, something which dates back to the late 1980s when the city was preparing for the gentrification to come. Public parks in New York often close at nighttime, 10 o’clock or midnight, but Zuccotti Park was privately owned by the building across the street. New York often makes deals with the developers of large skyscraper buildings where, in exchange for constructing so tall a building, they’re required to create some public space nearby. Zuccotti Park was one of these “privately-owned public spaces,” or POPS, which meant it was required to be open 24 hours a day, and that it was up to the private owner, and not the city or its police department, when it was closed. This was the legal loophole that led to the first few days of arrival for occupiers.
Friday, March 15, 2013
NO CONFIDENCE
The votes are in
Other divisions at NYU are considering holding their own no-confidence votes may now move forward with them. Prior to the vote, the school's board of trustees had publicly reaffirmed their support of Sexton, so the vote alone is unlikely to drive him out of office.
Andrew Ross, a vocal critic of Sexton and his policies, said he expects the struggle over the direction of the school will shift from faculty-against-president to faculty-against-trustees. "They represent the concentrated power of Wall Street," he said. "For us, I think that fight will be an opportunity to shine a light on the Trustees, which rarely happens."
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Not Confused.
A defender of the Sexton plan and of the man who authored it has surfaced, and it's Cyrus Patell, an associate dean of humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi and associate professor of English at NYUNY. I'd like to take some space here to engage his critique and note its omissions.
Patell begins his critique of the FASP line by questioning, whether, indeed, universities have ever been "fundamentally democratic institutions." It goes downhill from there, though, when Patell decides to defend the undemocratic hierarchies of the university through first dropping the H-bomb, naturalizing the perpetuity of both the institution and its administrative strata and thus putting forward a set of authoritative claims which no student, not even an 8th year PhD student, can ever make use of. The university belongs to its traditions, and its traditions belong to its administrators. Patell continues, buttressing his argument in favor of the hierarchical structure of university administration by confiding in his readers that he rarely learns things from his students, that knowledge transfer in his classrooms is mostly unidirectional. Freirean pedagogical objections and #nodads dismissed as "fashionable" nonsense, Patell affirms the value of the bloated administrative class of which he has recently become a member, however, he says, reluctantly. Sexton et al, Patell argues, are important because only they can perform the hard work of herding cats, of disciplining and directing the faculty. Sexton in particular, Patell writes, deserves praise both for creating the global network university that Patell helps to administrate, and for NYU's rapid expansion since Patell first arrived on campus in 1993 (though Sexton was president only for the last half of that time period.) Curiously, Patell puts forward this argument despite (in the comments) acknowledging that NYU's endowment continues to lag far behind the institutions it considers its peers, and, I mean, fuck endowments, but how can we read that and not interrogate the gross salaries of Sexton and the university's other administrators? Jack Lew's golden parachute alone could have more than paid for all of the lost wages of the fired and blacklisted GSOC strikers, many of whom came from Patell's department, and some of whom never worked for NYU again.
Others have written far better critiques of the global network university and the University Leadership Team's governance of it than I have room or time for here, but, in brief, the GNU looks, both in its rhetoric and in its political and economic operation, to many less like the beacon of global connection and interchange that Sexton champions and Patell endorses and more like a set of colonial outposts. This is still the case even if one sets aside the language with which Sexton described his brainchild for much of its planning stages - as an effort to "embrace the other," to transform the globalized NYU brand into "the university of the other," colonizing global alterity under the umbrella of the purple capital of neoliberal multiculturalism. I understand Sexton has been persuaded to de-emphasize this rhetoric in more recent communiques and speeches. At least, I haven't heard him use it in a few years. But the animating logic of the enterprise remains unchanged, as does its political economy, which rests upon massive donations from host institutions and states back to the twelfth floor of Bobst, a practice revealed by the aforelinked Zvika Krieger essay but revealed as not an outlier but indeed routine by this illuminating NYU Local report on the demise of Tisch Asia, the one international campus beyond the scope of the GNU. When Singaporean officials explored the possibility of saving the program by integrating it into other NYU global initiatives, Sexton responded by demanding a $40,000,000 donation "just to talk". This is not open exchange, it's boutique franchising, buoyed by NYU's own study-abroad outsourcing of the costs of educating students on its own campus and the lucrative and profoundly cynical windfall of shipping them across the globe but continuing to charge them New York rates, to impose New York levels of student debt. For if Patell lauds NYU's ascendance to the big leagues in the last two decades, he's mum on the university's concomitant rise in levels of student debt. That NYU generates more student debt than any other tax-exempt university in the US apparently isn't worth a mention in assessing the pros and cons of the university's administration. Those students from whom Patell tells us he rarely learns anything disagree.
