For example, before the NYU adjuncts recently won union recognition, university management was cutting graduate teaching assistant positions and giving them to adjuncts and graduate students from other schools. NYU also tried to hire graduate students from Columbia (who themselves have been attempting to unionize), further allowing them to cut jobs of TA union members. When local 2110 filed a grievance over this maneuver, management endlessly cited it as a violation of the contract in their anti-TA propaganda. Typical of union contracts, it stated that the organization of “academic affairs’—including teaching assignments—was the sole prerogative of management. The union was seemingly an obstacle to such aims.

Wages combined with benefits for TAs went up 40% with the winning of the union. This altered the life of many graduate teaching assistants significantly, especially in New York City where massive inflationary pressures are benefiting rich people and hurting working people. It cut down on the number of jobs they had to work, allowing them more time to focus on their academic requirements they are under pressure to complete to remain in school—the purpose of which university management and faculty are supposedly committed to. This had a ripple effect on other competing universities similar to NYU and stipends, wages and benefits climbed.

In the end university management spent millions of dollars on lawyers and public relations propaganda—disseminated by hijacking the university email system—to attack the union. Unable to rely on unionized NYU security guards to harass striking members—most of whom were sympathetic to the TA struggle—they hired private thugs, led by the chief goon of NYU security, to spy on and harass union members. This money will easily be recuperated in the coming years when TA wages and benefits are slashed.

Anti-TA propaganda by the administration focused on four main points. First it was claimed that TAs were in fact paid in excess of fifty thousand dollars when the tuition waiver was factored in. At most large colleges, many graduate students, especially in the non-professional schools like law, medicine or business, do not have to pay tuition. However, the tuition waiver serves two functions in the political economy of the university.

It keeps full-time faculty employed by filling their seminars. But more importantly it ensures that there is a steady pool of TA and future adjunct surplus labor to actually staff the vast majority of undergraduate classes. It costs relatively little to have graduate students enrolled in department programs, compared to the hundreds of millions in undergraduate tuition dollars their labor produces.

Many graduate students will eventually drop out or will continue to bolster the adjunct labor supply in the future. It is in the management’s interest to attract graduate students with the promise of tuition wavers to keep this cheap labor pool available. Relative to undergraduate students, graduate students take very little from the university economy, but along with adjuncts and other employees provide the backbone of these cash cows. This surplus labor—along with other employees—produces the billions in NYU investments and local realty ventures that have skyrocketed. NYU is a major slumlord in the Village and the Lower East Side as well as a real estate anchor for the de-industrialized urban yuppie new economy.

The second point of anti-teaching assistant propaganda was that university management claimed that it had student interests in mind in its efforts to bust the union. Not only did the union supposedly undermine the idea of the illusory mentoring relationship between faculty and graduate students, but also TAs and undergraduate students. They claimed the strike proved that union members were ignoring the interests of undergraduates and the importance of education in general.

They stated that they were more committed to the ideals of education that the strike was interfering with. Management also argued that a union was no longer needed, given that they had learned their lesson about the importance of higher wages and benefits for graduate student teachers. This was a political attack on TAs in which the administration claimed to represent the interests of students and education as a whole.

The third plank of administration propaganda was that the union interfered, under the terms of the contract, with “academic decision-making” by filing a grievance to stop the elimination of TA positions. As stated before this was a strategic move to provoke the conditions by which management could justify its smashing of the union. However, there is an important political issue here that the union leadership, given its narrow economism and loyalty to the legal framework of capital and labor relations, could not win.

Management’s claim that “academic decision-making” was interfered with was, as stated before, based on the claim to represent the social mission of education as a whole. The power to undercut union membership by eliminating or moving TA positions directly raised the question of who will control education in whose interests. This question simply cannot be tackled along the lines of narrow trade union demands.

Union members had to confront this question politically because it was the whole basis of management’s claim to legitimately smash the union. It was important to define this issue by addressing the function of the contract and labor law as a tool of management and the state as part of a TA political program to frame the strike. Even for the reformist defense of the contract, it was important to define this issue as a question of student and community control of education.

The fourth point of management propaganda was that TAs selfishly went on strike only in their own interests. The grievances of all sectors of the university among faculty, staff, TAs, adjuncts, and students are immense. They include the increasing power of the management over faculty matters, the cutting of funding to select departments, especially in the humanities and least politically powerful programs. These grievances also include lack of student housing and overcrowded facilities coupled with continued tuition hikes. Clerical workers face patronizing management rules where they must get permission from their boss in order to apply for jobs elsewhere in the university.

Many in these sectors rooted for the TA strike as a blow against management for their own grievances. However, once again the narrow trade union demands made by leadership would not allow a political vision or strategy that sought out united fronts with these other sectors beyond just rhetoric. The strike could not have been won without an attempt to organize a front of common grievances rooted in a political vision of the university, based in direct action utilizing the idea of the general strike that incorporated all sectors.

It is important to point out that the administration was bolstered in its efforts by the fact that NYU has a largely middle and upper middle class student base. There is also a conservative—some say corporate—institutional culture at NYU. NYU actively promotes an apolitical campus and architecturally avoids building large student areas common to most campuses. Student access to rooms and areas to advertise and carry-out events of their own is almost non-existent and otherwise tightly policed.

NYU has the feel of a corporate headquarters rather than what management claims is the ideal of the university. The constant attack on student expression is highlighted by how the university eagerly provides and relentlessly promotes forums for elite politicians, state and foreign officials, and the Washington intellectual establishment, giving a platform to a host of imperialist, racist and anti-working people ideas.

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