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The view from West 4th Street

Guest blogger Michael Cohen of NYU’s graduate student union, GSOC.  With thanks to Scott Eric Kaufman for sending this essay my way.

The GSOC strike at NYU has reached the two-month mark. For those who don’t know, GSOC is the graduate student union at NYU, and we’re striking to force the NYU administration to negotiate a second contract with us (here’s a more detailed history of GSOC and NYU). It looks like we’ll still be on strike when the spring semester begins on January 17.

The shaky state of academic labor formed a consistent theme throughout the recently-concluded MLA convention: as universities become more corporate, teaching increasingly goes to contingent faculty (as much as 70% of the teaching at four year universities is done by graduate students and adjunct faculty), while those who get tenure-track jobs face ever higher standards for actually getting tenure, even as the academic publishing industry has shriveled. Therefore, the situation at NYU seems to fit into larger patterns at work in higher education: NYU’s labor practices may be egregious, but they don’t stray that far from the rest of the crowd. However, there are some things about NYU in particular that have driven both the intensity of the strike and the intensity of the response to it, and I want to talk a little bit about that.

While resenting your home institution may seem integral to academic life, the feeling around Washington Square has been pretty bad for a long time. The NYU administration’s union-busting campaign fits into a larger pattern of behavior. Decision-making power here is concentrated at the top of a highly bureaucratic managerial structure. These decisions get made in secret, with little effort at even token community involvement. This past summer, John Sexton called a town hall (listen to it here) to discuss the union after he had already announced his preliminary decision not to recognize it. (He then appeared shocked when people showed up to challenge this decision). In fact, NYU has never released the results of a survey that it conducted last spring in which it asked directors of undergraduate study how unionization had affected their departments. When pressed to release these findings, the administration claimed it had no way to gain authorization from the individuals surveyed; the widespread feeling is that they refuse to release these responses because they were overwhelmingly positive about the union.

There’s not much social or intellectual culture among the departments, either. When the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences spoke to a town hall meeting of Greenwich Village residents last month, he described how NYU would raise its ranking by “acquiring” (his word) 125 well-respected professors, as though buying a certain critical mass of intellectual capital would magically improve the university all on its own. In fact, virtually the only events in my department are job talks. As it stands, there are almost no forums for inter-departmental dialogue, nor are there many spaces where people from various parts of the university can meet. In the languages and literatures building where I work, there is no system—not even a bulletin board—to alert people to events in other departments. I don’t think it need be taken as a given that what goes on in, say, the German department would be of no interest to people in the Slavic languages. What this attitude does take as a given is that each department and each person in each department can be dealt with directly and in isolation. The determining features of our NYU lives are all institutionally-mandated. Not surprisingly, divide-and-conquer has been the most prominent weapon in the administration’s arsenal of union-busting tactics: divide the sciences from the humanities, divide the international students from the U.S. students, divide the languages from social sciences, and so on. There is literally almost no space for collective life on campus, other than the picket line.

Given this system of instrumental individualism, most complaints about the strike (the selfishness or irresponsibility of striking grad students) from people within the NYU community have taken the form of complaining about the strike’s effects on others. Of course the strike affects others—that’s its purpose. Anger about the strike has come from a realization that individuals are not, in fact, autonomous, but are instead interconnected: undergraduate well-being is tied to graduate well-being. Busting GSOC without any regard to the wishes of the graduate students has harmed everyone on campus, though the administration has attempted to portray their union-busting as paternalistic concern for graduate students, while any actions that grad students take in response (i.e., a strike) are reckless attempts to harm unrelated parties.

