Emily Wilbourne

From: Catharine R. Stimpson, Dean
October 24, 2005

responsible…1…liable to be called to account (to a person or for a thing). 2 morally accountable for one’s actions; capable of rational conduct…[1]

This is not a letter I write happily.

I understand that the United Auto Workers (UAW) and an NYU affiliate, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), have scheduled a “strike vote” for today, October 24, and tomorrow, October 25, and perhaps for even further into the week. The UAW and GSOC want graduate assistants to vote to go on strike in order to force the University to recognize the union and engage in collective bargaining with it on behalf of graduate assistants.

I may be misinformed. I hope I am. Prudence, however, requires that I believe what I have been told and read.

Since Spring 2005, members of the NYU community have disagreed about the issue of unionization of graduate assistants. The union has supporters among faculty and students, some passionately so. Some say that the union gives purpose to their lives. Others say that the union offers them protection and security. Still others want to offer solidarity to their fellow students who may believe in the union more strongly than they do. [2]

I respect these voices, and others, but all of us who are teaching have an overarching responsibility to our students—no matter what our position about the UAW and GSOC. Our obligation is to meet our classes. If we were doctors, we would not walk out on a patient in an operating room. If we were lawyers, we would not abandon a client in a court room. Graduate assistants or faculty, we are teachers, morally accountable for being with our students in their classrooms and laboratories. A vote for our accountability as teachers must trump a strike vote and a strike. If we are irresponsible, we are liable to be called to account.

More work needs to be done to strengthen graduate education at NYU—and elsewhere. Despite our differences about unionization, I am profoundly committed to working with the entire GSAS and University community to continue this job. In a few days, the GSAS “Priorities Statement” for 2005-6 will be distributed to faculty, staff, and students. It offers some ideas about our common future.

I would be happy to talk to anyone about this Letter.

Best wishes.

1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Ninth Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 1173.

2 The University’s position is available at www.nyu.edu/provost/ga and http://www.nyu.edu/public.affairs/gata/

--------------------- via NYU E-Mail Direct ---------------------

mle wilbourne <mle.wilbourne@nyu.edu> Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:01 AM

To: catharine.stimpson@nyu.edu
Subject: re: your open letter to the GSAS

dear catharine r-for-responsible stimpson,

i read, as i always do, your open letter with interest. if it was one that you didn't write happily, it was not one that i read happily.

the graduate student union is no more, or less, than the sum of its parts; it is constituted by the graduate students themselves. to write to us as if the union were some imposition from elsewhere attempting to lure us, the students, into a foolish strike is frankly insulting. i almost added that it missed the point of unionisation, but, to tell you the truth i read your opening salvo not as a misunderstanding, but rather as a deliberate deployment of a linguistic device so as to erase the community conjured into existence by the bodies of those that proclaim themselves (performatively) as members of a union. words are a powerful weapon, and you wield them well.

"Graduate assistants or faculty," you write, "we are teachers". true, true. teaching is not an occupation that i approach lightly; it is one that i enjoy, and one that i work hard at. it is an occupation (i might go so far as to say a *job*) that i take so seriously that i dare to imagine that the nyu administration might recognise the work that i do as work, perhaps even, they might recognise my right to union representation. i know full well that, under the influence of the current political administration, the national labour board doesn't recognise my right to unionise; but as a lesbian and a foreigner, there are a number of other rights that your government refuses to extend to me, and their refusal doesn't change my belief in my entitlement.

the other r-word that asserted its presence in your letter, was respect. if you really respect our voices, then negotiate with our union. it takes an inordinate amount of courage to publicly change one’s mind. were you to change your mind about graduate student unionisation, it would not only demonstrate your respect for the graduate students and the (incredibly necessary) work that they do for the uni, but would be a change of heart that i, not wanting to speak for anyone else here, would very much respect.

your letter was framed by the popping double "p"s of the move from unhappiness at writing, to being happy to discuss your letter with anyone. today i voted "yes" to the call for the strike. i did so because i want the nyu administration to recognise our union. it would make me happy if you could understand why, if you could respect that decision, and if you could respect the right of graduate students to be themselves responsible for whether or not they choose to unionise.

with my very great respect,
mle

Six months after writing the letters above, and after the conversations they initiated, the strike is ongoing, the issues unresolved. I remain intricately implicated in a political struggle regarding the conditions of my professional life, fierce practicalities such as an enforceable contract, health care and independent grievance procedures, and no-less-crucial questions concerning community, ideology and agency. Despite the length of my initial response, included above, I find that I still have a lot more to say.

Much of what I have to say on the topic of graduate student labour and the strike at NYU responds, directly or indirectly, to the assumptions that underwrite Dean Stimpson’s letter. Her rhetoric sets up a dichotomy between a commitment to pedagogy on the one hand, and a commitment to political activism on the other; imploring graduate students to choose responsibly between the two. I want to contest such polarisation. This piece of writing, a response of sorts, is engaged with seeking out and occupying the intersection of these two impulses, inhabiting a (theoretical) location where a commitment to political activism is a commitment to pedagogy, and a commitment to pedagogy a commitment to political activism. By this I do not mean that one is reducible to the other; it is precisely my point that the replacement of a commitment to political activism with pedagogical practice is inadequate. Instead, I want to articulate a space where a commitment to pedagogy provides the grounds on which a decision for activism can be made. In contrast to the wording of the Dean’s open letter, where teachers are “morally accountable for being with our students in their classrooms,” I do not wish to imply that pedagogy is limited to the specific geography of the classroom. I do, however, want to maintain a distinction between teaching and pedagogy: pedagogy involves a deliberate engagement with the practices and methods of teaching, it requires an awareness on the part of those-who-are-to-teach and those-who-are-to-learn of the potentially educative situation in which they are involved. I call this situation “potentially” educative, because not even the best-intentioned or well-executed pedagogical practice ensures that either teaching or learning will take place. Defined as such, the relationship between the classroom and pedagogy is not one of necessity, although it frequently emerges as one of utility.

