When I enrolled in the PhD Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center to study Composition and Rhetoric, I was idealistic about the future of the discipline and my own place in it. I believed that Comp and Rhetoric was asking crucial questions that were central to the mission of higher education in America. I still believe that. But, after working in the field in a number of full-time and part-time positions over several years, my idealism has turned to despair at what I now regard as Composition’s great shame.

As anyone who teaches college writing is probably aware, the majority of such courses are taught by contingent faculty, including adjuncts and graduate students. These workers usually receive low wages and few benefits. (Some long-term CUNY adjuncts receive health care, but even this small benefit periodically comes under attack.) This is not just a local problem. Recent data shows that adjuncts now earn a national average of just $2,758 per course, which means teaching eight to ten courses per year results in a salary of $22,064 and $27,500. These are poverty and near-poverty wages. More recently, Josh Boldt, who compiles data on the pay rates and overall treatment of adjunct faculty on his Adjunct Project blog, has confirmed what we already know: many adjuncts are not unionized, have no access to benefits, and are rarely told in advance if they will have classes to teach from one semester to the next.

These facts were made concrete to me shortly after I defended my dissertation. In the midst of my own happiness and relief at finally coming to the end of my long graduate school journey, I overheard a Composition teacher on the telephone in the adjunct office of a CUNY college. He was trying to get Medicaid benefits. I could not get the juxtaposition of these two events out of my mind. I’m sure this teacher never expected to find himself in that position as a college writing teacher.

I had indeed graduated, but into what future?

This was not the first time I had considered the cruelty and injustice of the academy’s tiered labor system. During my years as a graduate student, however, I had successfully sidestepped those realities because there were so many wonderful things going on in the field. Being part of wonderful things makes certain indignities bearable. I have been particularly lucky to be affiliated with the CCRC (CUNY Composition and Rhetoric Community), a group of dedicated scholars and teachers from across New York City, including many of my (former) fellow students at the Graduate Center. I still marvel at the good fortune I had to engage in many thrilling conversations about literacy acquisition, writing pedagogy, and the politics of education with these brilliant people.

The joy and sense of purpose that I derived from Composition Studies blinded me to its dark side for a time. Today, when I consider the widespread oppression of teachers of writing, I struggle to see how anything else ever mattered as much.

Disappearing Jobs

The specter of adjuncts on Medicaid haunted me in the months after my defense because I graduated during one of the worst job markets in several years. Though hiring statistics had been trending from bad to awful for decades, the 2008 MLA Staffing Report documented the accumulative carnage: more than two-thirds of all teachers in the Humanities are part-timers, teaching assistants, or other contingent faculty.

I had a solid background in Composition and Rhetoric, so there were some full-time jobs available for which I was qualified. But I noticed another troubling trend. A number of advertised positions included a substantial administrative component. Apparently, I was more likely to get a job if I was interested in supervising the low-paid, marginalized labor of others. I could be what James Sledd called a “boss compositionist” and what Joseph Harris identified as “the faculty member assigned to supervise the [Comp] droids.” Would any of the part-time teachers or tutors under my charge be eligible for Medicaid? The thought terrified me.

I do not denigrate the efforts of WPAs or other administrators. I know this is difficult and often thankless work that is unfairly rewarded because I have done it myself. The people in these positions are not the problem. The problem is that adjunct labor in any form is not professional development; it’s not something everyone does for a while until they get a real job. This goes for graduate student TAs as well. The false notion that graduate school is a professional apprenticeship obscures the reality that student-teachers, like their adjunct colleagues, earn far less for teaching the same courses as their full-time counterparts. Contingency in the academy is never an apprenticeship. It is labor exploitation, plain and simple.

Knowing this, how was I to manage my own entry into full-time employment? How could I square my political commitments and my despair over the exploitation of teachers with my intellectual work and my own desire and need for a full-time job in a field I loved?

Where Can We Find Hope?

I was in the midst of trying to answer these questions when, in April 2011, I attended a talk by two veteran scholars, John Trimbur and John Brereton, at John Jay College. I was thrilled to hear them speak. Again, I felt extremely fortunate to be a member of the CCRC, which had sponsored the event. Is there a Composition and Rhetoric group in the country that gives its students and teachers more access to luminaries in the field? I seriously doubt it.

But this essay is not about speeches by eminent scholars. Honestly, I can’t remember a single thing Trimbur and Brereton said during their official presentations. Rather, this essay is about how I left that event with the distinct and discomfiting feeling that the field had split into two parts: the minority elite who do the work of research and theorizing and the part-timers who do the teaching.

During the Q and A portion of the Trimbur/Brereton event, a student from the Graduate Center’s Compositon and Rhetoric PhD program stepped to the mic and asked a question that seemed to chill the room. “The job market is terrible right now,” she said. “What advice do you have for us? Where can we find hope?” This was a very relevant, even poignant, question. It immediately seemed to me that the subject of these scholars’ presentations ceased to matter very much compared to this student’s query. I too was very eager to hear some words of wisdom.

To my dismay, Brereton responded by advising the student to stick with her program undaunted. “If you have a Composition and Rhetoric doctorate,” he told her, “you will find a job.” Some in the audience murmured in disagreement. As for me, I was shocked at the complete ignorance of Brereton’s response. It’s not that I expected him to tell this student to choose another profession. Nor did I expect him to express the unmitigated job-market gloom that many graduate students and new PhDs know all too well. I expected, simply, the truth. Even a sugarcoated version of the truth would have been preferable to (let me just say it) an outright lie about rosy job prospects for Humanities graduates in any field.

Was Brereton truly unaware of the labor crisis in the Humanities in general and in Composition in particular? Was this prominent scholar, who had authored what is perhaps the essential history of the origin of Composition Studies, really so blatantly uninformed on the subject of who teaches Composition in American colleges these days? After all, the MLA had declared a job market crisis back in 1998, which is plenty of time for the news to trickle up to those who occupy even the loftiest towers of the academy. The shadow of contingency is everywhere. The AAUP reported in 2006 that the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty positions fell from 56.8 percent to 35.1 percent in three decades. (Of course, Brereton probably assumed this crisis was not relevant to Composition and Rhetoric PhDs, an issue that I address below.)

More disturbing than Brereton’s weak grasp of the facts was Trimbur’s unwillingness to correct his colleague, assuming he knew that a correction was required. It seemed to me that Trimbur was annoyed to have to respond to a job-market question at all. Such queries were a distraction from the erudite subject matter he had come prepared to discuss, I suppose. Is this the same scholar, I wondered, who has used Marxist conceptual models to theorize the circulation of writing? When the session predictably unraveled into incredulous rebuttals by those in the room who had some passing familiarity with the Humanities job market, Trimbur was silent.

I too was speechless.

The lack of good, full-time jobs for PhDs of any stripe, especially English graduates, is not a secret. I cannot believe that Trimbur and Brereton are unfamiliar with Composition scholars like Eileen Schell whose book on the dire conditions endured by contingent faculty, those “mother-teachers,” is more than a decade old now. Nor can I fathom that Trimbur and Brereton have gone about their careers blissfully unaware of award-winning writers like Susan Miller, who famously called adjuncts “the sad women in the basement.” Have Brereton and Trimbur visited their colleges’ proverbial basements lately?

Perhaps, I told myself, feminist critiques of Composition are not on Brereton’s or Trimbur’s radar. Everyone can’t read everything, I guess. But should I accept that these scholars, who have been prominent members of the profession for decades, are unfamiliar with Richard Miller’s assessment from 1999? “Nothing can conceal the fact,” he wrote, “that at large universities most writing instruction is regularly entrusted to those without PhDs – full-timers, part-timers, advanced graduate students, and newly minted teaching assistants who have just completed their bachelor’s degrees.” That’s a pretty clear statement. It may be reasonable to assume that Trimbur and Brereton are less interested in the programmatic details of academic hiring because they are focused on disciplinary theory and history, as is generally the preference of renowned scholars. Does that mean that neither had heard anything like James Sledd’s statement from almost thirty years ago that “there can be no revolution in the teaching of writing until the exploitation of teachers is ended”?

Perhaps the problem is not a lack of awareness. Maybe Trimbur and Brereton are familiar with the mountain of research documenting and lamenting our field’s growing reliance on contingent labor, but they just don’t see what all the fuss is about. Maybe they think a “revolution” in the teaching of writing is not necessary at all. Or perhaps they are revolutionary minded, but they believe improving the teaching of writing on a mass scale can be achieved under current conditions? (This is a proposition, by the way, which was soundly rejected as far back as 1912 when Edward Hopkins asked the question “Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done Under Present Conditions?” in the English Journal. The answer, even then, was “no.”) What other factors might explain Brereton’s misinformed and misleading statement and Trimbur’s perturbed silence?

The Immunity of Composition

There is another explanation for these scholars’ response to the PhD student’s question. Perhaps Trimbur and Brereton believe that Composition and Rhetoric graduates have a magical immunity to the general tragedy that unfolds at the MLA conference every winter when hundreds of new and not-so-new graduates, many with sterling resumes and shiny new suits (quite possibly purchased on credit), compete for a decreasing number of full-time positions. Sure, Brereton and Trimbur might be thinking, those who made the grand error of earning a PhD in Literature are in a bad spot, but Composition and Rhetoric folks will be okay.

I reject the notion of Composition’s exceptional status because the literature on academic contingency does not support it. In fact, a special issue of College English devoted to labor in English Studies, of which our field is a part, was published the month before the event at John Jay College, which is certainly enough time for Brereton and Trimbur to have glanced at the opening pages, if they were so inclined. The issue highlights shocking statistics that should embarrass us all. “[A]lmost three-quarters of all faculty members in higher education are now working in part-time, non-tenure-line appointments,” write Mike Palmquist and Susan Doe. This shameful state of affairs is where we find ourselves twenty-five years after the Wyoming Conference Resolution, one of the most valiant (but failed) efforts by professors to address the growing adjunctification of Composition.

The Wyoming Resolution may have failed to produce change, but it certainly alerted everyone who was paying attention to the growing problem of contingent employment in the field. “[F]aculty teaching courses in composition have been affected most by this growing reliance on contingent faculty,” Palmquist and Doe continue. “Nearly 70 percent of all composition courses . . . are now taught by faculty in contingent positions.” There is no silver lining for our field in these numbers. In fact, it is clear that the reproduction of this horrid system, not teaching or theorizing, is now the central work of our discipline. Perhaps Composition PhDs were better positioned once, but this is not an argument that can be made today with any credibility. It is patently ridiculous to assert that our field’s dependence on vast armies of part-time teachers does not affect the number and quality of full-time job openings. It’s time to put the myth of Composition’s exceptional status within English Studies to rest, once and for all.

Is CUNY An Exception?

Perhaps, I considered, Trimbur and Brereton are under the impression that holders of PhDs from CUNY are somewhat insulated from the job-market woes that many others experience. CUNY is, from a certain perspective, where Composition and Rhetoric was born, which might make CUNY candidates more desirable. Of course, there is no evidence that CUNY graduates are having more success on the market than anyone else. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that those with CUNY diplomas are more likely to find tenure-track positions. Should that really give us comfort? Should we be relieved that a crisis that relegates the majority of writing teachers to low-paid invisibility and leaves many PhDs underemployed has not yet landed at our door? This doesn’t make me feel any better, even if it is true, which it isn’t.