University life seems predicated on totally effacing these realities and instead presenting the university as a space outside of the economic realm—and so one of the administration’s primary rhetorical tactics has been to deny that graduate students are workers, as though being a student and being a worker were mutually exclusive categories. John Sexton has made the extreme claim that teaching isn’t work. Other administration spin-doctors have likened grad student teaching to “pedagogical training” and grad student labor to “apprenticeship” (a reference indicating a total ignorance of the history of the apprentice system and its relation to the formation of organized labor). In this rhetorical scheme, teaching is a guild system, and grad students must work their way through it as apprentices (grad students), journeymen (adjuncts) before becoming master craftsmen (tenured professor). The quirky archaism of this imagery hearkens back to a pre-capitalist economy and fantastically ignores the working realities of the corporate university. I think that the ideological wish here is to imagine that teaching really isn’t alienated labor, a desire with which I sympathize but which is in complete contradiction to the stated policies and mandates of the corporate university’s managerial bureaucracy: NYU will improve itself by buying its way to the top, which means getting as much (dollar) value as possible from everyone. The rationale is strictly economic: earning and spending money will get you success.

The strike recognizes this basic reality. Many on campus—administrators, faculty, students, both supportive and opposed—portray the strike as though it were only a political statement. In fact, the strike is our way of showing that we understand how things work here, and we’re using economic means to fight a purely instrumentalized economic structure.

The muddled interconnections between corporate capitalism and education may simply be more nakedly displayed at NYU than at other places. Universities tend to cloak their bad labor practices under the veneer of the cultural and intellectual prestige they command within society, and NYU, let’s face it, lacks the prestige of, say, Yale. Grad students have wised up to the rules of the game here: you can’t make everything economically determined and then deploy the language of liberal idealism when it suits you—ideologies always fail through their internal contradictions, and NYU’s rhetoric is pretty easy to decode. We know we’re here for an economic purpose; I’m fine with that—after all, I love the work. But I’m going to gain the best advantage I can, and that means unionization. GSOC has made life better for NYU’s grad students, and I will never trust an administration that has threatened me the way this one has. (Given the magically rising cost of tuition and the massive leveraging it now takes an undergrad to get a degree here, it won’t be long before they wise up too—many of them already have.)

The word is out about NYU, but it didn’t have much of a reputation to damage. But strikes are meant to cause economic damage, and economic statements are the ones NYU understands. So, two months in and we’re still on strike, and we’ll stay on strike until we get a contract. That’s just the way things work around here.

Many thanks, Michael and Scott.  I’ll have a followup to this tomorrow, after I take care of some local business later today. —MB

Posted by on 01/11 at 09:33 AM

  1. Dear old NYU Law School happens to be my alma mater. “A private university in the public interest,” it calls itself.  At that time, it had the highest tuition among any law school (major or otherewise), despite, or perhaps because of, also having the largest endowment of any law school.  “In the public interest” indeed.

    I don’t think any of the economics have been lost on then Professor, later Law School Dean, and now University President John Sexton, who is a pretty damned intelligent man. 

    We live in an ever more corporatized world, where a university is, ostensibly, just another brand name, its “community” simply customers or a “labor” force.  Whatever President Sexton wants to say, the graduate students are making the university money; whatever its higher purposes-- a university is fundamentally a business.  NYU, just moreso… and moreso than everyone else, given its pricing.

    Posted by the talking dog  on  01/11  at  01:52 PM

  2. Well, it’s certainly not the case that NYU is trying to break the union because the school is cash-poor and unable to meet GSOC’s economic demands.  Hiring 125 well-respected professors requires approximately one ton of dough, particularly if any of them are in the sciences and require lab startups.  And apparently the endowment is doing quite well—not Harvard/ Yale “billions upon billions” well, but well enough. . . .

    Posted by Michael  on  01/11  at  03:14 PM

  3. "The muddled interconnections between corporate capitalism and education may simply be more nakedly displayed at NYU than at other places. Universities tend to cloak their bad labor practices under the veneer of the cultural and intellectual prestige they command within society, and NYU, let’s face it, lacks the prestige of, say, Yale.”

    I support GSOC, but these two sentences strike me as somewhat disingenuous. NYU isn’t Yale, but in the American hierarchy of academic prestige, it’s fairly comparable. I don’t have any rankings before me, but it comes off as something like “NYU isn’t one of the top 5 most prestigious universities in the country, it’s only top 15.” In other words, a pretty privileged place nonetheless.

