uni-vers-ity

After 8 years of an outdated contract

4 years of absolutely no raise

7 months of negotiating

25 days of striking

3 days in counting of student occupation - 9 by the time this is published,

Part Time faculty at The New School finally won the best contract they have ever received.

And though that may have been the objective, something else entirely was the reward.

Students put their tuition on the line.

Teachers risked their paycheck.

Students paused their work, seemingly jeopardizing their grades.

Teachers were threatened with replacements.

Students and teachers made a Strike School.

Everyone put their body directly or indirectly on the picket line.

Students continue to create a university outside the institution.

Inanimate buildings are now spaces of emotional architecture on the corner of 13th St and 5th ave. These aren’t concrete sidewalks but a stomping ground for solidarity. If you look closely you will find small bright orange flakes, Home Depot buckets cracked and beaten from drumsticks to every chant from four consecutive weeks.  I call this kind of activism, street ministry.

So-li-darity forever

So-li-darity forever

So-li-darity forever

Cuz the union makes us strong

Sitting in Joes cafe, I see invisible UAW blue and white signs hung around people’s coats next to the coffee stands.  When I pass the Taco place, it’s no longer the Taco place. It’s when a group of us, who never knew each other before the picket-line, squeeze into a booth to zoom in on our membership meeting from an iPhone placed in a cardboard container that once held tortilla chips. Barely warmer than before, our belly laughs transform our torso into a thermos, as we discuss the HBO special “White Lotus” with as much conviction as our impending compensation.  Trivial sits next to survival.  The purest ecstasy is at the precipice of struggle and solidarity touched by humor.

Then comes the New School Student Occupation Town Hall. Hundreds physically and virtually in a circle. One person stands while speaking. We who listen sit.  In response to a thought people lift and shake their hands signifying agreement, excitement, a physical “Yes”. Someone reads aloud community guidelines, discussed as a group in previous circles; one line at a time. We repeat in unison, one line at a time. When sentences feel long, we chuckle. Someone records in a language we know and understand. The thoughts being shared are about revolution, liberation, legacy, care. Think cave paintings. Koran. Bible.

While watching and listening, a position different than leading, something for me crystalizes.  It feels as though I am witnessing a rite of passage.  An iteration of the most basic ancestral need. It isn’t food or shelter. It’s the ingredient Maslow forgot to mention in his proposed hierarchy of needs. The foundation below the physiological baseline - the ingredient that makes food and shelter actualize - is what these students are orchestrating in front of me. It’s what the first humans did. It’s self-organizing, collectively, towards self-actualization. It’s creating the possibility of unity in this great big vast universe. It’s creating university.

I see myself ten years prior, sitting on the Lang Cafe floor organizing in a circle around food justice in preparation for interviewing leadership from Chartwells and Aramark, dining service purveyors, about employee conditions and environmental impact. I see my mentor sitting around a table co-creating a class called “Sustainable Systems”, not knowing I would one day teach it. A kaleidoscope of previous activists channel the light on this moment.

In the University Center (UC), I see a table for medical supplies, food stacked high with the appropriate sign, the Gathering Resources team reports back in the daily general assembly while using a bright pink megaphone.  Articulate demands are drafted and read aloud after hours of consensus. Innovative demands like Pay Ratio whereby leadership’s raise is in relation to the entire working body’s raise. After, beautiful flowers appear in a silver troff with an announcement of a class on flower arrangements led by a student who works at a flower shop and brings back the soon to be thrown out stock.  Another student hosts an Anti-Alienation class.

School is. Even in the absence of it.

Today’s self-organizing is paired with the latest iPhones, Instagram stories, trends in fashion and nuance to language our predecessors may not have acquired, but the message is as old as we are. This conversation around building ethical community could be happening in Rift Valley Kenya 200,000 years ago, but in this 21st century moment, with this specific group of collective growing humans, it’s in a building called the University Center in the middle of Manahatta.  By students who call themselves occupiers.

Some place in the universe, we made a center.  And isn’t that what we’ve always done?

If the experiment of life itself is the process of unifying parts to make a whole, then I think democracy is a work in progress with moments of wholeness. Like the time another faculty member and I spontaneously got foot massages on Houston St after a full day of marching in the freezing cold.  No one is alone. Having something to fight for focuses the capacity and creativity of our human love, otherwise we will fight ourselves and each other.

My student who’s been on the picket every day and occupying the UC, says it like this, “it’s really hard, we sit for hours, once until 6 in the morning to try and reach consensus among the difference of opinion.” Their experience is ours. Someone takes the side chat too far, someone who oversteps is asked to sit down, someone is afraid to speak up. Democracy asks us to hold multiple truths at the same time and move forward for the common good. It’s perhaps the most difficult and gratifying task.

Someone stands up to speak in the circle. Their outfit is a mix match of baggy patterns. Tears parallel their dangly furry cat hat. I’m reminded of the difference in generation by aesthetic only. The sentiment is mine as much as it is theirs. Cries of I don’t want to loose this community we built over the past 4 weeks. Even though our initial mission was meant, I’m not leaving, occupy forever. I lift and shake my hands in agreement because I too don’t want this feeling to end. The irreplaceable experience of democratic joy. The body’s urge to occupy a greater cause in the moment is potentially greater than our need for shelter.

My student sits in front of me as the teacher and names the essence of it all.  “Some of these demands are going to take time, we know that, but I think ultimately what we’re trying to do here” she humbly shrugs her shoulders, “..is…create a sustainable system.”  The circle is complete. A reciprocal relationship between teacher and student is one of spiritual proclivity - bending communities, shifting systems, and continuing our human legacy of a better way. That’s the reward. And it is priceless.

Photo: New School Student Occupation Town Hall, Dec 11, 2022