I considered all of these possibilities before I settled on the reason for Brereton’s advice that seems the most likely. Faculty who occupy privileged, tenured jobs, especially veterans, often don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to adjunct labor and the crisis in the Humanities because they don’t have to know. They haven’t had to look for a job for so long that they don’t know what it’s like out there. This is an explanation, not an excuse. Under what conditions might such scholars be persuaded to familiarize themselves with the working conditions and job prospects of writing teachers, including those with and without doctoral degrees?

I will address that question later in this essay. First, I want to discuss the conversation that ensued at John Jay after Brereton’s shocking statement that Comp and Rhet PhDs won’t have trouble finding jobs. People in the audience, who understood that he was dead wrong, suggested various ways to address the problem. Unfortunately, all of these suggestions are misguided because they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the job market and how it works.

Solution #1: Veteran Faculty Should Retire To Make Room For New Hires

This is a refrain that one hears quite often. It is a very curious response to the labor crisis in the Humanities because it suggests a faith in the system as it is. Upon what foundation should such a faith be based? When I first entered graduate school, for example, I was told that all the “baby boomers” were soon going to retire in droves, which would open faculty positions for younger scholars. This prognosis is quite laughable now. I don’t blame the people who gave me this advice any more than I blame myself for believing it. Still, we must ask, why didn’t those jobs materialize?

I don’t know if baby boomers are still clinging to their faculty posts longer than anyone expected. In this economy, I certainly wouldn’t blame them. But I don’t think the employment status of the graying professoriate is the issue anyway. The truth is there is no guarantee that a veteran faculty member’s retirement will result in the university hiring even one full-time replacement. Does anyone really believe that college administrators, upon hearing of a professor’s retirement, get together and say, “Dr. So-and-so was making $100,000 per year, so we should go ahead and hire two new faculty members at $50,000 each to replace him”? I’d venture to say that most college administrators, with their reduced budgets and corporate mentalities, do not usually think that way. At least we cannot count on it. The process by which higher-ups greenlight a faculty hire is a kind of academic alchemy that bears little relationship to whether anyone retired or not.

Solution #2: We Should Stop Admitting So Many Students Into English PhD Programs

This is an infuriating supply-side response to the dearth of full-time positions in English. Trying to address academic contingency by admitting fewer people into doctoral programs is like saying the solution to the outsourcing of autoworker jobs in Detroit is to cut off the supply of autoworkers. That will teach those auto company executives to stop offshoring jobs!

Such a solution is similarly absurd in academia where the idea is that colleges aren’t hiring, so we should give them fewer people to choose from, and then more of “us” will find jobs. Is this a fair assumption based on the facts? How long would it take before a reduction in the number of people earning PhDs in English/Composition and Rhetoric would actually be felt in the job market? Ten years? Twenty? Never? How do we tell the difference between the “us” who deserve admittance to PhD programs and decent jobs afterwards and the “them” who don’t?

Furthermore, can we be certain that colleges will not continue to enact policies that further erode demand for full-time jobs even in if we narrow the PhD pipeline? We must only look to the shuttering of the French program at SUNY Albany for evidence that administrators can and will close down whole departments when it suits them. Such measures would leave a lot of PhDs out in the cold, whether they are part of smaller cohort of graduates or not. Furthermore, it is not clear that we could come to a national consensus that curtailing access to doctoral programs is desirable as a labor strategy. In fact, this is a doubtful prospect. Professors at PhD-granting institutions need students in their classes, after all. And institutions of all kinds still need cheap teachers to staff Comp 101. As Marc Bousquet writes, “what administrators want is what administrators want, and what can us chickens do about that?”

Solution #3: Newbies Have To Work Harder These Days. But The Jobs Are Still There For People Who Do Everything Right.

This insulting “solution” is informed by a distorted worldview in which an individual is totally responsible for whether or not an employer hires her for a job and whether that job pays a living wage. In this fantasy, mysterious and divine market forces determine a worker’s value and we all accept the result as fair and just. This view is not limited to academia. Many unemployed and underemployed people are being told just now that they need to get the skills that employers want if they expect to make a living, get health benefits, and retain a shred of dignity in old age. Yes, it’s up to the worker to make work pay! Though many economists reject this theory, it has achieved golden-rule status in academia and elsewhere. Barbara Ehrenreich skewered such lunacy in the 90s in her book, Bait and Switch, which is about the plight of unemployed middle-class professionals.

“The [job] seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. . . . [T]here was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.”

It’s not the “system” or the job market or academic hiring practices! It’s YOU! Do everything right, job seeker, and you will be okay! This advice comes with an added sting in academia. If earning a PhD (or an MA degree for that matter), with all its attendant sacrifices, does not already indicate that one has done “everything right,” then I don’t know what does.

Here are some of the messages graduate students hear, ad infinitum, as part of the standard advice to work more and harder to earn the right to a compete for a chance not to be on Medicaid like the rest of the poor adjuncts.

English/Comp and Rhet PhDs will be okay if they:

• Publish more. (You must publish a couple of articles or a book before going on the job market. How one is supposed to manage this while finishing a dissertation, teaching, and eating regular meals is not discussed.)
• Teach a lot. (You will need to teach as much as possible so you can put all those courses on your cv and look really impressive to hiring committees. How one is supposed to do this while also publishing more, finishing the dissertation, and eating regular meals, is not discussed.)
• Happily accept any position, even one off the tenure track. (Once you get your first job, then you can publish a lot and move on to greener academic pastures eventually. Do you have a partner who does not like the idea of moving across the country so you can accept a job that you do not really want? This scenario is not discussed.)
• Present at more conferences. (Of course, you will probably have to do this on your own dime since you have not yet proven that you deserve institutional affiliation and/or funding for the conferences that you need to attend to prove that you deserve institutional affiliation and/or funding.)

These platitudes, incommensurate as they are with each other and material reality, constitute advice to eager up-and-comers in the category of “do more and work harder for less because that is the way the world is now.” The problem is that such advice sends the message that individuals are responsible for the economy. Didn’t find a job? You didn’t publish enough; you didn’t teach enough; you didn’t want to live in Idaho bad enough. It’s a devious way of letting the system off the hook by telling us that where we find ourselves, after years of intense academic study and various monumental accomplishments, is our own fault.

The Real Problem: In Which It Turns Out that Academic Capitalism is Just Like Regular Capitalism

The previous discussion of disappearing full-time jobs in Composition and Rhetoric allows me to define some terms. What do I mean by the word “system” that I have been using so far? Viewing contingency as a systemic problem means acknowledging that we can’t make everything better by cutting off the supply of PhDs, by encouraging veterans to retire, or by working harder for table scraps. And we certainly aren’t getting anywhere by waiting patiently for the field’s éminence grise to voluntarily develop an accurate grasp of the facts.

Yes, I am bringing up the Trimbur/Brereton debacle again.

Even though I find their unwillingness to frankly address the greatest crisis in the field appalling and unpardonable, I do not think Trimbur and Brereton are personally to blame for the general lack of interest in labor contingency from those who benefit the most from it. However, I focus on them because systemic problems are reflected in the attitudes and perspectives of individuals. Was it Upton Sinclair who wrote that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it”? No one is immune from this diagnosis.

So what can be done? As many scholars, from Richard Ohmann to Stanley Aronowitz to Donna Strickland have argued, we need to see the academy in general and Composition and Rhetoric in particular from a global economic perspective. Within this framework, Humanities PhDs are workers within a larger economy in which good jobs have been disappearing for decades in exchange for an itinerant, unstable, low-wage workforce. In academia that means adjuncts.

To see the problem of adjuncts on Medicare as part of a global trend, it helps, as always, to have a theory. (By the way, an adjunct on Medicare is not a “problem” for capitalism at all. Foisting an employee’s health care costs onto the public is a very good deal for the private sector.) That is why I turn now to David Harvey’s theory of the internal contradictions of capitalism. Harvey’s work helps illuminate the macroeconomics of academic hiring, and he proposes some ways to address capitalism’s excesses which are relevant to academia. So let’s start by defining another term that is important to my argument.

What is a Crisis?

The MLA says the Humanities are in crisis. What is a crisis anyway? Harvey explains that a crisis “is nothing less than a massive phase of dispossession of assets.” This definition is important because it illustrates that the problem is not a reduction in the number of assets, which is the lie we are endlessly fed in our age of austerity. Rather, a crisis occurs when certain sectors of society are dispossessed of assets they once claimed. Dispossession happens, in other words, when bankers and politicians use so-called budget deficits to raid public pension funds for speculative investments, when land is seized by eminent domain, or when public schools are labeled “failing” so that they can be privatized by profiteers at Goldman Sachs.

This system works fine in theory, though, as Terry Eagleton writes, “the [capitalist] system has also proved incapable of breeding affluence without creating huge swathes of deprivation alongside it.” In addition to the minor issue of plunging hundreds of millions of people around the world into daily poverty, capitalism is also crisis prone because it must never stop accumulating resources, including money and land, to further its expansion. “Capitalism,” Harvey writes in The Enigma of Capital, is a “process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money.” This insatiable need to gobble up more stuff ensures that capitalism will always run into barriers to growth. Capitalists earn profits, which they reinvest to earn bigger profits, which they reinvest again. This cycle continues as long as those reinvestments result in a compound growth rate of at least 3% per year. Once the growth rate falls below three percent, Harvey says, a crisis ensues, like the kind that precipitates a massive bailout of Wall Street banks at public expense, for example. But remember, a crisis is not a reduction of assets; it is a period in which assets are taken from one place and moved to another, presumably more profitable, location.

The problem is that, since the 1970s, capitalists are running out of places to invest their surplus capital. In a globalized world, the economic system cannot reproduce itself forever. Barriers to growth include technology, the environment, and access to lines of credit. Capital constantly needs to circumvent these barriers to assure its survival. For example, if laborers get together and demand higher wages and better treatment from their employers under threat of a strike, this represents a barrier to capital accumulation that must be surmounted at all costs.

Adjuncts and the Global Economy: Circumventing the Labor Barrier

Where does academic contingency come in? First of all, we must understand that the problem of academic hiring is not a lack of jobs per se. That is the symptom, not the disease. A pool of contingent laborers has been created by global capitalism as a way to get around labor barriers to expansion. A reserve army of the unemployed, as the saying goes, is required for capitalism to survive, which in academia translates as cheap teachers.

Let me further explain the connection between academic labor and global capitalism. Colleges, like any business, are entities in which the majority of workers do not own the institutions where they are employed. Rather, higher education workers exchange their labor power for wages. One barrier to the growth of academic capitalism, then, is solidarity among workers, or what Harvey also calls the “culture of the workplace.” In order for the American higher education system to grow, as it has done for many decades, increasing numbers of workers are needed. From the point of view of capitalists, the majority must labor for low wages and on contingent contracts in order to ensure maximum flexibility for capital. This is why some critics have called academia a “pyramid scheme” in which privileged tenured faculty, and those William Deresiewicz calls the “immiserated proletariat,” are both necessary for capital to function. Here’s how Harvey explains it:

“[I]n a desperate bid to exert and sustain control over the labour process, the capitalist has to mobilise any social relation of difference, any distinction within the social division of labour, any special cultural preference or habit, both to prevent the inevitable commonality of position in the workplace being consolidated into a movement of social solidarity and to sustain a fragmented and divided workforce.”