I think that there is something important about my need to write down and think through the circumstances and consequences of the NYU strike – and something even more important about the way in which this primarily cathartic impulse is manifest: complete with endnotes and an appendix, this text is marked by the scholarly apparatus of academia. It is, in turn, a mark of my own relation to the procedures that condition the intelligibility of academic thought, an incorporation of scholarly behaviour, a naturalised performance of professionalism, a claim to scholarship and to academic labour in and of itself. The turn to rethink the work of academia – teaching, advising, research, publication – in terms of labour, union organising and collective bargaining requires attention to the specificities of tertiary education and the particular formations under which such labour is performed. As such, it requires a self-consciousness towards the importance of writing (down) and thinking (through) that troubles simplistic distinctions between theory and practice.

The Personal is Political
I am a musicologist. I write and think, that is, about music. In my scholarly work I try to convey the pleasures and desires that drive my intellectual inquiry. I have tried to explore the capacity of writing to intervene in the discourse of musicology such that I can write about music as performance (rather than as notes, as is usual with traditional analysis, or as works, as is typical of historical musicology). To do so, I return to theories of performativity like an idée fixe, they promise a productive way to understand the materiality of the body in its relationship to music; to see the body as performed by the music that it performs; to theorise repetitions and citations, actions and their effects; and to understand my own performance of language and historiography in relationship with the performances of the distant past. This is a way of understanding performance, spectacle and reception as actions undertaken and undergone by temporally and physically present bodies. Performativity theory treats such actions, their repetitions and their consequences as an epistemology of engagement that complicates notions of agency and passivity. I try to teach my students about what I study, and why I am excited by it.

During the Fall semester, when the strike began, I was one of three teaching assistants in a sophomore music class for non-music majors, “Expressive Culture: Sounds,” with an enrolment of around 75 students. I taught two sections, led discussion, took a couple of the lectures, did grading, held office hours and answered student emails. The scope of the class was broad, examining “the notion of ‘expressive culture’ through musical forms from wide geo-cultural spheres and historical moments, critically considering music’s ubiquity topically and from a number of perspectives.”^[2] In practice, such classes hinge on the pedagogical transmission of two fundamental epistemologies – the one a practice of listening, the other a habit of thinking. The first of these requires teaching students to separate out and think about the various sounding components of the music to which they are listening, and is, in my opinion, easiest when one can first show them how frequently and well they already employ such skills, talking, for instance, about genres and features of popular music that they particularly enjoy. The second involves a shift from using “music” as noun, to denote the object of study, to verb, and thus “musicking,” a participatory practice performed by composers, musicians and listeners alike.^[3] Music as action is inextricable from the fabric of political and social context that surrounds it; while an F# may not be gay in and of itself, singing an F# in a gay men’s chorus can be, just as the selection of repertoire, the iterations of rehearsal, the physicalities of tuning and timing and the scene of performance structure a community in particular ways. In combination, these two concepts allow students to think critically about music; to think, for example, about the raced and classed implications of not liking country music, or the way in which certain social interactions are mediated by an i-pod play list.

I love teaching, although it takes up a lot of my time and I find it hard work.

The university administration has argued that the labour performed by graduate teaching and research assistants is not work, but merely “part of their academic program and training.”^[4] Having taken such a position, the administration feels no obligation to recognise the graduate students’ union: unions represent workers, not students. The smug logic of such a proposition is severely undercut by the actions of the same administration. Most PhD students at NYU receive a five-year funding package made up of several years as a teaching assistant and others spent on full fellowship. Although the gross pay for each year is the same, stipends for each fellowship year are disbursed through the fellowship office, and students receive only a 1042-S at the end of the financial year. During the years spent as a teaching assistant, however, our salary is paid through the payroll office, taxes and medicare contributions are withheld, and the student (worker) receives a W2 taxation form.^[5] On paper, these students are workers, yet the administration recognises no disconnect between their taxation practices and the rhetoric touted on their webpage.

The strike, therefore, is one for recognition, an extreme form of protest invoked only after petitions, letters, rallies and town hall debates had failed to impact the decision-making process of the university administration.^[6] Once the strike started, it interrupted the rhythm of my days. Monday and Wednesday afternoons found me not in the Waverly building, lecture hall 320, but in front of the library, fenced in by police barricades, walking, chanting, singing and dancing the picket line, marking time on an upturned pickle bucket. I’m not convinced, to be honest, that I could have taught the class that I wanted to teach even had I followed Dean Stimpson’s advice and not participated in the strike. If my time in the classroom was spent struggling to articulate the nexus of action, community and politics that is musicking; then my time on the picket line was a struggle of another sort that communicated – in form and affect – exactly the specificity of the intersection between sound and the body.

After reading Dean Stimpson’s open letter, prefaced by the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word “responsible,” I looked up “protest.” The definition, “protest, n. An act of protesting,”^[7] astounded me both by its circularity and the centrality of action. The dictionary went on to elaborate five nuanced meanings of “protest,” including solemn declarations and written statements alongside political rallies. In the explicatory terms offered by the OED, protest is nothing less than performative – in utterance, word and deed; perhaps foundationally so.

Picketing, like teaching, is hard work, but unlike teaching, it is a physical labour to which my body was ill accustomed. One Wednesday, with my body crouched in the gutter, beating time to the chant “If we’re not workers then we’re not not working,” the labours of my not not working body cohered into thought: to protest is to deliberately and consciously foreground the body as legible text – “decant[ed] … from its consumption and gather[ed] up as play, activity, production, practice.”^[8] Theoretically and literally, protest is a physical demonstration, a manifestation (in Italian, manifestazione) of a laborious and demandingly somatic commitment to an idea. “Watch me,” it says, “Listen to me, see how much effort I am expending to display this body as not working.” The “listen to me” is important. The sound of the protest is vital. The rhythm of the protesters singing, chanting and producing percussive sounds stands as synecdoche of their unity of purpose. The better the drum line, the more together our utterances, the more convincing the manifestation of our determination. This is my body: pay attention. Roland Barthes argued that there were two kinds of music, “the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic.” The rhythm of the picket line is produced by the bodies on the line, “from an activity that is very little auditory, being above all manual (and thus in a way much more sensual).”^[9] And the bodies are, in turn, produced by such rhythms. As protest, the picket line spectacularises the body of the protester. Marked with placards and signs, moving in choreographed circles, drumming and chanting in an aural text of unified purpose, the picketer produces the text of protest and is produced by it. The protest is performative and set to music.

