Dear President Sexton: About the Strike
By Jesse Lemisch
Mr. Lemisch is Professor of History Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.
“NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S PRESIDENT warned striking teaching assistants on Monday that those who fail to return to the classroom by December 5 will lose their teaching assignments — and stipends — for the spring semester.”–Chronicle of Higher Education 11-29-95
To: John Sexton, President, New York University [mailto:john.sexton@nyu.edu]
From: Jesse Lemisch, Professor Emeritus of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY [utopia1@attglobal.net]
A word about the GSOC [Graduate Student Organizing Committee] strike, historians, and how NYU looks to the larger world:
It’s simply grotesque that a university that seeks to show an advanced and somewhat liberal face to the world should use the retrograde action of Bush’s NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] as a basis for an attack on the existence of GSOC. I said to one member of your faculty that your recent email to striking graduate student employees (below) suggested to me that NYU was following a repressive strategy earlier developed by Columbia and its provost, Alan Brinkley (see my History News Network article, “Alan Brinkley: Liberalism in Collapse?”). Your colleague responded that NYU has less in common with the Ivy League than with Wal-Mart. The spreading perception of this shameful behavior is bound to have implications for NYU’s faculty and graduate student recruitment and for its general standing in and beyond academe.
I have enjoyed immensely my contacts with GESO at Yale, GSEU at Columbia, and GSOC. I don’t have the figures at hand, but it’s certainly my impression that history graduate students play a disproportionate role in these unions. I know these people and their work. Let me tell you, President Sexton, these are our very best young people. They are among the most serious and dedicated scholars and teachers I have known in a career that has included Yale, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, SUNY/Buffalo, and CUNY. They have seamlessly welded together a moving and admirable quest for social justice with deep, serious and original scholarship.
It’s also germane to mention that the University of Chicago Alumni Association has, in frustration and regret, labeled the classes of 1964-74 the “Lost Classes.” These alums are embittered and alienated from their alma mater now — thirty to forty years later — because of unprincipled repressive acts committed by the U of C in those days, including political firings and mass expulsions, closely related to what you are now threatening.
Together with others, I will do everything I can within and beyond my discipline to bring attention to your unacceptable behavior — in the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the CUNY faculty, and every outlet for publication that I have. A large audience will be watching you closely.
Jesse Lemisch
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