In other words, one strategy that capitalists employ to control labor is the enforcement of a tiered system in which workers are encouraged to see themselves as fundamentally different from their colleagues (that is, if they see each other at all). Trimbur’s and Brereton’s comments (or lack thereof) illustrate how successful academic capitalism has been in exploiting “relations of difference” amongst academic workers. As I explained above, Trimbur and Brereton are not mean people who don’t care about adjuncts. Rather, we can see their lack of awareness as a reasonable outcome of what Harvey calls the “tactics of capital” to control labor via fragmentation and division.

This is not about the blindness of a few elite professors (or, for that matter, the willful naiveté of PhDs who believe they will win the academic job market lottery by being more deserving than everyone else). In fact, as Harvey notes, “class is a role, not a label that attaches to persons.” Indeed, many full-time professors in low-status institutions are far from the privileged beneficiaries of the upward flow of capital. Rather than try to identify who the individual culprits are, then, we need to continuously assert that this is a systemic problem that originates in the necessity of capital to control labor by ensuring that a few people get everything, most get nothing, and those two groups don’t talk to each other very much, or even see themselves as part of the same profession.

Contingency is Composition: Where Do We Start?

Academic contingency is a systemic problem, but that doesn’t mean that we can let Trimbur and Brereton off the hook. In fact, getting comparatively privileged members of our profession on board the anti-contingency train is a crucial battle strategy. At the very least, senior scholars must be responsible for not spreading misinformation. Harvey says that we can’t fix capitalism by “tinkering around the edges.” We must address the inherent risk in a system in which a surplus of low-wage workers is necessary for our global mode of production to survive. “We can’t address the problem of poverty,” Harvey writes, “without addressing the problem of the accumulation of wealth.” Another way to put it is that we can’t address the problem of contingency without insisting that the elite among us get the facts right and figure out whose side they’re on.

How does getting more senior scholars to speak in favor of equality help the cause? Harvey explains that a new anti-capitalist (read: anti-contingency) movement should be a “co-revolutionary moment, not a storming of the barricades.” If you’re a full-time faculty member in an English department, your adjunct co-workers are not going to come and beat down your door and beg for your support. They shouldn’t have to. They are too overworked and nervous about getting invited back the next semester. Tenured and tenure-track faculty, especially those in the most privileged locations, must become active allies in the fight for better working conditions and pay for all teachers. “The disconnected and alienated,” Harvey argues, “[must] have an alliance with the deprived and the dispossessed.” There are always ways to subvert the system, and tenured faculty must do more in their own institutions and professional organizations. At the very least, they must be honest about the problem.

Another step in forging an alliance between the discontented and the dispossessed is to reward those academics working to illuminate the grotesque conditions endured by part-timers. For example, Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow have made a documentary called “Con Job” which highlights the plight of adjuncts. The film makes the crucial point that contingency is not a qualitative distinction. Rather, it signals only a differential status of employment. That is to say, these filmmaker-scholars shatter the myth that adjuncts deserve their fate when they are actually human cast-offs of the churning capitalist expansion machine. “Con Job” should be as widely circulated as possible. And it should be treated as intellectual scholarship, which is exactly what it is.

In addition to promoting and rewarding anti-contingency work, our professional organizations must insist that our field’s journals devote a larger number of their pages to the study of how contingency affects the teaching of writing. Brad Hammer calls this new arena of scholarship “Contingency Studies.” Hammer explains that such a move is necessary because “our professional discourse has moved away from pedagogy to embrace the work, theory, and writings of the minority elite within composition.” Scholarship on the relationship between adjunct labor and global capitalism can no longer be an academic sideline project granted a few pages of “newsletter” space in CCC. Furthermore, groups like the CUNY Composition and Rhetoric Community have done a commendable job providing support and a sense of belonging to Composition and Rhetoric students and other members. But until the CCRC also becomes a labor movement, it will be of limited usefulness to the vast majority of teachers of writing at CUNY.  Organizations like CCRC must do more to ensure that Contingency Studies becomes the central intellectual work of the field because, as I argued above, reproducing and legitimating a tiered labor system is already the field’s central disciplinary function.

Finally, I’m convinced that change can only come if Composition’s intellectual work is not allowed to further descend into what Marc Bousquet calls “management science.”

‘Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss’

As scholars such as Joseph Harris, Leo Parascondola, and Tony Scott know, Composition and Rhetoric PhDs are often hired as bosses for academic capitalism. In fact, there is now a de facto rule that most Compositionists will spend at least part of their careers managing and supervising adjuncts and other low-wage higher education workers. We must ask ourselves if this is what Composition and Rhetoric scholars ought to be doing with their hard-earned degrees and big brains. Marc Bousquet explains how our field’s intellectual endeavors serve the interest of capitalism, which, again, requires a reserve of low-wage workers to survive and perpetuate itself.

“Clearly, the emergence of rhetoric and composition into some form of (marginal) respectability and (institutional-bureaucratic) validity has a great deal to do with its usefulness to upper management in legitimating the practice of deploying a revolving labor force of graduate employees and other contingent teachers to teach writing. The discipline’s enormous usefulness to academic capitalism [includes] delivering cheap teaching, training a supervisory class for the cheap teachers, and producing a group of intellectuals who theorize and legitimate this scene of managed labor.”

As a dynamic and creative force, academic capitalism has absorbed the intellectual work of Composition in the service of the continued exploitation of teachers of writing. Our field is useful in this scheme because earning a PhD in the field is perceived as a credential for managing the low-wage labor of those who occupy the academic pyramid’s bottom levels.

What can be done? Rhetoric and Composition scholars who direct programs must do more to insist that a majority of those they hire and supervise are full-time workers who earn fair wages and benefits. I know this is a difficult proposition, and perhaps impossible in some settings. But what kind of field will we have if Compositionists continue to allow their labor to be co-opted by those who perpetuate the oppression of the majority of writing teachers? Many writing program directors are not in a position to make change alone. That is why our discipline, and our professional organizations, must vigorously support them if they choose to take such a stand.

Finally, my experience at the Brereton/Trimbur event has convinced me that those who occupy places of relative privilege in academia’s decreasing number of tenured positions must educate themselves about academic contingency and do more. A lot more. Higher education must have a new labor movement that is anti-capitalist in orientation and that seeks to build coalitions with precarious workers in other sectors of the economy. The emergence of Occupy Wall Street has opened the door. We must not let the moment pass us by. As Nate Brown explained in his speech protesting privatization at the University of California, “the only way the university struggle can isolate itself is by failing or refusing to acknowledge that it is also an anti-capitalist struggle, that it is also a class struggle.”

I admit that I am not optimistic.

The Academic Curiosity Shop

Let’s face it, many of our field’s eminent scholars ignore the class struggle in higher education and the low-wage teaching trap that ensnares many bright and deserving students and graduates because Composition needs those teachers to reproduce the game for the next round of players. Established faculty who have the power to get their words in top journals and win places on popular conference panels can no longer be let off the hook for declining to advocate for workers in the academic basement. At long last, elite faculty must acknowledge that much of their scholarship is deeply and shamefully irrelevant to the daily work of most college writing teachers.

A recent College English article, by Jim Cocola, frames the issue as a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. The result is not pretty for traditional faculty.

“For if the American professoriate has never been a closed shop in the traditional union sense, it remains a guild, albeit a diminished one, whose tenured and tenure-track members are increasingly old and, increasingly, curiosities, occupying a dubious position somewhere between a self-propagating administration, on the one hand, and a rapidly proliferating casualization, on the other.”

Established scholars who do not vehemently challenge the labor system that funds their own privilege are the “curiosities” that Cocola describes. But there is a way back to relevance. Harvey’s theory of capitalism’s road to crisis suggests a new task for us all, but especially for those who are in a better position to demand change. It is “the task of the educated discontented,” he writes, “to magnify the subaltern voice so that attention can be paid to the circumstances of exploitation and repression.” The well-known voices in our field – and in higher education more generally – must magnify the voices of their oppressed colleagues.  A real “Contingency Studies” ought to start with a robust commitment from the field’s veterans, and it must include taking action at the local and national level. As prominent members of the profession, it’s their responsibility to advocate for the next generation of scholars and reclaim the soul of higher education. These emissaries guard the gates of an academic discipline that is disintegrating. It’s time they recognized it.

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There’s a train wreck quality to the 2012 Republican presidential nomination contest. Political observers of all stripes are watching with a mix of astonishment, disgust, fear, and straight-up amusement as the most terrible and ridiculous nominating contest in the history of the country (so far!) plays itself out on our computer and television screens. Analogies to crappy reality TV have long since become cliché—Who Wants to Be a Godawful Presidential Candidate?—and indeed for a brief period an infamous reality-show-thing/person actually led in the national polls.

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March 1, 2012 marked the #M1 National Day of Action for Education called for by various student/teacher groups all over the country including Occupy Education and Occupy Colleges to highlight problems within the educational system, such as a lack of democratic decision-making and growing corporatization. In New York City, groups including Students United for a Free CUNY and NYC All City Student Assembly called for local, school-based actions in the morning to be followed by a rally in front of the Dep. of Education in downtown Manhattan and a protest march over the Brooklyn Bridge to Ft. Greene Park, with speak-outs at various sites along the way.

As part of the Day of Action at the Graduate Center, students from the GC General Assembly served up a “Radical Lunch” as a way to raise awareness about various issues related to affordable public education and academic freedom at CUNY. After distributing the day’s “Menu” (see sidebar) to the surprised patrons in the Dining Commons, kazoo sounds filled the room and the various “dishes” were served to the table of mock diners. There was, for example, an order of “democratic space where the public has control of the university” which didn’t even make it to table due to being grabbed and eaten by “Chancellor Goldstein” who declared it “delicious,” tasting “like $500,000 and a living stipend.” Or the “adjunct” at the table asking for meaningful academic employment – as to be served up with multiple commutes, long hours of grading and “hardly any health insurance.”

Short sound bites between servings, delivered by students planted among the audience, laid out some of the hard facts underlying the direct action: even if founded as a free university, CUNY introduced tuition in 1976 and has raised it since again and again, with a recent increase of $300 per year through 2015. Members of CUNY’s undemocratically appointed Board of Trustees sit on the boards of major corporations or big banks, and favor an increasing privatization of a university that is run on an economic model. Wages of all CUNY instructors have dropped 30 to 40 percent since the 1970s, the majority making less than 10 percent of their chancellor’s salary. In addition, in the past thirty years CUNY cut its full-time faculty in half, relying instead on an increasing flock of part-time instructors, which do not earn a living wage, have no job security, and teach classes constantly growing in size.  To make matters worse, public sector employees are subject to New York’s Taylor Law, which includes a “no-strike clause” and strict penalties for its violation – basically making striking and other work stoppages extremely difficult or illegal.