This reading of “protest” borders on the obvious, as if I risk, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident.”^[10] The process of thinking was tied to my physical engagement in the actions and performance of protest. The picket line was the scene in which such thought could occur to me as revelatory commonplace. If the picket line was the place for my revelation, it was and remains the wrong place for its communication. That is, I probably could have explained my thinking to my fellow picketers – but to do so we would have had to stop picketing. Similarly, even had I managed to engage a passer-by long enough to have had the necessary conversation, I would, again, have had to stop picketing to do so, perhaps, even, to have stopped protesting. The rhetoric of the picket line and that of academic theorisation are, to this extent, incommensurable.

I will return to the physical performance of protest, but I want to first follow the traces of rhetoric a little further. GSOC has had to learn the rhetoric of protest. The consequences are an interesting mix. There remains a tension between the necessity for attention-grabbing soundbytes and a genuine desire for a sophisticated analysis of a highly complicated situation. A banner making session, about a month ago, provides a case in point. Two banners were made to be used on the picket line. One read, in large letters, “THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIA IS ON THE LINE,” the other (in necessarily smaller writing) read: “In short, the generation in power must accept that one of their most crucial roles is to hear and heed the voices of the next generation of leaders. – John Sexton.”^[11]

The second of these is less successful as a banner, and was far more difficult to make. And yet there was a sense in the making of it that it proved a point: using President Sexton’s own words against him felt triumphant. I believe that we all secretly hoped that Sexton, reading it, would acknowledge himself outwitted, and cornered by the logic of his own utterance, would admit defeat.

Perhaps this faith in words and rational arguments is no more than garden-variety idealism, but perhaps it is a particular feature of the academic labour movement. Even six months into a difficult strike, the academic (as opposed to administrative) participants remain invested in the power of words, as if having the strongest, most logical, reasonable, articulate and sophisticated argument will be enough to convince the opposition.

The tendency towards wordiness is not only apparent in the banners on our picket line, or the title of a flyer produced by the anthropology department, “Ten Popular Misconceptions About The Strike and Ten Highly Reasonable (if wordy) Responses,” but speaks of a tension within the academic labour movement that becomes most evident during an extended job action such as the strike. Kitty Krupat and Laura Tanenbaum, writing in the hopeful period after GSOC-UAW won their first contract at NYU, make a comment that is worth quoting at some length:

GSOC-UAW has been a remarkably harmonious group of youthful intellectuals and seasoned trade unionists in one of America’s most powerful and progressive unions. Still, we have had our differences of opinion in the process of creating a union structure and a method of operation. Most graduate students, for example, are inclined toward discourse and used to reading and writing for a living. As a consequence, they itch to compose essays rather than leaflets and long for public meetings in order to debate controversial issues. Wisely, we believe, our colleagues in the UAW have urged us to stay focused on basic issues, keep our message concise, and avoid substituting the written word for one-on-one relationships with other graduate students.^[12]

I’m not, myself, certain of the wisdom of observing all three such conditions at all times. Many graduate students, GSOCers and otherwise, have expressed resentment over the simplification of issues on the part of both GSOC and the university administration.

On 28 February 2006, over 60 GSOCers bussed to Albany to lobby members of the NY State Legislature. On the bus we were divided into groups of three, given packets containing fliers and petitions to hand out and timetables of scheduled meetings with senators, assemblymen and assemblywomen. We were also given a lecture, by the president of our local, 2110, on how to lobby. This is a labour issue, she said. Do not confuse the issue by talking about academic freedom. Do not talk about the potential downfall of Western Civilisation as we know it. Do not, she stressed, get technical, do not use academic language, you will lose your audience.

Sitting in the bus, I was outraged by her comments. Wasn’t it the point that we were graduate students and university teachers? Couldn’t we use this opportunity to teach the Legislative Assembly just how complicated the situation was and thus demonstrate both how essential we were to the university and the carefully-thought-through rightness of our position? Yet, hours later, in the offices of elected representatives, with only five minutes to make my case before an un-informed audience, I realised that I had little choice other than to follow her advice. I felt compromised, but I condensed the message, erasing the ambiguities and articulating a clear division between work and study, I framed the discussion in terms of “rights”; I felt like I was dumbing it down. Neither protest as lobbying, nor protest as picketing provides the scene within which the complications of academic labour – either in general or the specificities of the struggle between GSOC and the NYU administration – can be articulated. Neither provides the intersection of pedagogy and political activism for which I am searching.

This returns me to my scene on the picket line, the moment where, through participation, I learnt something, and where furthermore, I realised that I couldn’t simultaneously participate on the line and teach the knowledge that I had gained. Perhaps I learnt something further, by noticing my desire to teach what I thought I’d learnt. I want to argue that the disjunction between protester and teacher is due to the comportment of their bodies; the one is spectacularised, the other partitioned off as irrelevant; one challenges the legitimacy of an authority located elsewhere, the other is manifest as the instrument of such authority. The protesting body becomes exemplary, a warning or celebration (dependent on the politics of the observer); if it teaches at all, it teaches by example. The physicalities of the picket line appear in sharp opposition to the very different labours of teaching, which is not to claim the teaching body as neutral. Teaching – and for that matter, the associated labours of grading and researching – can be understood as predominantly mental, yet produced in conjunction with a certain formation of the body into a disciplined and contained posture.^[13] The physical disposition takes years to learn, the embodied mark of the (well-)educated, naturalised by years of schooling. The example of protesting teachers destabilises the purported neutrality of sedentary restraint. In demonstrating the difference between the legibility of such bodies (teacher and protester) it emphasises the extent to which academia schools us, and points to a material distinction between academic and traditional labour that needs to be accounted for by the theorists and supporters of the academic labour movement.

