We won't pay for NYU's crisis, but that won't stop them from trying to force us to.
Last week NYU finally confirmed to the graduate student body that it planned to implement its "FAR 4" restructuring this fall. FAR 4 purports to abolish, formally, the category of teaching assistant in favor of mass adjunctification of TA labor on a putatively voluntary basis. Theoretically NYU grad employees would now be able to join the adjuncts union, or so the deans claim - in fact they still have yet to discussFAR-4 with local 7902 (the adjuncts' union) and have offered only flimsy explanations for how grad employees would be able to meet the contact hour cutoffs for adjunct union membership.
That's the least of folks' worries, though. FAR-4 would, in the short term, free up some time and give folks in their first five years a small amount of extra cash. Maybe 8,000 bucks for two semesters of teaching, depending on what it is you're teaching and how much time you spend in the classroom. But there's a rigid five year funding cutoff replacing a somewhat more fluid, if nonetheless exploitative in itself current arrangement where full TA appointments are often still available to 6th and 7th year students in many departments. So few PhD students ever finish in five years - something that a modest decline in teaching "responsibilities" - and the email sent by the deans to department chairs and DGSes two weeks ago suggests that all current PhD students will be expected to fulfill all remaining "obligations," despite the fact that FAR 4 supposedly completely disambiguates teaching labor from the conditions of graduate employee "financial aid" (i.e. pay) - that FAR 4 will likely create a permanent corps of liminal, superexploited, "superannuated" grad employees teaching 3/2 loads for less money than i get paid to teach a 1/1. In the labor movement, we call that a speed-up. A pretty gross one at that. And it's a speed up which may only be available to non-intl students: despite vague administrative promises to "work around" f-1 Visa working hours/week and demonstrated level of support restrictions, the math just doesn't compute. If one teaching assistant gig is supposed to be twenty work hours per week, as we're all told during our teacher trainings, and twenty hours per week now pays about $4000 per semester, how do I demonstrate I have $20,000 dollars of support if I can't work more than 20 hours per week as a condition of my VISA and am not independently wealthy? Dude, it's like herrenvolk exploitation!
FAR 4 has been framed explicitly as an anti-union measure by the deans, a way to "finesse" an expected reversal of the National Labor Relations Board's 2004 Brown Decision, to preempt expected actions by the federal government to restore federal labor protections to graduate employees at private universities. Even if they aren't lying about the possibility of joining the adjunct union, NYU administrators know full well that FAR 4 would, by rendering much of our labor and compensation invisible under the sign of "financial aid," dramatically reduce and circumscribe what aspects of our work and compensation we would be able to negotiate. Health care, for instance, would be off-limits, still subject, as it has been for the four years since GSOC's last contract expired, to administrative whim and fiat. That's not an acceptable alternative to a GSOC contract, clearly. And one doubts that local 7902 is particularly jazzed about the creation of a subclass of pseudoadjuncts who can take bargaining unit work (though adjunct positions fromerly known as ta jobs will supposedly be reserved for graduate students) but won't be on equal footing with the rest of its membership in several important respects.
Oh, and then there's the fact that the whole thing appears to be a sham. Not only will we be doing the same work, but at least if administrative communiques to department chairs and dgses are to be believed, the very disambiguation between teaching labor and graduate employee "funding" is nonexistent. Everyone admitted to the graduate school prior to the spring of 2009 is still "obligated" to teach as a condition of our funding. So what FAR 4 means for us is a continued attack on our union rights, a speed up both of our labor and of our time to degree with no relaxing of either requirements.
Merry crisis, indeed.
(This is but a sample of FAR 4's implications. Others of note include the reliance on the "moral authority" of the faculty to compel grad employees to teach after/if ever the disambiguation actually takes place i.e., the hypermanagerialization of the faculty/grad employee relationship, and much more!)
Folks I've talked to over the last three months (since this plan was initially made public - sorry for not blogging, by the way) have been both highly skeptical of the administration's claims that FAR 4 will allow us to teach less but also initially pessimistic and defeated. Thankfully, the more we learn about what this plan is and what it does, the more people seem amped up to fight it. It's going to be an interesting year. But hey, if you wanna be starting something, you got to be starting something.
(give me points for not slipping in "they don't care about us" or "scream," both of which are relevant, or babbling about Manu Dibango, except in praeteritio. As always, only I am culpable for the above blog entry and its many failings, hypertext links to michael jackson videos, and the opinions expressed and claims made within.)
