The University vs. the TAs

The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace.
Monika Krause, Mary Nolan,Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008

Reviewed by David Huyssen

In April 2005, while marching with a picket sign down York Street in New Haven, Connecticut, among hundreds of my fellow graduate students, I passed a construction worker at one of Yale’s countless property developments who motioned to me and inquired, “What’s this all about?”

I answered, “We’re teachers on strike.”

“What do you get paid?”

“About $17,500.”

“A semester?”

“A year.”

His face registered disbelief, then disgust. “You get paid $17,500 a year to teach Yale kids?” I nodded, but as the march was moving on, I didn’t have time to magnify his incredulity by explaining that $17,500 was near the top of the pay scale for comparable positions nationwide. He shook his head, and before turning back to work, said firmly, “Good luck.”

This exchange returned to me several times while I read The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace, a compilation of essays and one roundtable discussion examining the causes and implications of the 2005–06 Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) strike at New York University. The volume’s power lies partly in its recognition that the physical and financial expansion of corporate universities will increasingly throw workers like teaching assistants and construction workers into the same boat because, at the end of the day, they work for the same boss: The University™. The collection also demonstrates that organizing makes a difference (my TA pay has gone up over 40 percent in three years, not least because of that April 2005 strike at Yale). Its underlying question is whether America’s university faculty will appreciate these points sufficiently to learn from other university workers (including graduate students) and organize collectively to defend their own interests. As a GSOC protest banner proclaimed, “The Future of Academia Is on the Line.”

Coedited by four NYU teachers (two graduate students, Monika Krause and Michael Palm, and two professors, Mary Nolan and Andrew Ross) closely involved in the sevenmonth NYU strike, The University Against Itself  “seeks to draw useful lessons from the strike, as well as from the remaking of NYU as an institution and GSOC as an organization.” It studies NYU specifically and universities in general, offering a solid reassessment of corporate growth in higher education, while exploring how to fight for better universities through collective action.  Blessedly free of jargon and unforgiving in its critique, this book speaks powerfully to any faculty member interested in retaining academic freedom, shared governance, dignity on the job, or just the job itself.

The collection is divided into three parts, the first of which, “Corporate University?” is the most comprehensive, demolishing any justification for its own question mark. Its essays examine not only NYU’s participation in the ubiquitous trend toward casualization of labor (academic and otherwise), but also the growth and corporate arrangement of the administrative class in numbers, remuneration, and power. Excellent pieces by Ellen Schrecker and Mary Nolan note the pernicious effects of casualization on academic freedom and faculty collegiality without failing to point the finger at university administrators and policies for this damage. Micki McGee lambastes NYU president John Sexton’s “Blue Team, Gray Team” metaphor, which Sexton expressed to NYU AAUP members in a 2002 meeting. He described  his ideal faculty as being divided into one contingent of superstar professors (blue team) and another, much larger group of disposable teaching faculty (gray team).

Scary? In the wider context presented here, Sexton’s vision seems only one symptom of a frightful epidemic. While faculty lose power everywhere, undergraduates shoulder massive debt to afford a devalued education, communities become unaffordable for longtime working class residents, and municipalities watch their tax bases erode.

Other thought-provoking essays probe these maladies, diagnosing the spread of corporate culture and noting the near-exclusive provenance of NYU’s trustees (hardly unique to NYU) in the worlds of finance, insurance, and real estate (the so-called FIRE economy). This cozy relationship between business and the university manifests itself in the increasing tendency of administrators to assess the university’s intellectual, cultural, and educational “products” (the “ICE” economy, as Sexton has called it) “as an investment in future financial value.” Heaven help us.

The book’s second movement,“GSOC Strike,” contains a set of more narrative analyses deconstructing the NYU dispute. It begins (after a helpful timeline of union activity at NYU from 1971 to 2007) with Susan Valentine’s essay chronicling the union-busting strategies that NYU unleashed on striking graduate students. Although some will remember the systematic intimidation, threatening, and blacklisting of strikers— many of Academe’s readers signed petitions deploring it—Valentine illuminates other, arguably more vicious tactics of spreading disinformation, spying, and using willing faculty as proxy bludgeons. GSOC faced a ruthless administration, along with challenges (analyzed in subsequent pieces) to resolving internal disagreements, formulating a media strategy, and cultivating productive relationships with faculty and undergraduates who were themselves divided. I finished this section with a renewed appreciation of just how brave GSOC strikers were and how important the fight they launched remains.

“Lessons for the Future,” the final section, offers prescriptions for that fight. Essays by Andrew Ross, Gordon Lafer, and Cary Nelson recognize that many universities, as part of the corporatizing process, are developing closer relationships with knowledge based corporations globally, diversifying revenue streams, and gaining powerful allies in the process. This means that tried-and-true union strategies (strikes, public shaming, petitions) can work to win real power only when deployed in conjunction with corporate campaigns that target the university’s real moneymakers: medical services and research, real estate, federal grants, and so forth. One promising alternative not mentioned here is the possibility of organizing across work categories with clerical, custodial, and dining-hall unions.

As Monika Krause and Michael Palm insist, however, the linchpin of any campaign (particularly ambitious ones like those hypothesized and envisioned by Lafer and Nelson) remains organizing ourselves. Indeed, readers can take heart in Krause and Palm’s description of the organizing that continues at NYU and the victories GSOC has won on bread-and-butter issues since the NYU strike. Contract or no contract, organized workers win concessions.

If the corporate university isn’t for you, The University Against Itself suggests you get organized and start making demands.

David Huyssen is a PhD candidate in U.S. history at Yale University. He is also a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Graduate and Professional Students and an organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale. His e-mail address is david.huyssen@yale.edu.

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