Parsin Parsons

Updates to the Parsons situation at The Notion and at Runnin Scared. Updates, but no real news. We still don't know, beyond taking New York mag at its word, how many adjuncts were non-tendered, because we don't have names. Or, we have one: Dale Emmart, a 22-year veteran. Who are the other eleven?

If Parsons makes good on its assertion that half of the newly-displaced profs will be tendered offers in other departments, then we're dealing with six fired teachers. If it is true that Parsons' bottom line is OK -- and that seems unlikely, given the New School's run of acquisitions and infrastructure improvements this decade -- then to fire people just because there's a recession going on is not ethically sound. Businesses across the board are taking advantage of the recession to take cost-cutting measures that would otherwise be unpalatable. It's bullshit; it's also happening on a massive scale in government, non-profits, and the private sector.

This makes the logic of protest difficult to grasp. Adjuncts are fired for any number of reasons. This is the nature of adjunct employment, union or no union. Parsons' only mistake seems to be sending out a form letter that implies that the recipient is one of many; that there was a mass firing. Their current PR gambit is exactly this, and it might be a winner: Firings are just another day in the life of adjunct professors, and to protest them is like protesting rain.

So, this is a protest with a material end-point -- unlike the student occupation -- only it's possible that it lacks a prime mover. It is a protest against everyday conditions, not against extraordinary abuses. Violation is here understood to be intrinsic to adjunct employment.

This is difficult for me to parse. Is this a protest built on survivor's guilt? Is this not that big a deal for the people who got canned? I've been non-tendered before. It was okay; I had other plans. Not good plans or anything. No money in those plans...so inform me Parsonsites! I need information...

New New School Brou-Ha-Ha

Never thought I would root for "occupiers," but this New School crew changed all that. A protest at Parsons W. 12th St entrance is scheduled for more or less right now, in solidarity with the dismissed Parsons adjuncts.

You'll remember that I asked more than a week ago "Where are the Parsons adjuncts?" Presumably here. What I meant, in sum, was that it's not enough to agitate for the dismissal of people you simply don't like very much, a la the "occupation" against Bob Kerrey. A protest with a material end, I'm postulating, has a better chance at success.

And the Parsons press release seems to prove it, chalking up the pink slips to failed communication, in the manner of: We didn't fire more than a dozen adjuncts, it was six, and we offered them teaching posts in other areas. Already the institution is running damage control, rather than just calling the NYPD.

It still amazes me how little real information has come out about the Parsons firings. Has anyone been non-tendered for next year? Really and officially? Who and how many? One-third of faculty? One-half? 20? Six? What does teaching another area mean? What saith ye, Parsons Pink Slips?

Also, how come Lawrence Hegarty and Peter Drake are the only two dudes willing to be photographed for the cause? Viz.,this in the NYT and this on the Parsons blog:
Has the university -- to concoct an example, since none exists -- offered printmakers jobs in 3-D digital rendering or suchlike, knowing full-well that the current crop of printmakers lacks that skillset, and that shifting a current instructor's area is tantamount to reopening the position to outside applicants, i.e. firing?

Finally, as an example to us all, Columbia faculty are meeting to support academic freedom in Palestine; this is a protest without fashionable accessories, built to redress tangible grievances, namely, Israel will not let Palestinian academics attend conferences in their fields. A simple thing like the right to a comp'ed lunch calls into question borders, sovereignty, rights of movement and return, usw, all the giant problems in miniature...
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Leaders of the New School Count the Receipts

Reading about the occupation of a disused building at the New School by a group demanding the resignation of the president and some trustees, some questions about politics and representation:

After the protest, why is the most interesting dispute about the authenticity and meaning of the video of NYPD "spraying" inside the building? Nearly everyone in the building was dressed to get maced. Say the protest ended without any pepper spray or tear gas fired in anger; scarves, keffiyehs etc. become fashion accessories rather than real-world precautions. With spray, we can continue discussions about the relationship of free speech to security, civil liberties and civil rights within the University usw. Without spray, there's less to talk about.

Doesn't this defer the meaning of the protest onto its means? Clearly, this is not a direct form of communication, as in "Meet our demands, or we will not leave." The occupation didn't last long enough to have been conducted on those terms. It appears, rather, to be an attempt to bait the University and the police into committing violence, thereby delegitimizing their power, and broadening the base for future protests.

Even the original meaning of the protests (the first in December) is hazily concocted. Kerrey and James Murtha are, respectively, a proponent of the Iraq War and a man related to a war profiteer. This is the least charitable view. Probably, by temperament, they should not be running the New School. Is this like Paul Wolfowitz running Oberlin? No, not really. But I understand and share the desire to punish absolutely everyone who thought it might be a good idea to chase down Saddam Hussein. Fair or not. The University is a place where the unsettled debts of history come to roost. If you don't like it, you can walk right back into the corporate world.

So pushing these men out for one political choice I see as legitimate. Why then combine the issue with some vague allegations of academic malfeasance? Is Kerrey failing to "safeguard the values" of the New School just by being square? Hasn't the New School been on a corporate tear in the past decade, expanding into business and fashion, veering from its foundation in pure soft sciences? Isn't Kerrey the culmination of a long-running corporatization of the school? So where was senior faculty outrage ten or fifteen years ago? Too busy getting tenure to get arrested?

Why occupy an unused building? In what way does that disrupt the functioning of the School? What happened to shutting down classes? Where are the Parsons adjuncts? (Forget Bob Kerrey's job, let's compromise: Kerrey gets to keep his job as long as Parsons adjuncts get to keep theirs.) Why does the iconic photo in the Times show a banner that says "Occupy," in a classy font, with a demure black star? Why do photos of the actors look like an Urban Outfitters spread? The more we look at the images of the April protest, the more purely performative it appears.

Back to fashion: More frequently mentioned than his Iraq stance or his assumption of the Provost position is Kerrey's pure "incompatibility" with the New School's "radical character". As if to prove this character, students wave the red-and-black flag and demand the president's ouster. Of course, it's the radicalism of the School that drives enrollment. Showy, cop-baiting demonstrations serve to ratify the thing they profess to vilify: counting the day's receipts.
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