Alluding to recent assaults of student protesters at Baruch, the plot reached its high point when, wait … who?… “It’s a crab!” – “It’s a troll!” – “It’s a Kroll!” entered the stage to face the two already handcuffed students that had asked for the “right for peaceful protest.” Introduced as a “University of California delicacy” that would be “served up with pepper spray”, the Kroll went on to introduce “data-mining, intelligence, and on-the-ground security” to the academic community – but in the end was chased out of the room by the united kazoos of the room, a 1991 mix tape on a boom box, and the dancing members of this successful direct action’s cast. All in all a delicious – i.e.  smart, funny and, yes, radical – “lunch” with hopefully many successors!

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There has likely not been a sociopolitical phenomenon more heavily documented than the Occupy Wall Street movement. What took root in Zuccotti Park and quickly blossomed in over 1000 sites throughout the United States captured the world’s imagination, but also its cameras, laptops, iPhones, and Twitter accounts. No sooner had OWS celebrated its two-month anniversary, the first “Occubooks” began to appear, offering first cuts at making sense of the most exciting populist movement to rock the United States in seventy-five years. Unsurprisingly, they offered a mixed bag of quality and focus. A steady stream of OWS books has since appeared on bookshelves and Nooks. And while the latest publications offer increasingly strong and coherent narratives of what happened, they understandably privilege events that went down in and around the belly of the beast—Wall Street.

99 Nights with the 99 Percent, Chris Faraone’s engaging new book on OWS, takes a different tack. The most recent book in the proliferating Occupy literature, 99 Nights—a rollicking, richly textured collection of reports, profiles, photos, and poems—presents the most thoroughly encompassing history of OWS to date. Faraone—a reporter with the Boston Phoenix—spent the final quarter of 2011 zipping back-and-forth between coasts and camps, filing some of the hardest-hitting and most entertaining dispatches from some ten cities across the United States.  Along the way, he reported on many of the less talked about but arguably most important dimensions of the Occupy movement—issues of race and gender, crime in the camps, sympathetic police and the myriad characters and personalities that kept the movement ticking in its darkest moments. At the same time, 99 Nights never gets entirely swept up in the excitement and chaos of individual settings, presenting instead a broadly-rendered portrait of a national movement in all its diversity, beauty, and, at times, self-contradiction. The Advocate recently spoke with Faraone about his new book, the encampment era of OWS, police brutality coast-to-coast, and what the future might hold for the Occupy movement in 2012.  

Let’s begin by talking about the book itself. 99 Nights with the 99 Percent, and in fact your reporting generally, is different in a number of respects from other stuff out there on Occupy. Describe your approach and what you intended to accomplish setting out.

Basically what I wanted to accomplish was to present a sort of time capsule. All the chapters are kept in the present tense as they were when I was originally reporting on the events. No matter what happened before this—with other movements that led up to Occupy—and no matter what happens in the future, here’s the story of what happened in those three months. People will look back at the encampment era differently, especially in academia, where different interpretations will be offered that will depend on what happens moving forward. My book offers observations of what actually happened in the moment when the camps were going strong.  Of course, I am only one person who can only cover so much—about a dozen cities, with most of my coverage centered on Boston and New York—and so at the same time I didn’t want to lose the sense that this was huge, something that was really popping nationally. One number we kept seeing was that there were roughly 1600 American cities, occupied in some degree or another. I wanted to reflect, not each of them individually, obviously, but the general sense that things were really bubbling across the country, and I tried doing this by including the timeline made up of haikus.

A lot of these other books—and some of them, like the n+1 book, are really great—while not academic, really get into the nitty-gritty of things, like the methods of organizing employed, or offer a history of what led up to this moment. My book tries to get through all that, not get distracted by those considerations, by documenting what happened day-by-day. I started by writing out a timeline of the first hundred days, but it felt arbitrary and it didn’t really flow with the rest of the book. And while I was doing this, the word “occupaiku” popped into my head. I googled it and found—amazingly—that no one had come up with it, probably the only “occupun” that hasn’t been totally used and abused. I found that writing haikus for each day was a good way to make sense of what had been happening. And so these poems, as well as the photos I included with them before each chapter, allowed me to bring together my own experience during those three months, and also really helped me make clear that this shit was going on all across the country.  

You’ve had what’s been a contentious relationship, at times, with Occupiers and their media reps. Where has the tension come from and what have been the greatest challenges for you reporting on the Occupy movement?

Well, the first challenge is that basically I’m sympathetic to just about everything Occupy has been doing and talking about.  I say something to that effect right at the start of the book.  These are issues that I’ve been covering passionately for years, especially the issue of foreclosures which I had been reporting on in the months right before Occupy. Where the risk comes is that I had been reporting on the community organizations that are deeply rooted in the neighborhoods where foreclosures had hit the hardest.  And so to watch Occupy at the very beginning—and I’ll go on record as saying that it almost impeded, in some ways, the actions that had been building and building—was frustrating. My reporting on that was not welcome by all.

Later, though, with the camps, the truth is that the people running the media teams weren’t always in tune with the craziness that was going on in the camps at night. They weren’t always the ones who had to put up with it or who had to deal with it—the drunks, the drug addicts—and these were things that were really happening. And when I reported on this stuff, I was confronted with this line “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” which is bullshit.  I wasn’t there to knit pick these things to criticize the larger movement, obviously. But when they become issues—people don’t want to see them, but they were hard truths—they need to be reported on. Take Philadelphia for instance: this is precisely why the fucking camp fell apart, completely, because that stuff ended up taking over.  Michael Allen Godlberg from the Philadelphia Weekly did a great job of writing about this stuff and was shit on for it. And what ended up happening in Philly?  By the end there wasn’t even a media tent left in the encampment.  It had become a fucking shantytown.  

But I will give the Occupy movement this: they are transparent. They air their dirty laundry on Twitter, for Christ’s sakes. A lot of organizations and movements simply don’t do that. We all know that a lot of the same issues—male dominance of the discussion, for example—that have effected social movements in the past of course effect Occupy Wall Street. But unlike before, now it’s all out there for everyone to see. In the first three months, though, there was this sense, understandably, that either the media was out to get Occupy, or they were out to do a lazy job in covering it. And so the media reps were sensitive about it. And I understood that. It was a pain in the ass at first, but you know, you have to prove yourself.  

What surprised you the most as you visited various Occupy camps around the country?

Well, probably the extent to which every occupation takes on the characteristics of its city.  Whereas, for example, I’ve been in several working group tents down at Wall Street and in Dewey Square in Boston, I don’t think I was every actually invited in to one.  The West Coast was completely the opposite, just unbelievably friendly. Literally, everywhere I went people were just so welcoming, it was completely different. So that was one thing.

The other thing I learned was that the diversity that people talk about in the camps was no bullshit. You had steelworkers, homeless veterans—and I can’t stress the presence of homeless vets enough. It points to the absolute irony of the running conservative line about OWS. Just as they refuse to acknowledge that there is a homeless veterans problem in this country, just as they refuse to acknowledge that there are thousands of unemployed pipe fitters, they refuse to acknowledge that these groups were present in the camps, that they are a part of this movement.

And finally, the observation I keep coming back to—which is obvious but we rarely talk about it—is that the problems the camps had to confront—homelessness, drug addiction—are not new problems as anyone who has lived in a city can tell you. The difference was that suddenly they were front and center, they were out there for everyone to see. For someone who’s constantly frustrated that these issues are so frequently overlooked, it was interesting to see people’s reactions. And not surprisingly, the reaction from a lot of people was “yuck, go back to where

Talk about Occupy the Hood.  One of the under-reported angles on OWS has been the tension you describe between Occupy camps and Occupy the Hood offshoots. First of all, what are the contentions, and how, if at all, have they been managed and resolved in different cities?  Do you get the sense the relationships that have formed between occupiers and outside organizers, especially those working in communities of color, have sparked honest discussions about race, or not?  

I would say that an honest discussion about race is there in some regard. But in other ways, it hasn’t really been addressed.  A lot of people know it should go down, but at the same time, they feel that things are pretty immediate right now, and so it takes a back seat. But the issue remains. A lot of people will point out, just like Jamal Crawford says in my book, that when we think of all the shit that people have been through with Occupy—let’s say, you got arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge—well guess what? That ain’t shit compared to what happens just four blocks from the bridge in Brooklyn every day.  If people were going hungry in a camp, that’s nothing compared to the poverty that has existed in our neighborhoods over the years.  The problems that Occupiers were dealing with in the camps have been problems, but in much greater magnitude, that communities of color have been dealing with for some time.

As far as Occupied the Hood is concerned, here we arrive at another problem. Black activists are better equipped to talk about this, but to be frank, there are a lot of black people across the country who are just not interested in the horizontal democracy model. It’s the specifics of it—the finger wiggling, the stack, the leaderless of it—that in certain ways run contrary to legacy of the civil rights movement in this country. It’s been said to me, “look, black people don’t want to sit around in circles with their legs crossed, wiggling their fingers.” This is obviously a gross overgeneralization. And it’s not that the people are opposed to the horizontal model in theory. It’s just that, for example in Chicago, while general assemblies are going on in Grant Park, there are 100,000 foreclosed upon homes on the Southside. And so it becomes an issue of immediacy.

But let’s not forget about places like Oakland, which predominantly comprise communities of color, where people have been pissed off for a long time, and where, in that case, Black, Latino and Asian groups were already organized together. When I was out there, and I tweeted something like “oh my god, this amazing: there are all these different groups out marching together,” and Boots Riley corrected me and said “no, this is just Occupy Oakland, it’s all one thing.” To hinge on this, and the final thing I’ll say here, is that fortunately a lot of the relationships between different groups that started out superficially, I’ve seen become more organic as time goes on, but it has to happen naturally. At the same time, it’s important to remember, too, that it’s early, that we are still less than half a year into this thing, so we’ll see.    

You say that an entire book could be written about the Occupy con man Paul Fetch. Can you talk a bit about who he is, what he allegedly did, and where he is now?

Paul Fetch.  I have no idea where he is right now, though he was allegedly spotted in Boston not that long ago. He—and I need to be careful with what I say since he’s already sued a bunch of people in Boston—is an alleged con man. But the amazing thing about Paul Fetch is that he is, in one person, the embodiment of and speaks to multiple phenomena related to the OWS. First, financial vulnerability.  Fetch was in Occupy camps in Boston, New York and Cleveland, but it’s a problem for encampments everywhere. In Boston alone, OWS was collecting $2,000 a day in cash. And this was not a group of people that was necessarily well equipped to take care of lots of money. It was begging for someone to take advantage. Furthermore, he’s been involved with Anonymous. And of course, Anonymous was crucial to the success of Occupy. In Boston, particularly, Fetch’s presence brought a lot of skeletons out of the closet, at least as far as that was concerned.