    Which is not to say that they aren’t screwing their grad students and other workers.

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  04:08 PM

  4. The GSOC point, I suspect, is that NYU is “new money,” as it were, among the top-tier American universities, and so has not yet learned to avoid certain forms of “vulgar display,” to draw the cloak of ivy over the naked shape of power....

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  04:48 PM

  5. Nick: “to draw the cloak of ivy over the naked shape of power....”

    Annie Savoy: “Oh, my ...”

    [/gratuitous Bull Durham reference]

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  04:59 PM

  6. Thanks for this piece.  I graduated from NYU and I am mortified at their behavior.  They will not receive any donations from me until they cease any union-busting. 

    Of course, the corporatization of the university is just one aspect of this conflict.  What’s happening at NYU is part of a larger Bush Administration effort to restrict workers’ rights in the U.S.  The Bush appointees on the National Labor Relations Board have consistently ruled for the most narrow possible interpretation of federal labor law and sought to exclude employees from the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act, the law which protects workers’ rights to form unions. 

    The NYU situation arises from the Board’s reversing its own precedent (set by NYU) and holding that graduate assistants are not “employees,” under the law.

    These battles won’t be won in the courts and probably not in the halls of congress; they will be won by employees, like the GSOC members, who aren’t willing to be treated like second class citizens. 

    Hang in there and keep up the good work!

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  08:37 PM

  7. I was wondering if Michael Cohen can tell us if the GSOC is getting support from the other campus unions?  One of the efforts i always tried to make in my organizing days, was to include and encourage cooperation on the part of the various support services unions as well as clerical, security, local teamsters, etc.  My constant pet peeve is the failure of unions to support one another when one is challenged.  Unlike Europe, unions and associations in the US seem to wish to exist in their own happy isolation from one another, rather than understanding that all of their economic interests are essentially similar.  Few members even acknowledge that police and other law enforcement (except of course the Department of Homeland Security) personnel are unionized---encouraging cooperation with their organizers is a huge step to greater success.

    Posted by  on  01/13  at  12:50 PM

  8. Tell the Yale grad students about the “cloak of ivy.”

    Posted by  on  01/13  at  03:33 PM

  9. "[O]ne of the administration’s primary rhetorical tactics has been to deny that graduate students are workers.... John Sexton has made the extreme claim that teaching isn’t work. Other administration spin-doctors have likened grad student teaching to ‘pedagogical training’ and grad student labor to ‘apprenticeship’.”

    The University of California made the very same arguments throughout its long fight against grad student organization.  Eventually the relevant authority (I think it was California’s Public Employee Relations Board) ruled explicitly that students paid to teach are indeed employees, not apprentices. 

    Unfortunately, even after our union’s recognition by UC and the negotiation of two consecutive three-year contracts, this legal decision has never really penetrated beyond the UC labor relations staff, who know better than to deploy the apprenticeship/professional training canard - but who certainly don’t blink when they hear it used by administrators or faculty.

    In my experience, the university views each round of bargaining as square one: a fresh opportunity to bust the unions.  We fight the same battles repeatedly, and each of our contracts has been settled only after strikes (both executed and threatened) against the university’s unfair practices during bargaining.

    This may sound discouraging, but don’t despair: My point is that determination and massive organization are the only things that ultimately persuade a university to cooperate - even a public university where strong unions already have standing.  We have come to anticipate UC’s bad behavior, but we have also seen that it responds to the financial threat of a well-organized strike.  So right on, GSOC!

    Finally, I wholeheartedly second spyder’s comment.  When the UC unions have coordinated effectively in support of each other, they have succeeded in dramatic fashion.  UC has acknowledged this success by crafting new contract language that explicitly prohibits one union from striking in sympathy with another.

    Posted by  on  01/14  at  06:24 PM

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