To think of protest and the picket line as actions, as verbs (and thus “protesting” or “picketing”), is to figure them as participatory practices and to put them into a fabric of political and social context within which the choices, iterations and presence of participants structure a community in particular ways. The act of picketing together is not merely a symptom of union solidarity, but a performative enactment that constitutes solidarity at the moment of its performance, constructing community in ways that exceed “the protest itself.” Like the musics studied in “Expressive Culture: Sounds,” learning to picket and learning something from picketing are two different things.

Having argued that at the moment of coherent thought my embodied-activity-as-protest was incommensurate with the embodied-act-of-teaching, I don’t want to imply that the picket line cannot operate as a pedagogical scene – indeed, if we agree that I did, in fact, learn something other than the mechanics of how to picket, then the picket line cannot be other than (potentially) pedagogical. But the differences between legible bodies that the picket line of an academic labour protest enunciates so clearly are difficult to teach.

Protest spectacularises the bodies on the line, and, as spectacular manifestations, these bodies risk an opacity that allows the passer-by to dismiss the bodies as extreme, dismissing the motivations of the protest in the process. Deeply engrained patterns of association figure academic labour as mental labour such that, when the picket line renders the academic’s body in sharply visible terms, the metonymic relationship between the scholar and their work is displaced. The fact is that in and of itself the picket line does not occupy a location where pedagogy and political activism are mutually constitutive. To do so, it would have to engage with the practices of academic labour, namely teaching and thinking (researching, writing, theorising). It would have to link the body to the performance of academic work in teachable ways.

The Professional is Political
Caught up in thinking about the manifestation of academic labour and responding to the conditioned impulses of my academic formation, I went to the library. I read up on the academic labour movement and the corporatisation of the university – subjects on which there exists a significant quantity of recent literature. None of what I read directly addressed the issues of performance and the body that had inspired my reading, although they did provide a frightening range of statistics. Particularly heartbreaking were those articles that celebrated NYU’s situation in 2001 as the first private US university to recognise a graduate student union. Throughout the literature, the arguments advanced for unionisation or collective action can, for the most part, be roughly characterised by their adherence to two basic trajectories. In the first instance, a relatively straightforward analysis is made in terms of labour, production and capitalism, emphasising changes to the funding, hiring and working conditions within universities over a given historical period. An effort is made to de-romanticise the engagement of the individual academic in the scene of teaching, and to emphasise the actual labour in this labour of love. The identification of ways in which the university has become more corporate provides evidence for the necessity of organised activism. A clear example of such logic is Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie’s article, “Professors Going Pro: The Commercialization of Teaching, Research, and Service.”^[14]

In the second instance, an argument is made around the ideal of a liberal arts education as necessary for the sustenance of an educated, critical and reasonable citizenry. Positing a decline in the quality of liberal arts education as a consequence of corporatisation and cost-cutting initiatives, and a shift towards vocational training such as business or computing degrees at the expense of the liberal arts, this argument holds such changes to be detrimental to the fabric of US society. A pertinent example is Jennifer Washburn’s book, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education.^[15]

In practice most authors, including the two examples cited above, combine both arguments in varying doses. The summaries I have given here are intentionally reductive. I find that both lines of argument fall short. I agree that it is impossible to understand the academic labour movement separately from its economic context – including an increasingly corporate university system. What I find unconvincing is the logic of the causal link between increasing corporatisation and union activity: this has not been the case outside the academy, where increasing corporatisation has vitiated the union movement. I am also hesitant to cleave to the assumption that the citizenry instituted through a liberal arts education is an unreservedly “good thing.” I don’t intend to deny that an undergraduate education in the liberal arts has its merits, or to argue against critiques of the sweeping institutional changes that have affected academia. I want, rather, to articulate what I perceive as a disconnect between the ideal – liberal, individual, tolerant, reasonable, democratic – citizen as purportedly produced by a liberal arts education, and the activism required in any large scale form of protest.

To return to the first of these critiques, I will acknowledge one – extremely pragmatic – argument that links the changes in university management to the rise of the academic labour movement. It is an acknowledged “truth” that people mobilise and/or organise only where and when it seems an easier and more comfortable option than continuing to inhabit the status quo. In this sense, the causal relationship is clear: the changes that can be understood as “corporatisation” are directly responsible for the turn towards unionisation. They do not, however, fully determine the nature of that turn. Many of the benefits that the academic labour movement hopes to preserve, reinstate or institute are rights – such as tenure or sabbatical – that don’t exist in unionised labour forces outside the academy. At the same time, the habitual separation (linguistic and conceptual) of the academy from the so-called “real world” conceals the extent to which the university – in its “ideal” and corporatised configurations – is implicated in the processes of global capitalism that the academic labour movement intends to critique.

A glance at the latest issue of the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences newsletter, On the Square, demonstrates the prevalence of such links. The cover story, “Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships at NYU,” begins by situating FLAS fellowships within Cold War politics (they were instituted through the National Defense Education Act in 1958), and goes on to note that “[s]ince 9/11, Arabic has been the fastest growing language studied at NYU, with an almost seven-fold increase in enrolment over the last four years.”^[16] The “Dean’s Message,” which begins on page two, centres on the notion of a “Global University” and the relationship of a global graduate school to globalisation. Catharine Stimpson sets herself a difficult task, attempting to remain optimistic about the prospects of a Global U, while acknowledging the reliance of universities on nation states and patterns of colonisation. She comments, too, on widespread decreases in state funding for higher education and the resultant turn, on the part of universities, to seek “revenues elsewhere: in fees and tuition, in research contracts, in foundations, in philanthropy.”^[17] What Dean Stimpson doesn’t mention is the related move to reduce the costs associated with tertiary education. Many institutions seek to enrol full-fee paying students in the most cost-effective of courses, employing graduate student or adjunct labour rather than tenure-track faculty, and providing minimal access to resources such as libraries and sports facilities.^[18] These practices take several forms, including but not limited to an increase in private universities that specialise in business degrees or distance learning. In Australia, where tertiary education for qualified Australian citizens occurs at a heavily subsidised rate, universities (public and private) have enrolled increasing numbers of international students, capitalising on the large fees they pay – in many cases five or six times the cost paid by local students – without contributing to an infrastructure that would cater to students for whom English is not their native language. This limits the educational and social opportunities of many students. The uneven shift of bodies and knowledge across borders and the impact of financial concerns on university operations cannot be understood as disjunct from the other symptoms of globalisation, and cannot be separated from the less obviously insidious processes of tertiary education.

