M a r k D i l l e y

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.