NYU State of the TA Unions NEW VIDEO Read more R U in it?

[Omaha Steve]

Full story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/14/unions

Read more are you in the video?

State of the TA Unions

The video had the same amateur quality as those that circulate on YouTube and other Internet sites. Set to the lyrics of “We’re Not Going to Take It,” a handheld camera followed friends of the graduate student unionization movement to a New York University alumni fund-raising event this past year that featured the unions’ public enemy of the moment, NYU President John Sexton.

he party crashers did their best to disrupt the function, and the roughly 100 labor organizers from around the country who watched the screening on Friday — some of whom appeared in the footage — cheered the effort. If that wasn’t enough to stir the audience at the start of the 15th annual Coalition of Graduate Employees Union conference, in Philadelphia, former Yale University graduate student Carlos Aramayo’s challenge to his “brothers and sisters” set the tone.

“University administrators are trying to put together a national message, and we haven’t been good enough in pushing our movement,” said Aramayo, a representative from Graduate Employees and Student Organization at Yale.

The administrators’ agenda, according to speakers: increased centralization of power, and a more corporate model for graduate education.

The administrators’ document of choice, speakers said, is a report released last fall by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation that speakers say decried the lack of strong leadership from deans at graduate schools and called for a more “cosmopolitan” approach to the Ph.D, that focuses on students’ marketability. Aramayo said he does not want to see students pushed through their programs under a tight watch.