“The Winter of Our Discontent”

The NYU grad student strike goes on and on despite grim news from the administration.

By Mythili Rao, NYU

The occasion was supposed to be somber. In an email to faculty sympathetic to the striking graduate students, American Studies Professor Andrew Ross invited everyone to attend an event this Monday afternoon in the arch of Washington Square Park entitled "No Flowers Please: A Memorial to Faculty Voice at NYU,” which was intended as a eulogy for discursive exchange at NYU in the wake of the university administration’s ongoing refusal to negotiate with its graduate students’ union.

The event was a response to a threat made in a recent open letter from NYU President John Sexton: graduate teaching assistants who had not resumed teaching responsibilities by this week would "for the spring semester lose their stipend and their eligibility to teach," grim news for those invested in changing graduate student working conditions.

By the time Monday’s procession made its way from the park to the police-blockaded picket line outside Bobst Library, however, the event bore no semblance to a ceremony of last rites. The lively assemblage of protestors beat drums, blew whistles, chanted slogans ("What do we want?" "Contract!" "When do we want it?" "Now!"), and took up the megaphone to vocally affirm their commitment to a strike which has been underway for nearly a month — and which has brought supporters not only from NYU but also nearby institutions such as Yale and Rutgers to the front lines outside Bobst library.

A contingent of picketers even brought their slogans inside Bobst, briefly staging a takeover of the library. "You couldn’t even study," said undergraduate Harrie Bakst, a junior who was preparing for exams.

"It’s not that I’m against the strike," Bakst said, emphasizing that "from a moral point of view" the administration’s decision to drop the GSOC "like a sack of bricks" was inappropriate. "But if it would affect my grades in a negative way by association … " he trailed off.

Blackboard, Blacklist

Those at the forefront of the strike showed no such reservations. On Monday afternoon, several of the picketers wore their names, departments of study and the bold words, "Blacklist me," written in permanent marker on poster board signs hung over their jackets. "No Deans on Blackboards," read one protestor’s sign, referencing the infiltration of unauthorized university associate deans and program directors onto the Blackboard website used to host online communications between instructors and students in early November.

"Now is the winter of our discontent," read another’s sign.

Monday’s crowd was nothing new for Washington Square Park. On August 31, the last day of Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) UAW Local 2110’s original contract, over 1,000 supporters — including national labor leaders, students and celebrities — gathered there to pressure the university to negotiate a new contract. Just last Wednesday, some 300 protestors filled the park demanding a return to the bargaining table at the GSOC-hosted Day of Action, a rally that was dominated by a large papier-mâché float-like-effigy of Sexton.

Originally, Sexton’s financially punitive ultimatum was scheduled to go in effect Monday, December 5. But, on December 4, in response to a message from Graduate Affairs Committee Chair Rodney Washington — who proposed a suspension of the strike on Tuesday, December 6, and the opening of a dialogue between the GAC and the administration on economic issues relevant to GAs later in the week — Sexton and Provost David McLaughlin agreed to postpone the implementation of their new policy by two days in order to "give GSOC an opportunity to consider" the proposal of the Graduate Affairs Committee.

By Wednesday, Sexton’s proposed deadline, the strike still showed no sign of abating. "By remaining on strike with our jobs at risk, we have commanded the respect and support of the national labor movement," GSOC chairman Michael Palm noted in an e-mail to GSOC members.

"Accept the union as the vehicle"

The issue’s reach has by now extended beyond the NYU community. A December 2 letter addressed to Sexton decried the administration’s "efforts to defeat the graduate student union and retaliate against those who have initiated and sustained the current strike" signed by a host of international scholars including Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley, Fredric Jameson of Duke University, Gayatri Spivak of Columbia University and Paul Gilroy of the London School of Economics.

"Although the NLRB in 2005 released the university from its obligations to recognize the union, it did not authorize retaliatory action on the part of the university," the letter said, explaining that the reversal of the National Labor Relations Board’s position on the right of graduate students to unionize this summer did not validate the NYU administration’s decisions.

The letter has since grown into an online petition "asking President Sexton to cease and desist his threats and paralegal machinations in relation to a strike called by a fairly elected union of graduate students" signed by over 2,000 individuals by Monday morning.

"We call upon the administration to accept the union as the vehicle through which graduate student workers have chosen to represent their interests, to relinquish its various sordid tactics of threat, invasion and coercion, and to enter, with haste and good faith, negotiations that will bring about a quick and fair resolution of their differences," wrote Butler, Berkeley’s Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, and the petition’s principal signatory.

In another particularly emphatic civic gesture, New York City Council members Christine Quinn and Robert Jackson told GSOC that the Council has frozen university funds and will not back NYU development projects until the university resumes contract negotiations with the union.

For NYU undergraduates, the ongoing graduate student strike is a puzzling spectacle at a remove from their primary educational concerns. On Wednesday, just an hour after NYU undergrads were scheduled to rally alongside GSOC members in Washington Square Park, undergraduate students lounging in the Kimmel Center expressed a sense of distance from the protestors a block away outside the library.

Junior Dan Muney admitted disinterest. "I don’t know what the strike is about. None of my classes have been affected," he said.

None of the classes of junior Marisa Mutean, a photography student in the Tisch School, were taught by TAs either this semester, but in a show of solidarity, her instructors opted to move classes off-campus anyway. One class met at Mandoo Bar on University Place while another convened at a Barnes and Noble; finding the arrangements inconvenient, both eventually returned to the classroom. "I feel like it is unfair to the students to ask us to give up the facilities we are paying for," she said.

As for the NYU administration’s handling of the issue? Mutean looked amused. "It isn’t doing anything about it," she said.

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