Looking at the history of student and working class movements around education is also important. The student movements in 1960s such as the Black Studies struggles and the Free Speech Movement at their best raised this central question of who should control education. At their height they also revealed the violence underlying the university in society as administrations collaborated with the FBI and state police forces to smash local protest that was a mirror of their support for segregation at home and imperialism abroad.

Rich lessons in working people’s attempts to get community control over education have to be studied. This would be an important step in overcoming the progressive vision of the university that motivated much of the soft support for the strike among faculty. This progressive vision of education is trapped by its desire to plan new benevolent policies for management and imagines that graduate student TAs are aspiring professionals above society. It does not contain within it a desire to collapse the division between mental and manual labor nor establish community not state and ruling class control of education.

Hard Lessons

Although the strike seemed widely supported by the faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where the majority of union members work, in reality such support was on paper only. The union’s undemocratic organization and refusal to fight the administration on the political level undermined the potential power of the strike to force the administration to recognize the union. The unwillingness to organize across sector and union to shut down the whole university in the name of related grievances and problems with a common origin assured that a largely symbolic and defensive action would result.

The problems and effects of the strike at NYU are far reaching and lasting. They also go well beyond NYU on three counts. They highlight the perpetual conflict between collective autonomous organization and the function of the union officials to harness labor to the needs of capitalism and the state.

The effects of the strike also illuminate the need to understand the function of the university as the ideological arm of the state, the elites and capitalism. This is certainly important not just for university employees and students, but also for workplace and community organizers in general. The university’s ideological vindication of the oppression of working people at home and abroad should not go unchallenged by employees or students.

Finally, the crisis at NYU is indicative of the crisis of the educational system as a whole in an era of social disinvestment and the looting of public infrastructure by the rich and politicians. Despite being a rich people’s school, NYU is also a perfect example of what is wrong with college education for several reasons. The ridiculous tuition fees are paid for at the cost of a low quality education and decaying services. Students pay more for less; something very few undergraduate students understood during the strike.

It is also an example of the division between types of colleges which are being effected very differently by the generalized attack on the education system. While the middle class and the elites are profiting from the economy they have no problem paying for rising tuition at places like NYU and certainly don’t rely on scholarships. Public colleges are facing the same tuition hikes and decline in quality coupled with an attack on scholarships that working class students rely on. This is something that working people are facing with the education system as whole.

A lack of union and political experience for the majority of TAs and the failure to organize independent rank-and-file power within, proved to be fatal for chances to correct the course of the strike. The NYU Graduate Teaching Assistant strike failed because of the fatal political conception and organization of the strike and the lack of experience and knowledge on the part of union members. The lack of thinking about the educational system and the history of organizing around it, such as campus and community based struggles for control, was also a key factor.

The fight for a union by TAs at NYU is not over. There is little doubt that management will move in the upcoming years to slash wages and benefits. When this happens we are likely to see a renewed push for the union. Hopefully, some of these important lessons on the need to build autonomous rank-and-file power to fight employers and a vision of education rooted in community control will prepare the ground for a more successful struggle.

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