The walls of the Ivory Tower are not as divisive as the metaphor implies. Any commitment to the production of an educated citizenry, whether motivated by an ideological pedagogy or a liberal project of individual enlightenment and upward social mobilisation, contributes to an expanding white-collar, or “no-collar,” constituency who are too qualified for the physical labour of cleaning their own homes or building their own cars. As the average wage demanded by the average citizen increases in relation to their level of education and desired standard of living, manufacturing jobs are moved offshore and immigrants who cannot make substantial claims to a living wage fill the gaps in the labour market. The workforces thus constituted have little or no access to health care or other benefits. They are simultaneously denied access to the privileges granted by participation within a labour union as they contribute to the circumstances that reduce union influence and power.

At this point, I think that the two lines of argument condensed from the secondary literature begin to confound each other. The nostalgia for a liberal arts education is a desire for an education into true citizenship – that is, an education into an adult and thinking participation in democracy. This is, also, very much an education into a particular docility, a reasonableness of disposition and intellect that is symptomatic of the Enlightenment Project’s faith in education, science and progress. Without wanting to make grandiose claims about my project in relation to war, colonisation and other monstrosities, I do want to posit an interdependence between such phenomena and an understanding of education as a means of civilisation, an education undertaken for the social and moral betterment of the student(s). Keith Jenkins, among others, has pointed to the Holocaust as the failure of the Enlightenment project on its own terms.^[19] His argument rests on a critique of modernism, the very reasonableness of Enlightened thought, the assumption of the educated reasonableness of others, and the presumed benefits of progress. The current “War on Terror” – the dissemination of freedom and democracy through pre-emptive military force – can be similarly understood within the terms of education and enlightenment. The “freedom” advocated by the United States military is not the freedom to disregard democracy, nor does it permit critical engagement with liveable definitions of the term “democracy.”

My point is this: if one takes seriously – and I do – a reading of higher education as a far-from-neutral participant in the complex structures of globalisation, and if one takes seriously – as I do – the teleologies of modernism and the disturbing implications of education as self-improvement, then the ethics of a commitment to pedagogy are questionable. This is not a conundrum about which I feel any certainty of finding an adequate response.

I find the ideological underpinnings of a liberal arts education disturbing, and yet, my work as a musicologist who teaches at the university level implicitly replicates much of this ideology. According to the NYU website, the “Expressive Culture: Sounds” course “seeks to prepare students for their continued learning in and beyond college, for active participation in their communities, and for lives in a rapidly changing world.”^[20] This is the liberal arts in a distilled form: musical appreciation, while light on immediately obvious and tangible benefits, makes you a better person. Even when such a class is deliberately structured so as to problematise the consumerist model assumed by the terms “Expressive Culture” and musical “appreciation,” even when it works towards an articulation of how music comes to have meanings only in relation to the “ideas and fantasies and desires people project into it” and “the ways people use [music] to help sustain their sense of who they are and how they are in relation to others,” the pedagogical logic behind such teaching articulates a model for being a better, more perceptive person.^[21] The model is structurally different, but the motivation remains the same.

Right-wing politicians and left-wing educators continue to regard the classroom as the locus of a radical pedagogy capable of drastically altering the fabric of society.^[22] In many instances the spectre of leftist education simultaneously justifies reductions in state funding and political interference in course content at the same time that it limits the efficacy of left-wing action by circulating an assumption (cited in conversation by several strike detractors) that the work undertaken in the classroom is a self-sufficient activist practice. I have already put forward my belief that a commitment to pedagogy is an insufficient substitution for a commitment to political activism.^[23] I want to reiterate that position. How can one ethically maintain a commitment to pedagogy and to tertiary education without merely replicating the patterns, discussed above, that serve to undermine the content of radical left critique? How can one be committed to tertiary education but not to the liberal goals of the Enlightenment Project?

In short, my detour into the secondary literature failed to provide a theoretical foundation to support my commitment to pedagogy and political activism. On the contrary, it left me questioning the purpose of tertiary education and the compromised consequences of the pedagogical calling – radical or otherwise. It left me wondering how I could understand my own (deep-seated) belief in the moral rightness and ethical necessity for critical and radical scholarship and pedagogy at the university level.

The Pedagogical Is Political
Twice already this paper has made recourse to the OED. Dean Stimpson cited the definition of “responsibility,” and I cited “protest.” At this point, I think it necessary to define “pedagogy”:

pedagogy, n.

1. A place of instruction; a school, a college; a university. Also fig. Now hist. and rare.

2. Instruction, discipline, training; a system of introductory training; a means of guidance. Obs.

3. The art, occupation, or practice of teaching. Also: the theory or principles of education; a method of teaching based on such a theory.

If the first two meanings of “pedagogy” are outdated – historical, rare, obsolete – they offer an encouraging flexibility; and given the seemingly inevitable arc of this argument, I am no longer surprised by the primacy of action in the one definition that remains relevant. Of course pedagogy is a practice, it couldn’t be otherwise. Taking “pedagogy” to be both the art and practice of teaching, and the theory and methodology with which it is carried out, then the “radical pedagogy” invoked in relation to the leftist classroom, should be similarly radical in form as well as content.

The notion of radical pedagogy is one to which I cleave; it is a practice that I want to think of myself as performing. But what do I imagine that I can teach? Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? I would like to imagine that I educate my students into something other than into a model of liberal citizenship, but into critical awareness and activism. To do so, I imagine that one would need to teach a sophisticated understanding of the thoroughly compromised condition of agency and maintain a pedagogical space within which students can recognise and act on a sense of outrage.