He’s a character. I’ve never had a harder subject to write about than him.  I would check everything ten times, and everyone had a different story.  But more than anything, he was one person who really woke up the Occupy movement. They realized a bunch of stuff—and not just that they had to watch the money. They were also suddenly forced to confront this issue of, “how do we kick someone out if we have to?” That would be a fascinating book right there, a collection of profiles of each person who’s been kicked out of an Occupy camp around the country and how that happened. I mean, people think it’s hard firing a union employee, just try throwing someone out of an Occupy camp.  Though I have to say that, out west in places like Seattle, guys like Paul Fetch would have had their asses kicked and would have been dragged into the street.

Why is that?

Well, I wouldn’t say that the movements out west were more violent, just that they had to be more defensive of themselves. They had to be.  I mean, you’re talking about camps where half the people were covered in chemical burns—the police brutality was at a whole different level. In Oakland—I can’t believe I haven’t seen this reported on more nationally—at one point they had two different camps. Snow Park was filled with people that wanted nothing to do with violence. And that doesn’t mean that everyone else wanted to be violent. It means that after everything Oakland has been through, starting with Oscar Grant and going straight through to everything that happened in Occupy, people just weren’t willing to say “yeah, we’ll just sit back and take it.” So the level of what people were willing to put up with was completely different, from everything I observed, on the East and West Coasts. The way people badgered the cops on the East Coast, just wouldn’t have happened on the west coast. They would have been pepper sprayed immediately.

Why are the two coasts so different?

Well, and I’m speaking strictly anecdotally, I think it has a lot to do with the sheer numbers of people involved out west, tens of thousands of people in the street. You’d get a couple of thousand people, say, in Boston’s biggest marches.  And so what’s happening on the West Coast was just at a completely different level. And of course there’s history: Oakland has had a lot of experience with police brutality; Seattle got all the training it needed in the 1990s. And this accounts for a lot of the reaction to the protests on both sides. I mean, have you seen some of the videos that came out of Occupy Seattle? And I am not just talking the one with Dorli Rainey, the eighty-four year old woman who was pepper sprayed during a march.  There are others that didn’t get much hype because no one died, they didn’t involve brutalized octogenarians, or whatever—you can find them online. There’s one that just blows me away more than any of the rest where a cop, riding a bike on the left side of a totally peaceful, day-time march of a couple of hundred protesters and he just breaks out a can of pepper spray and just starts spraying people in the face as he rides by. And this, like everything else, just feeds reaction in both directions. But it’s not just an East/West Coast thing. The city that has been probably the harshest in response has been Chicago, which, of course, is really Rahm Emanuel.  And this is to say nothing of what went down in smaller camps that got nothing but local coverage—the Tuscons, Tulsas.  I looked through the timeline of events and I see that hundreds of people were arrested in a city like Tulsa, which when you look at it proportionally, would be like a thousand people being arrested in a city like Boston or New York.

On this issue of the cops, describe Occupy Police and Operation Shield. What’s your sense on the success or failure that men and women in uniform have had trying to claim a space in the 99%?

Well, what I have to say on this is not just as someone who is sympathetic to protesters who get the shit kicked out of them for doing absolutely nothing, but has to do with things more generally. Look at Philly—which again, fell apart on its own. I was going back and forth between Philadelphia and New York, which each had about the same number of people in the camps.  In New York, you had Zuccotti surrounded by about 150 cops. In Philly, there were about four.  Philly kept it a lot less aggressive, and there was a lot more interaction between the police and the encampment. And in a way, it makes sense. I mean, who among us doesn’t know someone who has been foreclosed upon, who among us hasn’t been affected by the crisis.  Police, fireman, they’re blue collar, too. And they were put into some unbelievable positions throughout all this, in some places day-after-day. You know, for all the bad press that the relationships between police officers and occupiers naturally got, I was on several marches where I saw protesters and cops laughing together, and I’ve witnessed several occasions where officers tip off protesters about what’s going to happen, get messages into the camps. And in testimonials there is example after example of individual police officers, and groups of police officers, who didn’t want to do some of the things that were expected of them, or that they were told to prepare to do. I don’t have to say it. What Todd Gitlin argues about this, I couldn’t agree with more. There’s a validation of the movement that goes on when outside authority figures, especially those that have worn various uniforms—whether police or military—express sympathy and solidarity. 

Finally, what do you think we can expect to see in the spring?  Some people have been talking everything from retaking city squares and focusing on reclaiming foreclosed upon homes to moving towards direct action campaigns targeting the workplace, while others suggest that the movement has lost steam during the winter and what we’ll see from here on out will be a hollow version of its previous self.  What’s your take?

I’ve been writing about inter-Occupy phone calls and list servs that have been going on since the camps broke up. And that was just the start of what’s going on now, which has been a lot more organic. If you go to any General Assembly, on any given weekend, and you’ll find people from all over: Boston, New York, DC, Rochester. This past weekend at a GA meeting in Boston there were a dozen people from Delaware, and people from Providence.  So there’s a difference about people simply talking, and what they’re doing now which is sharing ideas for actions. The West Coast has had this down for a minute—their inter-Occupy phone calls led to two port shutdowns.  The East Coast, while there aren’t as many power houses out here as there are out west, and while there’s been solidarity from the start, now we’re beginning to see a movement beginning to take hold across cities. Without a doubt, the best example of this was Occupy the Primaries. It didn’t get that much press, but at Occupy the New Hampshire Primary you’d get twenty people at a given action, and don’t forget that they were birddogging every candidate and there are a lot of candidates! That was before there were only four. And if you were to ask the protesters where they came from, you’d find that they had come from six or seven Occupy camps—Vermont, New Hampshire and Boston, but also from New York, people had arrived from Orlando, Tampa. We are really seeing something—this is a big political year: first the G-8 and NATO, and then the DNC and RNC conventions, these are going to witness massive Occupy efforts. Especially at the conventions, it won’t look like what’s going on in the halls, where everyone is split up into their nice little piles, divided up into states. Outside, it’s going to be huge groups of angry people from across the country, protesting together. And sure, you would have had some of those people protesting together anyways, but this time they’ll all be under the common umbrella of Occupy.

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I know many of my colleagues don’t take student course evaluations very seriously. They claim that instructors are punished by such evaluations for maintaining standards, for rigorous grading and adherence to policies, and for not being “friends” with their students. They also complain that some departments and certain institutions place far too much emphasis on these evaluations, essentially making them the only measure of an instructor’s “success.” Advocate editor James Hoff wrote in these pages a while back that, by being a “demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader” he frequently feels that he is “actively sabotaging” his evaluation scores. Compellingly, he goes on to suggest that some “‘good’ teachers are not necessarily helping their students to be good learners,” and that, however good the intentions of such evaluations, they generally fail to measure the pedagogical value of a given course, reflecting instead whether the students had fun in the class and/or had affection for the instructor.

Obviously, James and others have a point, and it’s important to consider and reconsider systems of evaluation on an ongoing basis. It’s far too tempting to run classes in a way that almost guarantee positive, even flattering responses that make the department happy and stroke your own ego. I would argue, though, that it is equally tempting (and facile) to assume that anyone who routinely receives glowing evaluations is pandering to, and not challenging, their students.

I’ve always cared about and carefully considered student evaluations, particularly the critical ones. Don’t get me wrong: I love the warm and fuzzy “best professor ever” evaluations too (hear that, students? Keep ’em coming!), but I spend a lot more time on critical comments, and regularly take them into consideration when planning future syllabi. Of course, these statements (both positive and negative) need to be taken with a grain of salt, and within the context of what happened in class. But looking at the comments of those students who take a little time with the evaluations, alongside the aggregate information of the checkbox-type scores, really has proved invaluable to me as I try to evaluate what works and what doesn’t in a given course, with given students, and within the academic culture of a given department.

While my evaluations have generally been positive, and even flattering, I am still very aware of the potential consequences of negative evaluations. I know of at least one friend who, after teaching several semesters at a certain college in Westchester County, received a spate of negative feedback from students in one class and was not invited back again. The complaints, essentially, were that the course was too demanding. It was made clear to my friend that student evaluations were the primary factor in whether or not to invite an adjunct faculty member to return. She had, in all her time there, never been observed by a faculty member, and her teaching methods had not been questioned after any of her previous courses.

This story was very much on my mind as I awaited my student evaluations from a course I taught at Marymount Manhattan College last semester. Accustomed to teaching at CUNY, I was surprised when, like my friend, I wasn’t observed by a faculty member at any point during the semester. And while I hoped that positive student evaluations would outweigh any complaints, I had reason to believe that some of the responses would be a little harsh. Early in the semester, in fact, there had been something of a mini-uprising against the amount of reading I had assigned. I managed to quell the insurrection, as it were, but suspected that there was still some frustration among some of the students.

As it turned out, the evaluations were much more positive than I could have hoped. There were some criticisms and quibbles, of course, and one or two comments that sounded disgruntled (complaints that I “rip apart” student writing when grading, for example, and even one comment that I am “a hard grader, and not in a good way”), but in aggregate it was among the most positive responses I’ve had to a course. My favorite comment was that I was “genuinely involved in the education process” and that “I leveled with” the students.

In retrospect, I think the objections to the syllabus, and the conversation that ensued, strengthened, rather than weakened, the evaluations and—more importantly—the course. Students who objected to the amount (and sometimes the difficulty) of reading gave me an opportunity to talk about the decisions I’d made in putting the syllabus together, about things I might do differently in the future, and about strategies for successfully navigating the semester. These are all things I try to do anyway, as a way to encourage students to interrogate the material, to think critically, and to develop ideas for their presentations and final projects. Being challenged on my selection of readings, though, brought this process even more to the forefront, and helped reinforce the idea that the syllabus, and therefore the material itself, could have been framed in a great many different ways, and that there was no definitive approach to the ideas we were discussing.

Titled “Power Plays: Politics, Theatre, and Social Change,” the course was conceived as an ambitious, interdisciplinary class for upper-level students and, for some of them, fulfilled a required slot in Marymount’s elaborate core curriculum structure. My predecessor, who designed the course, put a heavy emphasis on volunteerism and mini-internship opportunities, practical explorations of applied theatre and theatre in the community. While I’ve had some experience with that kind of work, it was quite a long time ago, and I didn’t have a network of contacts in place to set up that kind of activity in the short amount of time I had to prepare the class. Moreover, the head of the department had suggested to me that she hoped to keep some of the practical, hands-on aspects of the course but also to move more in an academic direction, including more historical and theoretical readings.

The most immediate challenge was establishing a common vocabulary and frame of reference for students from a variety of backgrounds. It’s this process that was met with objections, particularly from the Communications students, most of whom had neither a theatre background nor a background in politics and social sciences. Theatre students and social science students seemed less bothered by the reading, though there was some grumbling from them as well. I did my best to turn this into a productive conversation, first pointing out that the syllabus made clear my expectations (five to six hours a week of work outside of class, etc.) and that I had put in place several mitigating factors to make the readings more digestible (one or two students were assigned to summarize, and lead a discussion on, each reading, for example). We also discussed reading strategies, about how to read for major points instead of trying to absorb every detail, and the like.

