Please forgive me for a "mass mailing."  But we need help to head

off a fiasco at NYU, and I am writing to inform you of the situation

and to ask you to take a few minutes to write to NYU's President John

Sexton. His contact information is at the end of this message.  I

would also appreciate if you could pass this along to your own

networks of academic and intellectual contacts, for the widest

circulation possible.

The Background:

Teaching assistants at NYU conducted a union drive in 1999-2000, won

an election, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers (in a local

that also includes other educational professionals in NYC such as

Museum of Modern Art and New York Historical Society employees). The

NYU administration fought hard against the union but was ultimately

forced to recognize and negotiate with it by the National Labor

Relations Board. There followed a 3 year contract that brought the

teaching assistants health benefits and a stipend increase. During

this time the university ran quite smoothly.  A large part of the

faculty supported the union, either during the initial drive or once

they recognized how efficacious it was in regularizing academic work.

In the summer of 2005, released from the obligation to negotiate by a

new Bush-appointed NLRB, the NYU administration derecognized the union

in a relatively unilateral move, and has been refusing to negotiate

with it. Given this extreme provocation, the union had virtually no

alternative but to strike.

The Current Situation:

GAs and TAs began striking on Nov. 9 and several hundred professors

have been teaching off-campus so as not to cross the picket line.

President John Sexton steadily refuses to deal with the union. At one

point several administrators infiltrated course websites (using the

program "Blackboard") so as to be able to determine which faculty and

teaching assistants were supporting the strike; this resulted in

widespread faculty outrage and the deans quickly withdrew from that

effort.

Now President Sexton has again thrown a bombshell: he has threatened

that any TAs who do not return to work by Dec. 5 will be deprived of

an entire semester's stipend and those who dare to return to a strike

in the next semester will lose an entire year's funding.

Such an action would be unprecedented. Graduate student employees have

struck at many other universities, including those in the Ivy League

and those just as anti-union as the NYU administration, but nowhere

have such draconian reprisals ever been taken. Moreover, to date,

American workers retain a right to strike. While employers may well

withhold wages during a strike, punishing strikers for a semester or a

year afterward is illegal. The basic disagreement between the students

and President Sexton is whether they are workers or not, and his point

of view must be reckoned with, but surely the action of assistants who

believe that they are workers cannot be criminalized because one

disagrees.

If this threatened punishment is allowed to happen it will set a

disastrous example for democratic debate at universities throughout

the country. It would also cause irreparable harm to the reputation of

NYU. We believe it will make it difficult for the university to

recruit and retain the best faculty and graduate students.  Moreover,

in addition to destroying morale amongst graduate students on campus,

the unilateral trampling of faculty and departmental decision-making

rights with regard to graduate student stipends and teach assignments

has further eroded any participatory notion of faculty governance and

departmental autonomy.

Hundreds of faculty have formed a group, Faculty Democracy, to protest

President Sexton's policy and to push for a cessation to dictatorial

and unilateral administration policy-making.

We request that scholars and intellectuals throughout the country urge

President Sexton to drop his threats and agree to negotiate with the

union, to cease his tactics of fear and intimidation towards graduate

students, and to move towards healing what is now a deeply riven

university community. He can be reached at 70 Washington Square, NY,

NY 10012 and by email at john.sexton@nyu.edu.

Please send a copy of your communication to rebecca.karl@nyu.edu.

Thank you,

Rebecca Karl

Associate Professor

East Asian Studies & History Departments

New York University