The decision to strike was not one that I took lightly. It scared me. When it came time to vote, I voted the only way my conscience would allow me to, but I hoped – desperately – that the strike authorisation vote would be enough to sway the administration. I hoped that I wouldn’t actually have to go through with it. Once that possibility faded, and as November 9 approached, I had to decide whether or not I would actually abdicate my classroom. Part of me was very much tempted to hold class off campus – to not actually strike, but still gesture in support of those who were prepared to carry through with it. But in the end, I struck my labour. I did so hoping that within the week the issue would be resolved. I was, in fact, terrified. And disappointed. The issue was not resolved and I became increasingly, selfishly, concerned for my own status as an international student. At this point in history, the international student in the United States occupies a tenuous and precarious position. The surveillance systems are intricate; she is fingerprinted, photographed, and bound about by an ever changing set of rules and regulations.

Airports in the United States terrify me. A horrible, sickening feeling, as if my inner ears were filled with a viscous liquid that wobbles about and occasionally slides down the inside of my throat. The fear is, on many levels, irrational: as a white, English-speaking, highly educated woman, I’m not typecast at the top of the list of potential terrorists. With dual Australian/British citizenship, I am doubly – and unwillingly – a member of the coalition of the willing, and I pass through the porous boundaries of the rest of the “West” with breathtaking ease. And yet in the US, my alien body has been funneled through the extra-security check-in with statistically improbable frequency. Visibly and audibly marked as different, those of us in line slide each other glances under our eyelids and hold our tongues. The first time I was body searched was in the bowels of JFK. I stood, legs planted apart and arms outstretched, while a large, butch, African-American woman looked me in the eye with both challenge and apology. She held one hand up in front of my face and pulled on the elasticised band of her blue latex glove so that it snapped back against her wrist. She said, “When I touch your sensitive areas, I will use the back of my hand.”

On the tenth day, I broke the strike. I taught my class. We met, not in their – our – assigned classroom, but in the library. It still meant crossing the picket line. Indeed, as the picket line was directly outside the library it juxtaposed – dramatically – the line, in all its rowdy, rhythmic glory, and the concentrated conversational space of my classroom. The week’s readings had been on Paul Simon’s Graceland album (1986), on world music and appropriation; but I mostly talked about the strike. I explained how much I loved teaching, but how little I wanted to be there under such circumstances. I brought in several of the themes that had been running through the class: the body, technology, listening, noise vs. music, Barthes – “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.”^[24] I tried to explain my moment of enviable theoretical clarity, my body, crouched in the gutter outside Bobst library, fenced in by police barricades, beating time on an upturned bucket, physically and mentally engaged in protesting; the liminal, ludic space that the moment of performance had opened for me, the subjunctive mood of hyperbolic self-awareness.^[25] To be honest, they’ve rarely listened so attentively, but perhaps that was more to do with the intensity of my communication than its efficacy. One kid said, “It’s like that Heidegger that we read, the graduate students have become the ‘standing-reserve.’”^[26]

Then, in a practical exercise of embodied musicking, I took them out of the classroom, up the stairs and out of the library, onto the picket line. For nine dollars and sixty-six cents I’d bought a variety of noisemakers at my local “Bargain (sic) ’R Us” in Brooklyn, and I invited them to walk the picket line, to feel, bodily, the effect of making noise, of writing the body as text, of musicking protest; or, to stand at a short distance and pay attention. Aristotle wrote that one who learns to play the harp learns to play it by playing it.^[27] One student chose to watch. Others were excited to walk and make noise. Another told me roundly that she thought it inappropriate for me to suggest such an activity to the class, but that she supported the strike and was happy to picket. I admired that comment the most: I was still her teacher, yet she was outraged and spoke out. In her position I hope that I would have done the same thing.

Speaking to the students that day, I told them – and meant it literally – that I was teaching under protest. The experience was, like the difficult decision to strike, and the paralysing decision to return to work, one that I felt was underwritten by mutually constitutive commitments to both pedagogy and protest. It suggests to me a radical possibility for job action in the struggle for academic labour rights. What would it have meant if all the graduate employees had taught under protest? If, instead of a refusal to teach there had been a refusal to teach as properly interpellated docile bodies? What I am suggesting is a job action whereby TAs would refuse to follow the set syllabus and instead teach a curriculum of their own focused on the circumstances of the situation. Classes could be held on campus or in unpredictable or unlikely locations, they could be held on the picket line. The content could cover the specific history of the labour struggle in question, labour history or labour law in general, the economic accountability of their education (à la Ronald Strickland ^[28]), the mechanics of graduate education, or the performance and performativity of academic labour. Assessment would be rigorous, students would continue to be marked on attendance, and assignments would be set on the topics that were covered in class. In conjunction with a picket line as a public manifestation of the protest, the academic labour itself would be spectacularised before the very people for whom it is carried out.

I imagine that the administration would find such a situation even more difficult to manage than they found the strike at NYU. For one thing, it would be difficult to claim that the TAs in question were lacking in pedagogical commitment. It would also be far more difficult to police, and therefore penalise, those who were involved; it would be almost impossible to replace their labour. Indeed, any attempt on the part of the administration to intervene would risk invoking a response predicated on the principles of academic freedom. By maintaining the links between graduate student employees and the undergraduates that they teach, the blanket misinformation campaigns initiated by the administration would be far easier to counteract. Hopefully the undergraduates, and by extension, the broader university community, would quickly learn to appreciate the complexities of the situation because “striking” graduate employees would be less reliant on the soundbyte economy of the picket line and press. This would embody a form of protest dependent on and enabled by the particularities of specifically academic labour.

I can foresee difficulties in carrying out such an action. Because of the differences between such protest and the traditional patterns of union activity, it would be likely that the broader labour movement would be less supportive of such action than they have been of the NYU strike. A strike is very easy to grasp, the rules are known, little further explanation is necessary. Also, because a structure such as the one I have proposed allows for the articulation of complex and varying positions, consensus would have been more difficult to reach. In addition, it would require further effort on the part of union members to simultaneously maintain picket lines and carry out teaching work. These complications, however, are such that a strong organising committee could turn these potential stumbling blocks into the strongest structural elements of the action.