Most usefully, though, I tried to weave the discussion into a broader theme in the course, one that I tried to make clear on the first page of the syllabus, but which many students probably ignored when we talked about it during the first session. Immediately following the official course description, which was given to me by the school, I added a variation on a passage I’ve been using for all my courses in recent years:

For me, course descriptions such as this one raise as many questions as they answer. As we move through the semester, I hope to challenge preconceptions and dominant notions about theatrical practice, theatre history, and the theatrical present, as well as the meanings of terms like “progress,” “community,” and “social change,” and the role of theatre and performance in the larger culture.

After a bullet-pointed list of more specific questions that might come up over the course of the semester, I added:

“I am much more interested in your ability to engage with such questions than I am in your ability to memorize series of facts. Unless specifically noted, you should feel free to consult your notes and texts for all assignments, including exams. Information is widely available. What is less common than access to information is the skill required to navigate, evaluate, curate, and interrogate that information. I am not here to dispense knowledge, but to facilitate learning.”

The discussion about the reading selections, then, expanded this notion of challenging the material and allowed us also to interrogate the structure of the course itself.

It also provided me an opportunity to talk openly about the challenges of creating a syllabus: every reading selected means another reading is not selected; broad historical narratives tend to be reductive, but avoiding these narratives makes it more difficult for students to keep a hold on the material; and representing a variety of political viewpoints in a room where most of us agreed on most issues was no easy task. This kind of approach–and the somewhat fragmented structure of my syllabus–have some downsides, of course. I almost never cover all of the material I prepare for a given session, for example. And it can be tricky to insist on cogently structured arguments when the structure of the course itself is in some ways intentionally elusive.

The upside, though, is that I am able to have actual collegial conversations with my students about both the content and the structure of the course, and to encourage them to look at the material from angles I may not have made room for on the syllabus, or may not even have thought of. I talked openly with students about things I might change next time around, about cutting back on open-ended deadlines, moving around the order of assignments, switching out certain readings, etc. I also regularly pointed out that almost any week on the syllabus could easily be expanded to a full semester’s course, and that I was trying to expose them to a lot of ideas and themes in hopes that each student would find something that really caught his or her attention and got him or her thinking.

I generally give more than one option for final projects, only one of which is a traditional research paper. One of my favorite options is allowing students to create syllabi of their own, either on the same theme of the class, or on a particular aspect of the class, expanding a topic that we touched on (or elided) and creating a full fourteen-week course. This tends to be more challenging than the students expect, which I hope gives them some idea of what goes into planning a course. It also, I’d like to think, gives them some sense of agency in their education and provides another layer of feedback for me. The submissions I received for “Power Plays” were very illuminating for me. One student created a syllabus that focused much more on political readings than I had, using plays and performances as illustrations rather than the meat of the course. Another created a course on marginalized identities and their representations in theatre. Another focused on the theme of female suicide in Western drama. Almost as interesting was seeing what assignments and policies they included, which in some cases were pointedly different than my own. I may even borrow a few of their ideas the next time I teach the course.

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This spring will be a crucial time for organizing at CUNY. Put plainly, things are different now. We—as CUNY students and contingent workers—are finding ourselves in the midst of a different political climate with a different emphasis on coalition-building—alongside a simultaneous interest in broadening our tactics, clearly defining our goals, and developing our strategies. We know that we labor within bureaucratic structures that constrain us, but we are now articulating stronger and more serious critiques of these structures and we are militantly mobilizing within and against them. After last year’s Arab Spring, the waves created by strikes, direct actions, and protests around the world, and our own consciousness-raising project right here in New York City at Zucotti Park (followed by the “winter of our discontent”), it seems that the bar has been reset pretty damn high. Maybe more is at stake now? Maybe it feels more than ever like there is nothing to lose? Whatever it is, something is different.

New things are happening for the Adjunct Project as well. Much of the energy we have put into advocating on behalf of adjuncts and other contingent graduate student workers at the GC is now being coordinated and facilitated through a more horizontal, autonomous, and inclusive organizing structure, and with renewed energy and dedication to student/labor activism through the Graduate Center’s General Assembly. In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and “#occupy”-style organizing more broadly, we have seen renewed interest in defying not only external bureaucracy, but hierarchies within our own organizing circles. This has unsurprisingly been accompanied by strong critiques of approaches that privilege an emphasis on “tactics” and “form” over “strategy” and “content” (the former in these cases being purportedly valorized at the expense of the latter by OWS and company). In my own assessment, these more overtly political conversations are sorely needed, and broaching these topics has largely been productive and invigorating. As academics, intellectuals, activists, organizers, and people just trying to get by, we often find ourselves forced into political dichotomies—sometimes we force ourselves and each other into these places of “either/or” around our means, ends, praxes, goals, forms, contents, tactics, and strategies. But questions of what our goals are (both short-term and long-term), what they have to do with the crisis in public education and our role as students/teachers/workers at a public university with a radical history, what they have to do with the crisis that is late capitalism more broadly, and how they relate to questions of identity and identity politics around race, class, gender, and sexuality, are really questions about what is to be done—in this moment, under these new and exciting circumstances. And these questions must be asked if we are to  build on our experiences of OWS, and learn from both the victories and failures of last fall. We must grapple with these questions if we are to remain focused and work through our political differences; if we don’t take these questions and each other seriously, we will find ourselves dispersed, worn out, stretched thin, all over the place, and at odds. We are already seeing the residue of too-broad coalitional politics, an emphasis on “inclusion” without a true discussion and taking-stock of political differences and visions, and the vitriol that results from glossing these over as so many different meetings that we simply cannot attend, as so many competing actions, meetings, and events to direct our energy toward.

We must use our own energy, and the (inter)personal struggles we are experiencing, as a way to take each other and ourselves to task, to hold ourselves and each other accountable, and to be introspective about our own politics, egos, and ossified beliefs. Activism hurts. It is painful, but it is necessary. We do it for (and in spite of) our own mental health. This means we must be open to each other, and open to the new sensibilities that might arise from this moment, historically and materially. And the new sensibilities arising in this moment are evidenced by the fact that people who don’t always take notice are starting to take notice, those who have not always been active are joining the activities, and those who have shirked accountability are finally being held accountable; take, for instance, the focus of the “Dissent and Security, CUNY-style” meeting at the Grad Center on February 8. This meeting was called for by a planning group that consisted of members of #occupycuny, the Graduate Center General Assembly, and more than forty Distinguished Professor (DP) signatories to a letter of concern to the Chancellor regarding the handling of demonstrations at Baruch College on November 21 and 28, 2011. A delegation of these professors met with Chancellor Goldstein in December, when it was agreed that an independent investigation of the handling of free expression and safety procedures in the university would be called for (this investigation has now been delegated to the Kroll Corporation—the same entity that “investigated” the incident during which peaceful protestors were indiscriminately pepper-sprayed at UC Davis on November 18), and that a subsequent “seminar” on these matters would be convened. Because of delays in this investigation and the planning of said seminar, a student/faculty planning group met to arrange an open meeting to address concerns around dissent, civility, security, and protest, and to produce some sort of joint statement/effort by faculty, students, staff and CUNY community members, especially in light of the events scheduled for March 1. The meeting was well-attended by folks from many different CUNY campuses, and evidenced the distress and outrage a diversity of individuals are feeling over the unjust student arrests and police brutality that occurred at the hands of NYPD and CUNY “peace officers” at Baruch in November. Members of the GC General Assembly and others are currently working on putting together our own statement regarding what happened on November 21 and 28, and we hope to have this ready for wide dissemination by March 1.

Another example of this new sense of responsibility, accountability, camaraderie, and interest in more vigorous organizing was expressed on Tuesday February 21^st, when a meeting was called for by Graduate Center PSC faculty and staff to invite students to discuss the March 1st Day of Action and other initiatives. The idea behind this meeting was to allow a space for professors, union officials, and administrators to support and collaborate on events and actions this spring at the Graduate Center, alongside student and adjunct organizers. This meeting was also attended by a diversity of individuals, including students, contingent workers, distinguished professors, and HEOs, and could be taken as evidence of this newfound sensibility of horizontalism, the desire to take the student movement more seriously, and the desire to let folks who are not necessarily in official leadership positions take the lead in organizing actions.

Whether and how students, full- and part-time faculty, administrators, and other CUNY stakeholders (some of whom have very different stakes) work together and whether and how their struggle unfolds as common or disparate is yet to be determined. One crucial and telling moment was the coordination of the Nationwide Day of Action for Education on March 1^st.Activists across the country came together in a multitude of different actions to defend public education, to express their outrage over the corporatization and privatization of their learning spaces, and to show their solidarity and pave the way for bigger, bolder, and more militant actions on May 1^st. The day’s events also included a 2pm Manhattan convergence at the Department of Education at 52 Chambers Street, followed by a march over the Brooklyn Bridge to Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. There was also a lot of action taking place at the Graduate Center on March 1. Students held a “Radical Lunch” in which they spoke out against the militarization of CUNY, the exploitation of contingent labor, the near-sightededness of standardization projects like CUNY Pathways, and the undemocratic and unelected Board of Trustees. Actions like this are just one part of a larger trend in which activists across CUNY will be broadening and becoming more and more inventive with our tactics throughout the spring, while simultaneously honing our focus and overall strategy.

Another important action took place on March 5, when New York Students Rising (NYSR) and Students United for a Free CUNY rallied hundreds of students in Downtown Albany to demand that our elected officials recognize that education is a RIGHT not a privilege. NYSR has also started a petition campaign for the pledge, a compact with legislators designed to bring more transparency and affordability to public universities. For more information on #M5 check out: nystudentsrising.org and to sign the pledge, go to www.change.org/petitions/calling-on-legislators-to-sign-the-nysr-pledge.This week is also “Teach CUNY” week, from March 5^th-11^th (with an ongoing campaign throughout the month of March)—spearheaded by activists at BMCC. This year’s Teach CUNY is a month-long faculty and student-led campaign to build awareness about the problems caused by decades of cuts to CUNY, including that tuition is increasing rapidly, financial aid is shrinking and harder to earn, class sizes have swelled, underpaid part-time positions have replaced full-time ones, and CUNY’s promise of open admissions for all students is in jeopardy (one thing these activists hope to focus on is the fact that students and workers at the CUNY community colleges are hardest hit by all of these things). For more info, check out: teachcuny.wordpress.com.

All of these actions give us much promise for a productive (yet possibly painful) spring. The energy is most certainly there; it’s simply a matter of getting through the hard conversations, channeling our efforts, and constantly bringing new ideas, styles, people, and relationships into the fold. All of this work is guaranteed to lead us right up to May 1^st, and this May Day a General Strike is being called for by organizers around the country. We will have to wait and see where all of this movement takes us in the next couple of months, but one thing is certain, move we will.

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Anyone who takes political resistance seriously must eventually confront the timeless question of tactics: which forms of resistance are appropriate to the struggle at hand; and which—if any—are not? A second set of questions necessarily accompanies the first. Namely, by what set of criteria are tactics deemed appropriate or inappropriate to begin with and (most importantly) who can legitimately make such a determination? All social movements respond in some way to these questions, but the dilemma is especially complicated for movements seeking to mobilize a broad base of support.

