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Friday, January 13, 2006

Open letter on the NYU strike

This week I finally got around to writing my very own letter about the stalemate at NYU.  I was going to put it in the mail, but I didn’t have one of those new 39-cent stamps . . . and besides, I figured that blogs travel faster than the mail anyway.  So here it is.

Professor John Sexton
Office of the President
New York University
Bobst, 70 Washington Square South, 1216
New York, New York 10012

Dear President Sexton:

I’m writing to urge you to negotiate a new labor contract with GSOC—but I’m not going to be so naive or fatuous as to appeal to anybody’s sense of justice and fair play.  I know that NYU seized the opportunity afforded it by the NLRB’s July 2004 ruling, and moved quickly to de-recognize its graduate student union.  Had your administration wanted to continue dealing with GSOC as a collective bargaining agent, you could very well have done so; the fact that you have not suggests that I would be wasting my time and yours by arguing that you should recognize GSOC out of the goodness of your collective hearts.  And, of course, the fact that your administration has threatened striking workers with long-term reprisals—which would take effect, according to your November 28 email, even after the strike is over—makes me doubt whether your collective hearts are all that good to begin with.

I know also that the political pressure on you is tremendous.  The actions of your administration are being watched across the country—not only by strike supporters like myself, but also (and perhaps more importantly, from your perspective), by the administrations of private universities everywhere.  The Ivies, in particular, have a vested interest in the outcome of this strike, since many of them have been holding their own graduate student unions at arm’s length for the past few years, and none of them, to date, has been willing to negotiate with those unions on a voluntary basis.  As far as they’re concerned, then, a victory for the administration at NYU is a victory for administrations at prestigious private universities across the board.

So, as I say, I’m not going make any lofty appeals to justice and fairness here.  I’m merely going to suggest to you that any “victory” you achieve with regard to GSOC will be Pyrrhic.  The Ivies and comparable private institutions may stand to benefit if you succeed in breaking this strike—but NYU certainly will not.  The reason is quite simple: every day you prolong this standoff, you send the message to thousands of potential applicants that they would be out of their minds to consider enrolling in a graduate program at NYU.

I believe it is a mistake for any school to send such a message to ambitious undergraduates; but it’s an especially serious and poorly-timed mistake for a school like NYU.  Over the past ten years, I have watched with admiration and envy as NYU has hired an extraordinary cohort of scholars, sometimes forging entire programs around the research of a cluster of newly-recruited faculty members.  I have watched NYU rebuild its English department while creating terrific new programs across the humanities and social sciences, ranging from American Studies to the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.  And I have sent a number of my most promising undergraduates your way, assuring them that NYU will be among the very best places for them to develop their intellectual interests and establish the foundation of their scholarly careers.

I’m sorry to say I would not recommend NYU to a talented undergraduate today.  I simply could not, in good conscience, send students off to graduate programs in which they would run the risk of being treated as you have treated GSOC. 

Graduate programs at Yale, Penn, and Columbia will not be affected by this strike.  Their applicant pools will remain just as deep as they ever were.  But I believe that NYU will take a very, very long time to recover unless you agree to sit down with GSOC soon.  Everyone knows that your administration’s hard-line anti-union stance has nothing to do with money: your spectacular faculty hires in recent years testify eloquently to NYU’s desire—and potential—to move into the uppermost echelon of American universities.  You clearly have the financial and intellectual wherewithal for the job.  But unless you resolve this labor dispute quickly and fairly (both are key), you may wind up presiding over a university with internationally-renowned faculty and emaciated graduate programs.  For surely the best and brightest graduate program applicants, looking on at the fate of GSOC from afar, will have enough of a sense of self-preservation to conduct their studies elsewhere.

I say this with a palpable sense of dismay.  I have many friends among your faculty; I think the world of NYU Press; and, as I’ve noted above, some of my former students are now your students.  For their sake, but also, ultimately, for the sake of New York University as a whole, I ask you to reconsider the path you’ve chosen, and to negotiate with GSOC—in good faith, and for the common good.

Sincerely yours,
Michael Bérubé
Penn State University

Posted by Michael on 01/13 at 01:07 PM
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