The theoretical implications of pedagogical coup as job action also raise some complex questions. In contrast to a strike action, where strikers refuse to do their job, such protest involves teaching assistants doggedly continuing to do their job, as it puts pressure on simplistic assumptions of what that job might be. What, for example, forms the “competencies” and “skill sets” of a university education? What relation is there between the literal content of a class syllabus and a measure of what that same class is assumed to actually teach the student? Is the relationship between teacher and student structured by an implicit contract? If so, to what extent does, or should, this assumed and metaphorical “contract” match up to the syllabus, enriched as syllabi are with assignments and requirements? If the relationship of teacher to student can be understood as a contract, then how does such a contract relate to questions of trust, authority and payment? To what extent might this implicit “contract” model the implicit “contract” that the NYU administration has promised to honour between itself and each individual graduate student employee? These are not questions that I intend to answer here at any great length. I ask them to emphasise what I see as an important theoretical distinction between the relationship of teacher to student and the relationship of administration to teacher that teaching under protest would throw into sharp relief. In claiming that our work as teaching assistants is merely “part of [our] academic program and training,” the NYU administration has attempted to write themselves (as employers) into the position of teacher to the graduate students, arguing for an environment of trust and intangible benefits (where the pedagogical skills we learn along the way are analogous to the practices of critical engagement and the reading and writing skills of the highly literate that are generally understood to be the benefits of a liberal arts education) in a situation in which the mechanics of a contract – number of hours worked, benchmarking, competency, economic recompense, health care and independent grievance procedures – would be far more appropriate. If the graduate students have learnt this through their embodied practical experiences, then we need to find some way of teaching what we have learnt to the university administration.

In the spring semester, I, like many striking graduate students, was put on fellowship, although under normal circumstances I would have been teaching. I was able, therefore, to participate wholeheartedly in union activities without having to face a frightening and difficult decision between jeopardising my visa status and crossing the picket line. On the one hand, this decision, taken by my department, made it easier – if expensive – for them to arrange replacement labour for that (large) proportion of graduate students who refused to do the required work. It meant, too, that the university administration was able to make sweeping statements to the press and the university community quoting statistics that bore no relationship to the actual involvement in the strike. On the other hand, it meant that I – even as an international student – was able to withdraw my labour: all collective action is made up of many individual decisions. It also meant that I couldn’t engage my classes in a pedagogy of the strike. I have, however, written this paper, which can be taken as a form of academic labour as protest, a thinking through and writing down that aims – in a thoroughly compromised manner – toward a radical and participatory pedagogy of its readers. If it seems unlikely that it would be read by the members of the New York State Legislature, who suffered under the time constraints of the five-minute version, I hope that this will be read by members of the university community – undergraduates, graduates, faculty and administrators – and work towards articulating an academic and pedagogical protest in thinking and writing, different from and yet relevant to the necessary simplifications of the soundbyte economy of political slogans.

Appendix GSOC-UAW: A Chronology^[29]

19 March 1997: NYU graduate assistants form the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC).

November 1997: GSOC chooses to affiliate with the United Automobile Workers (UAW). A year of underground organizing lays the basis for an open campaign.

October 1998: GSOC-UAW begins public petition drive. Within six months, union signs up majority of graduate students.

April 1999: GSOC-UAW asks NYU for legal recognition of the union. University denies request.

3 May 1999: GSOC-UAW files petition with the NLRB seeking election for union representation.

May-September 1999: NLRB holds hearings on question of whether graduate assistants at NYU are employees, entitled to collective bargaining rights.

3 April 2000: NLRB rules that NYU graduate assistants are both students and employees. The first to respond publicly is not NYU but Yale University, whose graduate students had been organizing with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) for ten years. In a press release, issued immediately following the decision, Yale urges NYU to appeal.

5 April 2000: NYU files an appeal with the NLRB, requesting a stay of election. NLRB accepts NYU’s appeal but refuses to delay an election for union representation.

25-27 April [2000]: NYU graduate students vote on whether to be represented by the UAW. NLRB seals the ballot boxes, pending adjudication of NYU’s appeal.

1 November 2000: NLRB dismisses NYU’s appeal, reaffirming employee status for graduate assistants.

15 November 2000: Impounded ballots counted. GSOC-UAW wins. UAW certified by NLRB as bargaining agent for NYU graduate assistants, putting NYU under legal obligation to bargain with GSOC-UAW.

November 2000–February 2001: NYU delays bargaining, threatening to take its case through the federal court system. Protests by nearly three thousand undergraduates and two hundred faculty members help bring matters to a head.

1 March 2001: Hours before a scheduled strike authorization vote, NYU and the union sign a letter of agreement, under which NYU recognizes the union and agrees to bargain.

2 April 2001: Negotiations begin.

28 January 2002: GSOC-UAW wins first union contract covering graduate student employees at a private university.

13 July 2004: NLRB overturns decision in NYU case, ruling that graduate students at Brown University are primarily students and not employees. Unlike students at NYU, teaching assistants at Brown are not placed on the payroll, but paid through a financial aid office.

21 April 2005: GSOC presents petition in favour of a second contract and signed by a large majority of bargaining unit members to the NYU administration.

26 April 2005: Faculty Advisory Committee on Academic Priorities, NYU, recommends against renewing contract with GSOC-UAW, arguing that TA and RA labour should be regarded as professional training, while acknowledging that the first contract had brought many benefits to graduate students.

2 May 2005: Senate Academic Affairs Committee, NYU, recommends against renewing contract with GSOC-UAW, arguing that money paid to graduate students is a form of financial aid. The report acknowledges that the first contract brought many benefits to graduate students that any future structure should seek to maintain.

26 May 2005: GSOC-UAW approaches NYU and requests that they reconsider the possibilities offered by a second contract.

16 June 2005: NYU administration announces their intention not to negotiate a second contract with GSOC and opens a 30-day period for notice and comment on this decision.