And then there is the labor question again. Not only does the blog post not address at all the ongoing concerns about NYUAD's construction and staffing in a context infamous for abuses of migrant construction and service workers, it is also mum on the labor struggles which have been ongoing closer to 19 University Place for most of the last two decades, struggles over the casualization and precaritization of the university's teaching workforce, overwhelmingly composed, by contact hour, of adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants, and over the unionization of the latter, which, if you want to know more about, you've certainly come to the right blog. We don't talk nearly enough, at NYU, about the fact that our "campus" was the site of the longest strike in the history of the U.S. academic labor movement less than seven years ago, a strike many of us were involved in, in one way or another. Any account of Sexton's presidency which doesn't address his role as unionbuster seems woefully insufficient to me, however biased I may be in that regard. (I disavow the triumphalism and some of the politics of those earlier entries, but I'll have to write more about that later.)
If Patell is correct to note that the university has never been a democratic space, I take issue with his conclusions. We may not run it, we may not control it, but the university is ours. It exists because of our labor as contingent academics, (and because of the labor of people, like the migrant workers in the UAE, who will always be understood as the university's outside, as its other, whether or not megalomaniacal administrators like president Sexton choose to "embrace" them.) That the university has an undercommons, that it is a space of exploitation, of hierarchy, privilege, power, capital, is no argument for why it ought to continue as such. And it certainly ought not to. But what university, if any, we should bring to birth from the ashes of the old is a question which John Sexton can have no role in answering. We have had enough of him. If the university has never been a democratic space, the point is not to defend its future as a hierarchical engine of neoliberalism, privatization, gentrification, and empire, but instead to make it a site of a struggle which exceeds and escapes its boundaries.
Parts of the second paragraph have been rewritten for grammar/flow.
Patell begins his critique of the FASP line by questioning, whether, indeed, universities have ever been "fundamentally democratic institutions." It goes downhill from there, though, when Patell decides to defend the undemocratic hierarchies of the university through first dropping the H-bomb, naturalizing the perpetuity of both the institution and its administrative strata and thus putting forward a set of authoritative claims which no student, not even an 8th year PhD student, can ever make use of. The university belongs to its traditions, and its traditions belong to its administrators. Patell continues, buttressing his argument in favor of the hierarchical structure of university administration by confiding in his readers that he rarely learns things from his students, that knowledge transfer in his classrooms is mostly unidirectional. Freirean pedagogical objections and #nodads dismissed as "fashionable" nonsense, Patell affirms the value of the bloated administrative class of which he has recently become a member, however, he says, reluctantly. Sexton et al, Patell argues, are important because only they can perform the hard work of herding cats, of disciplining and directing the faculty. Sexton in particular, Patell writes, deserves praise both for creating the global network university that Patell helps to administrate, and for NYU's rapid expansion since Patell first arrived on campus in 1993 (though Sexton was president only for the last half of that time period.) Curiously, Patell puts forward this argument despite (in the comments) acknowledging that NYU's endowment continues to lag far behind the institutions it considers its peers, and, I mean, fuck endowments, but how can we read that and not interrogate the gross salaries of Sexton and the university's other administrators? Jack Lew's golden parachute alone could have more than paid for all of the lost wages of the fired and blacklisted GSOC strikers, many of whom came from Patell's department, and some of whom never worked for NYU again.
Others have written far better critiques of the global network university and the University Leadership Team's governance of it than I have room or time for here, but, in brief, the GNU looks, both in its rhetoric and in its political and economic operation, to many less like the beacon of global connection and interchange that Sexton champions and Patell endorses and more like a set of colonial outposts. This is still the case even if one sets aside the language with which Sexton described his brainchild for much of its planning stages - as an effort to "embrace the other," to transform the globalized NYU brand into "the university of the other," colonizing global alterity under the umbrella of the purple capital of neoliberal multiculturalism. I understand Sexton has been persuaded to de-emphasize this rhetoric in more recent communiques and speeches. At least, I haven't heard him use it in a few years. But the animating logic of the enterprise remains unchanged, as does its political economy, which rests upon massive donations from host institutions and states back to the twelfth floor of Bobst, a practice revealed by the aforelinked Zvika Krieger essay but revealed as not an outlier but indeed routine by this illuminating NYU Local report on the demise of Tisch Asia, the one international campus beyond the scope of the GNU. When Singaporean officials explored the possibility of saving the program by integrating it into other NYU global initiatives, Sexton responded by demanding a $40,000,000 donation "just to talk". This is not open exchange, it's boutique franchising, buoyed by NYU's own study-abroad outsourcing of the costs of educating students on its own campus and the lucrative and profoundly cynical windfall of shipping them across the globe but continuing to charge them New York rates, to impose New York levels of student debt. For if Patell lauds NYU's ascendance to the big leagues in the last two decades, he's mum on the university's concomitant rise in levels of student debt. That NYU generates more student debt than any other tax-exempt university in the US apparently isn't worth a mention in assessing the pros and cons of the university's administration. Those students from whom Patell tells us he rarely learns anything disagree.