Now that the first “phase” of Occupy has given way to a more dispersed movement, the debate over tactics has intensified. It’s important to remember that the proliferation of ideas and perspectives at work in every movement invariably creates tension. This is part of what makes Occupy, like all democratic movements, so exhilarating. Unfortunately, tension is often misunderstood as disorganization. To those activists for whom uniformity is synonymous with coherence, diversity is perceived as a threat and tactics undertaken on behalf of the movement must be strictly regulated so as not to disrupt a narrow vision of Occupy’s character and aims. One such vision was recently articulated by Chris Hedges in his polemic, “Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy.”

As the title of his column suggests, Hedges sets out to discredit the Black Bloc tactic of protest as incompatible with his vision of Occupy, a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised from the body of the wider movement. To this end, he describes Black Bloc tactics as “criminal,” characterized by “hypermasculinity” and “mob violence.” Hedges is convinced that Black Blocs transform “human beings into beasts” and “hooligans.”

In his one-dimensional characterization, Black Blocs exist for a single purpose: to cause a kind of nihilistic, unthinking mayhem, excused under the euphemistic phrase “diversity of tactics.” Whether or not we accept his characterization of Black Bloc protestors, Hedges’ argument is important—if only because it underscores the contention over tactics. “Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism,” he argues, play into the hands of the state, allowing its police apparatus to intensify repression while alienating the mainstream public.

The corporate state…can use the Black Bloc’s confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished.

Unsurprisingly, the column caused a flurry online, provoking countless responses from across the political spectrum.

There have already been many excellent rebuttals of Hedges’ column, but they have generally concentrated on his straw-man characterization of Black Blocs as monolithic and universally violent. There has been virtually no consideration of the deeper intellectual timidity underlying Hedges assumptions about civil disobedience: a form of political cowardice that has become endemic among self-described progressives in this country. Although precious little of what has happened at Occupy protests can be reasonably characterized as violent (or even disorderly), legality has become a reflexive mantra. Meaningful resistance is, in effect, ruled out from the start. To the extent that a social movement refrains from defying the state in any way, it is taken as mature. In short, the “disobedience” in “civil disobedience” must be eliminated as much as possible if you want to be taken seriously by today’s defanged progressives.

The problem with Hedges’ column is not his basic willingness to criticize features of Occupy that he dislikes. Anyone concerned with the future of the movement has his or her own vision of what it can achieve and what the best way of doing it might be. This is understandable. Rather, it is the forcefulness with which Hedges singles out a specific element within Occupy for special denunciation that I find so troubling. Hedges does not simply criticize particular tactics; he suggests that those who engage in such tactics should be excluded from the wider movement.

To advocate for the proscription of anyone from Occupy is a fundamentally anti-democratic impulse. Like those who generally sympathize with Occupy, but resent the involvement of “hippies,” it defies the inclusive nature of democratic politics. The implicit division Hedges draws between authentic occupiers and imposters is far more damaging to the movement in the long-term than a couple of broken windows at a corporate coffee shop.

Even if we accept Hedges’ central claim that violence in any form undermines Occupy’s future prospects, it’s still difficult to know where to look for the symptoms he describes. Where are all the broken windows? Where are the police casualties? Hedges raises only one concrete example. He accuses Black Bloc protestors of smashing and looting a locally owned coffee shop in Oakland last November. It’s since been revealed that the damage was not actually the work of Black Bloc protestors, nor was the shop locally owned. Yet even this particular case is not statistically significant. Oakland police have been hesitant to report that the overall crime rate in the city dropped by 19 percentsince the protests began.

Hedges is not only concerned about violence and vandalism. He’s wary of tactics not recognizable as either violent or lawless. The use of homemade shields, for instance, is oddly condemned as antithetical to the principles of nonviolence—and don’t even think about shouting at the police, no matter how much they pepper spray your comrades.

If one looks at the radical social movements throughout the twentieth  century from labor and civil rights, to feminism and the antiwar movement, it’s pretty clear that change never occurs without challenging state power. This does not necessarily imply violence, but revolutionary activity by definition seeks to disrupt the status quo. It also tends to be unpredictable: violence and property destruction do occur and an unsympathetic media inevitably chooses to focus overwhelmingly on these instances, however minor. We admire figures like Gandhi and King in part because we recognize the discipline it takes to maintain uniform nonviolence in a revolutionary moment. As David Graeber pointed out in his rebuttal of Hedges article, even Gandhi refused to speak out against the bombing of British trains by allies less dedicated to his nonviolent methods. If one can say anything about these matters in the context of Occupy, it’s that the movement has not been disruptive enough.

One of the most striking aspects of Occupy, especially for foreign observers, has been its remarkable restraint in the face of unusually aggressive police attacks. While European cities literally burn, American occupiers have been at comparative pains to act in compliance with state power. They remain within designated “free speech zones” during demonstrations, content at being shepherded along by America’s finest. In fact, this was a strategic decision made by the New York General Assembly in the movement’s early days. Many of the same activists Hedges would exclude from Occupy for allegedly counterproductive behavior were among the earliest nonviolent tacticians of the movement.

In a column for an early edition of Occupy’s publication, the Occupied Wall Street Journal, Hedges called on Americans to “rise up” and, in a nod to the Palestinian intifada, “shake off” the 1%. Now he condemns those who refuse to conform to his preferred paradigm of resistance. His newfound animus against militancy is especially confusing because, in another column, Hedges seems to embrace riot tactics:

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

The contrast is striking. Just weeks after three people burned to death in a bank set ablaze by militant protestors in Athens, Hedges praised the Greeks for “getting it,” yet he now rebukes American activists for their comparatively tame acts of burning American flags and chanting “Fuck the police.” I’m quite sure Hedges would not approve of tactics that result in deaths here in the United States (nor should we) but singing paeans to the Greeks, while condemning militancy at home speaks reams about the problem with the American Left today. Progressives like Hedges are content to romanticize foreign struggles, but at the end of the day, what happens abroad stays abroad.

Occupy is arguably this country’s most important broad-based social movement in decades, but we must not shrink from direct action nor should we attack those who engage in minor unlawful tactics. After all, civil disobedience requires at least some forms of disobedience. Protest needs to become open resistance at some point if we expect to change American politics at the structural level. Though we may disagree over just what this means, the movement is strengthened by its diversity. If Occupy represents a democratic moment, a breath of fresh air amidst the double-pronged forces of neoliberal capitalism and American empire, we should be extremely careful not to undermine that spirit by launching trivial internecine attacks. What Eric Hobsbawm wrote with regard to the French revolution remains true of all spontaneous eruptions of political activity: “judgment is less important than analysis … [W]hat is the point of preaching a sermon against an earthquake? (Or in favour of it?)”

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It is a common pre-conception of the New York theatrical scene that Off-Off Broadway theatre (which generally shows in houses seating fewer than one hundred audience members) can be strange, goofy, challenging, and even at times opaque. The “downtown” theatre scene of Off-Off Broadway shows has found a variety of homes at venues such as LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club, WOW Café, Theatre for the New City, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, HERE Arts Center, and P.S. 122. The Ohio Theatre in Soho, a fixture of this scene since the 1980s, closed in August 2010 after the landlord refused to extend the lease. A little more than a year after the old Ohio closed, the New Ohio began its inaugural season in 2011 at a new home in the Archive Building at 154 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. (My last experience as an audience member at the old Ohio was entirely in line with the aesthetics of New York’s Downtown scene. In 2009, I saw Les Freres Corbusier’s Dance Dance Revolution there. It was a raucous and ridiculous dance comedy, loosely based on the video game of the same name, in which a David Bowie-like alien named Moonbeam Funk led a crowd of street toughs in a dancing revolution against a futuristic dystopian state in which dancing was banned.) Another obvious pre-conception of the downtown Off-Off Broadway scene is that the artists creating this work are frequently young, ambitious, and sometimes unfortunately rather inexperienced. And while the creators of Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War are indeed young—and have aptly called themselves The Mad Ones—the show is an expertly fine-tuned production, both adventurous and masterful, quirky and savvy.

Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War is a thoroughly funny show, filled with comic moments, songs, and silly interactions, but, like Samuel Beckett’s best work, does this all while still offering a bleak examination of what happens when hope is no longer an option. The show is set in the cluttered radio studio “Victory Studio” in Irkutsk (one of the largest cities in Siberian Russia). There, four Russians are engaged in broadcasting the At Home Field Guide, a song-and-storytelling radio show clearly modeled on A Prairie Home Companion. These twenty-first century Russians work in a space that seems to come directly out of 1950s America: uncomfortable looking wooden chairs and desks, radio equipment with far too many wires, and, directly center stage, a vintage 1950s-style dynamic microphone. As the seventy-five-minute-long play unfolds, it becomes clear why these Russians inhabit a space haunted by twentieth-century Americana: in this alternate history, the entire continent of North America was destroyed and rendered uninhabitable by giant robots in 1959. Periodically, those robots seem to be returning and obliterating cities in Russia. The radio actors in the show—and their audiences—rely on nostalgia for an imagined idyllic past. They see Cold War-era Americana as a lost Garden of Eden. Normally, to call a work of art nostalgic is something of an insult: nostalgia is usually perceived as silly at best, but more often saccharine and pathetic. Yet in Samuel & Alasdair, The Mad Ones show how in a world without hope, nostalgia may be the best option—or the only one.

The cast consists of four characters—the show’s unnamed Host (co-creator Joe Curnutte), the scientist and author Dr. Mischa Mormanov (co-creator Marc Bovino), the singer and actress Anastasia Volinski (co-creator Stephanie Wright Thompson), and the onstage guitarist Alexei “Tumbleweed” Petrovya (co-creator and music director Michael Dalto). Except Dalto, each of the other actors plays a second role in the radio-play-within-the-play, a depiction of imagined life in Midwestern 1950s America. The Host and Mischa play two brothers, Alasdair and Samuel, respectively. Alasdair, the older brother, is a handsome high school athlete, Samuel a sensitive boy plagued by visions of future apocalypse. Both are in love with their neighbor and former playmate Susie, played by Anastasia. The play-within-a-play is told over several episodes, each of which is told in a different style: the first seems to come from Leave it to Beaver (genuine 1950s middle America), the second in American noir style, the third episode as a Western. The stories also include classic American tunes like “Back in the Saddle Again,” “You Send Me,” and “She’s Got You.”

The episodes in the story of Alasdair and Samuel are interrupted by breaks for advertisements (whether for borscht or expensive Moscow jewelry stores), technical difficulties, emergency broadcasts in Morse code, and a “this day in history” segment. In the “real” world of the studio, we see the Host trying to keep everything together as it becomes apparent that something horrible is happening outside in the city. He maintains an apparently cheerful demeanor as things fall apart—an attitude that is illustrated by the silly bright red socks he wears with an otherwise conservative three-piece suit. He keeps smiling even when it is clear that the end is very near. Twice the studio loses power and the entire stage and audience are plunged into complete darkness: the first time for only a few seconds, but in the second instance for several minutes. The Host stumbles around and leaves the stage to find a flashlight; when the lights are finally restored Mischa has banged into something and given himself a bloody nose. Mischa, who reveals he hasn’t written a book or article for over a decade, pines for the love of Anastasia; during one sequence where the broadcast has been suspended, she tells the story of how she grew up in poverty and became a singer. Near the end of the play, the four broadcasters make a clear decision to finish their radio show instead of trying to escape the city. After their broadcast is complete, they realize the only thing on the airwaves is static; Anastasia and Mischa begin to dance together as the sound of an approaching shockwave becomes audible and the lights go out.