12 July 2005: Town Hall meeting held by NYU as part of the notice and comment period.

2 August 2005: NYU administration sends a contract proposal to GSOC-UAW, giving them 48-hour take-it-or-leave-it period. The proposed contract removes all provisions for an independent grievance arbitration process and removes the agency shop clause (effectively making the payment of union dues voluntary).

4 August 2005: GSOC-UAW to NYU administration, points out that an enforceable grievance procedure is an essential element of a collectively bargained contract and requests a face-to-face meeting in which to negotiate the elements of the second contract.

5 August 2005: NYU administration to GSOC-UAW, announces final decision not to negotiate with union. This decision is communicated to the NYU community the same day via email.

31 August 2005: First contract expires; GSOC-UAW holds a rally and a peaceful act of civil disobedience outside Bobst library, 76 protesters are arrested.

24-28 October 2005: Strike vote held.

9 November 2005: Strike begins.

16 November 2005: Faculty Democracy holds a “Teach In” Town Hall to promote discussion, no-one from the university administration attends.

28 November 2005: President Sexton announces a 5 December deadline, after which point striking TAs will have their funding cut for the remaining weeks of semester and the entire following semester, and strikers will be blacklisted for future teaching assignments. These punitive measures would be illegal were the graduate students still recognised as workers by the NLRB (which prevents the intimidation of striking workers as well as retaliation for past union participation).

30 November 2005: Graduate/Undergraduate Solidarity (GUS) Day of Action.

2 December 2005: Judith Butler launches an online petition in support of striking NYU graduate students.

4 December 2005: An eleventh-hour “third way” solution is proposed by members of the Graduate Affairs Committee of the Student Senators Council/UCSL and the Graduate Student Voice Subcommittee via university administered email channels. Hours later President Sexton and Provost McLaughlin accept the proposal and extend the 5 December deadline by two days.

5 December 2005: Original deadline.

7 December 2005: Deferred deadline. International students’ letter is delivered to President Sexton at 12pm.

28 February 2006: Over 60 GSOC members lobby the State Legislature in Albany.

April 2006: A petition in support of a second union contract gains the signatures of the majority of the bargaining unit.

27 April 2006: GSOC convention to call for negotiations. 57 people arrested in an act of peaceful civil disobedience.

Endnotes

[1]. I would like to thank Ann Pellegrini for her truly excellent class, “Getting Schooled: Performance and Pedagogy," in which I found the intellectual space to pursue these ideas, and for her comments on an early version of this paper. I would also like to thank Michael Palm and Chris Carter for their editorial input.

[2]. Jairo Moreno, Syllabus for “Expressive Culture: Sounds,” (NYU, Fall 2005), 1.

[3]. The term “musicking” is taken from Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1998).

[4]. http://www.nyu.edu/public.affairs/gata/faq.html

[5]. This quite clearly translates into a lower net income during the years in which students have more responsibilities and less time to devote to their studies. The impact of taxation can also have disproportionate consequences for international students, who are taxed at levels above those that apply to US citizens. Dependent on the conditions of international tax treaties, many international students, including myself, have tax withheld even during their fellowship years.

[6]. This paper makes no attempt to narrate the circumstances of GSOC’s campaign at NYU. With regard to the first contract, the history is well elaborated by Lisa Jessup, "The Campaign for Union Rights at NYU," in Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement, ed. Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 145-170; and Kitty Krupat and Laura Tanenbaum, "A Network for Campus Democracy: Reflections on NYU and the Academic Labour Movement," Social Text 20, no. 1 (2002): 27-50. In regards to the current circumstances, I have provided a timeline of significant events which may be of use to readers unfamiliar with the situation, see appendix.

[7]. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition.

[8]. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Flamingo, 1977), 162.

[9]. Roland Barthes, 149.

[10]. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 22.

[11]. John Sexton, “The Role of Faculty in the Common Enterprise University,” (Speech delivered as the Inaugural Canada Post Lecture, University of Ottawa, 9 September, 2003), 7; fulltext available at http://www.medias.uottawa.ca/salledesmedias/documents/030909Sextonfulltext.pdf. The same quote is include in President Sexton’s November, 2004 article, “The Common Enterprise University and the Teaching Mission,” available on the NYU website at http://www.nyu.edu/about/sexton-teachingmission04.html.

[12]. Krupat and Tanenbaum, "A Network for Campus Democracy," 28.

[13]. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

[14]. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, "Professors Going Pro: The Commercialization of Teaching, Research, and Service," in Campus, Inc. Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower, ed. Geoffrey D White and Flannery C Hauck (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 140-156.

[15]. Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

[16]. Karen Baar, "Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships at NYU," On the Square Spring, no. 1 (2006): 1.

[17]. Catharine R Stimpson, "Dean's Message," On the Square Spring, no. 1 (2006): 4.

[18]. Such patterns are traced in a variety of articles collected in Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003).

[19]. Keith Jenkins, "Introduction: Living in Time but Outside History; Living in Morality but Outside Ethics," in Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999), 1-33.

[20]. http://www.nyu.edu/cas/map/components/fcc.html.

[21]. Suzanne G Cusick, lecture notes for first lecture of MAP, “Expressive Culture: Sounds,” 2003.

[22]. In terms of right-wing politicians, I am thinking particularly of comments made by John Howard in his Australia Day Eve speech to the National Press Club, January 25, 2006, Canberra, Australia. The full text can be found online at www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech1754.html. Similar arguments are invoked in a much more positive sense by many of the contributors to Amitava Kumar, ed., Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere (New York: New York University, 1997).

[23]. A similar claim underlies Carol Stabile's article, "Pedagogues, Pedagogy, and Political Struggle," in Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, ed. Amitava Kumar (New York: New York University, 1997), 208-220.

[24]. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 188.

[25]. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

[26]. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977 [1954]), 3-35.

[27]. Metaphysics, Book IX.

[28]. Ronald Strickland, "Pedagogy and Public Accountability," in Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, ed. Amitava Kumar (New York: New York University, 1997), 163-178.

[29]. Reproduced from Kitty Krupat and Laura Tanenbaum, “A Network for Campus Democracy: Reflections on NYU and the Academic Labor Movement,” Social Text 70.2 (2002), 47-48.