And then there is the labor question again. Not only does the blog post not address at all the ongoing concerns about NYUAD's construction and staffing in a context infamous for abuses of migrant construction and service workers, it is also mum on the labor struggles which have been ongoing closer to 19 University Place for most of the last two decades, struggles over the casualization and precaritization of the university's teaching workforce, overwhelmingly composed, by contact hour, of adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants, and over the unionization of the latter, which, if you want to know more about, you've certainly come to the right blog. We don't talk nearly enough, at NYU, about the fact that our "campus" was the site of the longest strike in the history of the U.S. academic labor movement less than seven years ago, a strike many of us were involved in, in one way or another. Any account of Sexton's presidency which doesn't address his role as unionbuster seems woefully insufficient to me, however biased I may be in that regard. (I disavow the triumphalism and some of the politics of those earlier entries, but I'll have to write more about that later.)
If Patell is correct to note that the university has never been a democratic space, I take issue with his conclusions. We may not run it, we may not control it, but the university is ours. It exists because of our labor as contingent academics, (and because of the labor of people, like the migrant workers in the UAE, who will always be understood as the university's outside, as its other, whether or not megalomaniacal administrators like president Sexton choose to "embrace" them.) That the university has an undercommons, that it is a space of exploitation, of hierarchy, privilege, power, capital, is no argument for why it ought to continue as such. And it certainly ought not to. But what university, if any, we should bring to birth from the ashes of the old is a question which John Sexton can have no role in answering. We have had enough of him. If the university has never been a democratic space, the point is not to defend its future as a hierarchical engine of neoliberalism, privatization, gentrification, and empire, but instead to make it a site of a struggle which exceeds and escapes its boundaries.
Parts of the second paragraph have been rewritten for grammar/flow.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
It was never just the faculty
NYU Faculty Against The Sexton Plan report, via facebook, an exciting development. With unanimous consent, the executive committee of UCATS Local 3882, the union of NYU's clerical employees, has decided to institute a no confidence vote among its own membership. This move is an interesting rejoinder to notions of faculty governance which insist on the differentiation between the faculty and the mere employee as subjects of the university, a gesture of solidarity which also implies, rather forcefully, that if the contemporary university has any right to continue to exist, (and I think that's debatable) the precaritization and proletarianization of a large part of the teaching faculty makes new solidarities and connections between disparate groups of workers both possible and necessary. It also makes legible claims to governance from groups of workers whose claims to professionalism would often have gone unacknowledged by faculty and university administrators alike. A no confidence vote among a significant number of the faculty of the "heart" of NYU's liberal arts function would be a powerful statement. A simultaneous no confidence vote among clerical workers would be something entirely different.
NYU no confidence vote roundup, part II
Scrutiny of NYU’s lavish home purchases and loans for top
administrators and choice faculty is nothing new – the New York Times ran a lengthy story on the issue five years ago. But, as the no-confidence vote among NYU's Faculty of Arts and Science enters day 3, outrage over the perks the university offers to its highest paid administrators and a small stratum of highly compensated faculty is increasing, propelled in no small part by the gross inequities between the largess the University Leadership Team demonstrates toward its own membership and the steady abrogation of the power and living standards of a faculty hit hard by both the university's expansion and the ongoing casualization of its labor force. In understanding how the Sexton administration has structured gross inequalities into NYU's divisions of (academic) labor, this email from NYU Faculty Against The Sexton Plan is crucial. Linda Mills and Jess Benhabib, with whom GSOC members "conferred" in vain through the sham company union House of Delegates mechanism created by the administration during the strike, both made nearly half a million dollars in the 2010-11 fiscal year. Sexton made 1.5 million dollars a year. The dean of the medical school twice that - though presumably he lacks Sexton's eventual $800,000/yr pension. Meanwhile tenured faculty salaries average much less than half of Benhabib's and Mills', and the majority of NYU teaching, by contact hours, is performed by people like me - graduate student and adjunct instructors paid by the course, with no security whatsoever. When Sexton does bother teaching undergrads, as the NYUFASP communique helpfully notes, his salary works out to about $8800 more per hour, than those teaching at the bottom of the university's hierarchy.
And for the faculty, this president's regime has been one long top-down push toward the lowest of equality for all, so as to have a mass of teachers big and cheap enough to service the ever-growing mass of student "clients." Since he was appointed, we have seen a steady increase in the numbers of contingent faculty ---- clinical professors, adjuncts, graduate instructors ---- and, at the same time, a subtle drive to undercut, and break, the troublesome minority that is the tenured faculty. This drive has been apparent in the President's long refusal of shared governance (while claiming to support it), and his efforts to derail, and then discredit, this week's vote ---- to name but two examples out of many.
It is that ruthless and unthinking push to grow this university, whatever it may cost financially or academically, that has us pushing back this week ---- to save NYU's neighborhood, the city, and the university itself, from "2031"; to bring NYU's rampant global enterprise under rational control; and, at long last, to share the governance of this great university, so that our students are not just counted, but count most, and all faculty are duly honored and rewarded for it.
.jpg)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)