Thousands of Workers Exploited as Greedy Universities Grab Petrodollars to Globalize and Corporatize

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/thousands-workers-exploited-greedy-universities-grab-petrodollars-globalize-and-corporatize



The Invisible Hand Grabs the Ivory Tower

Under Sexton’s tenure, NYU has come to look more like a mulinational corporation than an institution of learning. Its board of trustees is stuffed with such capitalist posterboys as GOP megadoner Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot and one of the most virulently anti-worker corporateers in America, along a slew of Wall Street tycoons.

When the shit hit the fan with the worker abuse story, the NYU board quickly went into PR damage control mode and tried to push blame onto a contractor. But the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin quickly exposed that strategy for exactly what it is: baloney. Following the money trail, Sorkin revealed that the contractor in question is run by none other than NYU trustee Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, who happens to be the chief executive of the Mubadala Development Company and the guy who helped get NYU $50 million from Abu Dhabi’s government as a starter “gift” for the campus cloning project.

In a country where labor conditions are little better than slavery and objection will earn you a knuckle sandwich, Sexton should have seen this coming. And he did: In 2009, NYU issued a perfectly reasonable “ statement of labor values” to guarantee that workers would be treated fairly on the NYUAD project. Which, in the absence of an independent monitor, was worth about as much as the paper it was written on.

It didn’t have to be that way. NYU professor Andrew Ross, who serves as president of the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), explained to AlterNet that American universities need to either ensure basic standards of decency and fairness or stop trying to cash in by replicating their “product” in authoritarian countries:

“The labor code violations at NYUAD could have been prevented if the administration had heeded faculty and student advice to hire a truly independent monitor. Other universities can learn from this. They should protect the rights of non-instructional employees as strongly as they insist on the academic freedoms of faculty and students. If neither can be guaranteed, they should not operate in the country in question.”

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1. Obviously we need to not rate them and

fund them more through the government.