I like the result of the NYU graduate student unionization election (I would like to say, "obviously," but as too many profs use the "in principle I like unions, but ..." line when it comes to grad student organizing I guess I can't). But I don't think the subhead of this column ("An important victory over the corporatization of the university"*) is right. Unionizing isn't a victory over the corporatization of the university, it's a recognition that admins using corporatized universties for rent-extraction** is the reality of the university***; hence, unionization is a means of fighting fire with fire.
* I know that authors don't compose subheads or "deks" (thanks to Sean Carroll below in comments for correcting me on previously using "lede"); I'm objecting to the frame this one gives the column.
** This NYT story about sweetheart financing for summer homes for NYU "stars" deserves wide circulation.
*** The connection of the university and the corporation is not so simple ...
Despite its contemporary relevance, the corporation is in fact a very old institution, dating to at least the early 13th century; many people are surprised to hear that the original term of art in Roman, medieval, and Renaissance law for “corporation” was universitas and that today’s legal theories of corporate personhood derive from the foundation of what we now recognize as the University of Paris....
An enabling premise of The Society for the Arts of Corporation is that we suffer today from a corporate monoculture: that the historical diversity of the corporation — its structures, purposes, and systems of value — are insufficiently represented by the joint-stock, for-profit corporate form. Corporateness is never only commercial, nor is it ever entirely “legal,” in the sense that the beliefs, principles, activities, and phenomena that define a corporate entity or association can never be entirely captured by technical legal instruments (contracts, charters): in short, the law is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for corporateness.
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