Bush Gone, NYU Scrambles to Escape Anticipated NLRB Ruling

[Omaha Steve]

A former DU regular lost his job at NYU over the Brown decision.

http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=1316

Bush Gone, NYU Scrambles to Escape Anticipated NLRB Ruling

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

During a break from writing a column or blogging, you imagine that you’re going to return with a magisterial survey of all the events that transpired while you were away. Instead, of course, you are just plunged right back into the fray. Thirty interviews recorded but not edited; a dozen interviews promised but not done. Not to mention book reviews, self-indulgent columns about your offspring, and the never-ending fountain of administrator outrages demanding immediate attention: cancelled sabbaticals, slashed pay for faculty serving contingently, prison labor on campus, and pleas for federal money to erect more monuments to administrator vanity. I’ll get to all of these promises and topics in time. (Thanks to the intrepid John Protevi for the prison labor tip: more on that ASAP.)

While I was on the road, I heard from NYU students and faculty about the administration’s plan to restructure graduate education in response to the appointments of Liebman and Solis, which most observers feel will trigger a reversal of the absurd Brown decision, to which Liebman provided a scathing dissent. (That was the ruling that the Bush mob unapologetically used to overturn the landmark, unanimous, and bipartisan GSOC-UAW ruling that forced NYU to the table.)

Now NYU claims that all of their thuggery and intimidation — you know, like firing Joel Westheimer — was all a misunderstanding. They want grad students to join a union — just not the union they chose and built for themselves, GSOC-UAW. Instead, the administration wants to force them into the union of faculty serving contingently, ACT-UAW which, ironically, formed as a result of GSOC.

In future, NYU graduate-school officials have recently informed the community, grad students will be admitted either with funding or without, but teaching will not be part of their funding package. All teaching will be officially optional — though still conventionally expected in most fields. Interestingly, the new teaching-optional mentality contradicts the central argument made by NYU’s attorneys before the NLRB, that grad students couldn’t simultaneously be Yankees fans workers, because teaching was a necessary part of their education.

What will this plan mean in practice? Some students will teach less than now, especially if they are well off or in fields where grant money is available. And some will teach about the same but at an awkward time in the arc of their studies, in the sixth year and beyond.

It also seems likely that some students will teach more than the current standard, and quite a bit more than the upper tiers of future students. Some units will apparently be admitting more unfunded students who will have to “choose” to teach their way through as contingent labor. It seems pretty clear that this strategy is aimed toward undermining GSOC-UAW’s support with at least some entering students, and at the NLRB, though it’s far from certain that the “what we said last year was full of crap” strategy is going to win with Liebman at the helm.

FULL story at link.