Co-creator Lila Neugebauer’s direction is subtle and extremely effective: the show is wonderfully paced and effectively transitions between comic and serious moments. The second blackout is particularly effective: never before have I sat in a completely dark theatre for so long. Throughout the entirety of this sequence, which must have been at least four-to-five minutes long, I remained completely engaged by the story that I could no longer see. So was the rest of the audience: there was no coughing or shuffling in the audience as we sat riveted to our seats while the Host searched for light and Mischa stumbled around the stage, with the only visible objects in the New Ohio being a few tiny strips of glow-tape. The sets, costumes, and lighting are similarly excellent: Laura Jellinek’s set, Jessica Pabst’s costumes, and Mike Inwood’s lighting evoke both nostalgia and decrepitude: the ironically named “Victory Studio” is simultaneously an ode to American radio broadcasting and the last remnant of a society falling onto very hard times. Stowe Nelson’s sound deserves special note: not only does it highlight the wonderful singing of Thompson and Dalto’s skilled guitar playing, but the inclusion of static clicks, ominous white noise, echoes, and broadcasted sounds of a city in chaos crucially contribute to the overall aesthetic effect of Samuel & Alasdair.

The highest praise goes to the actors. Curnutte, Bovino, and Thompson effectively transition between their roles in the studio (where they speak in English with Russian accents) and their roles in the radio-play-within-the-play, where they speak in American accents—but, amazingly, ones that sound as if they are foreigners doing their best to sound like “authentic Americans.” Thompson’s singing of Gene Autry, Sam Cooke, and Patsy Cline is especially effective. Thompson is a genuine crooner who makes the songs powerfully emotional. The one real misfire in the show is Dalto’s monologue: throughout the vast majority of the show, Dalto’s musician Alexei “Tumbleweed” is completely silent except for his guitar playing. Towards the end of the show, he gives a brief monologue, spoken entirely in Russian. What he says is a complete unknown: a problem both of the creators’ choice to give this speech in Russian and in Dalto’s performance. The problem was that it was impossible for me to tell either what Tumbleweed was saying, or why he was finally speaking; both what he was communicating and why the creators chose to give him this speech were unclear. He was more compelling when he remained silent.

In addition to focusing on nostalgia, a central theme of Samuel & Alasdair is the act of telling stories, of making up a history that is partly known, partly imagined. The radio-play-within-the-play of Alasdair, Samuel, and Susie is obviously such a story, since in the world of the play America was completely obliterated, without survivors, in 1959. Another instance of such obvious fictionalizing comes during one of the ad breaks, when the Host describes Anastasia in order to advertise for an upscale jewelry store. The Host describes her to his listeners as a princess-like opera singer in a gown covered with diamonds and jewelry; onstage in front of us, we see that she is in fact wearing simple, even cheap-looking clothing. The facts as the audience sees them are brushed aside in favor of a more glamorous fiction. Another story that is told onstage is that of the robot war itself: in Mischa’s exposition, giant robots came out of holes in the ground, obliterating entire cities, leaving nothing higher than a human being’s knee standing. Their attacks also included electromagnetic pulses that disabled any electrical devices for miles and massive bursts of radiation that left the areas attacked entirely uninhabitable. The EMP, radiation, and devastating shock waves sound to me like the actual effects of nuclear weapons, and raise an interesting question in my mind: had there in fact been a robot war? Or was the alternate history presented in Samuel & Alasdair one in which Russia had in fact launched nuclear weapons at the United States? Were these new attacks in fact now retaliatory nuclear strikes being made against Russia? Was the robot war itself a fiction that the Russians had invented in order to cover up a violent and brutal attack made by humans generations earlier? There is nothing in the show to explicitly support such an interpretation, other than the omnipresent theme of obscuring the truth in favor of a prettier fiction. And what could be a more problematic truth than the fact of human beings’ capacity for war and violence? 

Whether or not they in fact intended to depict the aftermath of a robot war, The Mad Ones’ Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War is a triumph of downtown Off-Off Broadway theatre. This collaboratively co-created work (which was workshopped in Louisville and presented at the Anti-depressant Festival at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and at Ars Nova’s ANT Fest) portends well for the future of The New Ohio. If the theatre continues to present shows of this quality from such adventurous, intellectual, and engaging young artists, it will soon once again become renowned as a star of the downtown theatre scene. It is worth noting that while the show (which is unfortunately now closed after an extension) is extremely compelling, outside of the blackout sequence, Samuel & Alasdair was not the most original theatrical performance I have seen. On the one hand, it owes a great deal to Samuel Beckett’s post-apocalyptic tragicomedies like Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days; on the other hand it is a blatant collage of War of the Worlds and A Prairie Home Companion (although that juxtaposition is admittedly a novel idea). Additionally, just last year, the SITI (Saratoga International Theatre Institute) Company revived Anne Bogart’s 2000 production of War of the Worlds at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop. Bogart’s production, written by Naomi Iizuka, similarly dramatizes the inside of a radio studio as Orson Welles and fellow actors broadcast their infamous 1938 radio play. The shows are strikingly different: the SITI show dramatizes actual American history, while The Mad Ones are imagining an alternate history and set their show in an imaginary Russia. Nevertheless, the crucial similarities remain, and they display the fact that the downtown experimental theatre continues, decade after decade, to explore themes of metatheatricality and artistic creation in troubled times. New York is lucky that it has talented young artists like The Mad Ones to skillfully continue exploring these themes in New York’s vital experimental theatre scene.

Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War. Conceived by Marc Bovino, Joe Curnutte, and Lila Neugebauer and created with the ensemble. Written by Marc Bovino and Joe Curnutte. Directed by Lila Neugebauer. Sets by Laura Jellinek. Costumes by Jessica Pabst. Sound by Stowe Nelson. Lighting by Mike Inwood. Dramaturgy by Sarah Lunnie. Stage Management by Cadi Thomas. Music by Michael Dalto. Feeaturing: Joe Curnutte, Marc Bovino, Stephanie Wright Thompson, and Michael Dalto. At The New Ohio Theatre. January 5–February 18, 2012 (now closed). Wednesdays–Saturdays, 8pm. Tickets: $ Produced by The Pearl Theatre Company. At New York City Center Stage II. September 13 – October 23. Tuesdays and Thursdays–Saturdays at 7:30pm. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 2:30pm. Tickets: $15 – $25. See http://www.sohothinktank.org/robotwar.htm for further details.

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In 2009 the New Museum brought us its first triennial, the cynical and surprisingly boring Younger than Jesus, which, save for the video work (especially that of Ryan Trecartin, Cyprien Gaillard, and Dineo Seshee Bopape), was mostly an ill-conceived attempt to set a new paradigm for what is hip and adventurous in the art world. Three years later we face yet another attempt to tell us a story of youth and talent in the New Museum’s second triennial, The Ungovernables, set to compete with the Whitney Biennial. The result is, despite its many faults, much more appealing this time around. The cleverness is gone, replaced with an earnest attempt to understand how to create art in an unstable world. What makes The Ungovernables interesting, as Holland Cotter rightly points out, is its distinct lack of American born artists and the global scope of its participants (a total of fifty including individuals and collectives). For that, the show’s curator Eugenie Joo and her assistant Ryan Inouye should be commended. Indeed, as an event it stands in direct contrast to the Whitney Biennial which serves as a celebration of mostly American artists. This is a good and reasonable thing, as is the fact that the artists featured in the show were all born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. The decision to present new and younger artists who are not American and often neither white nor male is, without question, an important one.

If the New Museum does one thing right, it refrains from worshipping at the altar of male genius, as MoMA frequently does. But this should not be construed to mean that the New Museum is free from an agenda, or that it is not calculated in what it chooses to present. The commitment to the new is important, but it is often—and this seems to be the case with the New Museum these past five years—a trap. By taking a stance against the establishment, the New Museum has positioned itself  as the answer to what it is fearful of becoming. In doing so, and this is perhaps the terrible irony of all rebellion, it has created its own reified and hegemonic structure. Instead of the rebellion being co-opted by a sinister capitalist, the New Museum’s rebellion was co-opted by its own good intentions. It has become the self-appointed arbiter of what newness is and how it might be valuable.  The New Museum aspires to the same power as MoMA, the same taste making as the Whitney, but it does it in a slicker way and seeks to guide us to the proper orientation towards what important art is. Everything about the New Museum exudes the proper authority, it speaks in the perfect art-speak, its presentation is suitably shabby yet chic. It really should be able to make an irresistible sales pitch, except the New Museum wears its ideological leanings on its wall texts, and is unable to leave the art alone.

Take for example Beijing based artist Hu Xiaoyuan’s Wood (2009-2010), which consists of thirty-one pieces of wood covered in white chiffon silk with the wood’s natural grain traced in brush ink. The wood is then whitewashed and re-covered with the chiffon silk. Then it is leaned against the wall. We are told that Hu’s works “externalize the processes of the artist’s thinking” and that they emerge from “tumultuous deep-seated inner considerations.” What piece of art doesn’t engage in this process? Are we to believe that the way Hu makes art is somehow special or different than the artistic needs of every other artist? This is what the curatorial text implies, whether that is the intent or not. The problem is that the philosophic message behind the curatorial direction leaves the work overly complex yet somehow empty. Is it beautiful? Yes. Particularly interesting? Maybe. Precious? Absolutely. Lee Kit’s  Scratching the table surface and something more, in which he literally scratched a table at the same spot for two years has real potential both as an object and as a piece of performance art, and were the table his only contribution his participation would have been a success. Instead the curators decided to show Lee’s paintings on cardboard and cotton, which have pop song lyrics, textile patterns, and logos for consumer products. As far as paintings go they are neither particularly good nor interesting.

Cairo and New York based Iman Issa’s sculptures, while formally compelling, are fairly uninspired: an obelisk in mahogany, lightbulbs, tables, vinyl text. They have titles like Material for a sculpture representing a bygone era of luxury and decadence and Material for a sculpture proposed as an alternative that has become an embarrassment to its people. The wall text alerts us to the fact that Issa is inspired by “monuments and memories of personal significance…and channels the logic of these structures to propose an alternative to contemporary consciousness.” The problem with art that proposes so much, or that we are told proposes so much, is that we are in need of a guide; the abstruseness must be conquered by direction. We are not allowed to experience them merely as objects, and the most powerful thing about Issa’s sculptures is their distinct objectness. Without it, it falls flat, especially in the face of such grand pronouncements by the curators. Bona Park, from Seoul, Korea, engages in that unkillable art form: relational aesthetics. Instead of making something tangible, Park gave a questionnaire, before the opening, to those who have helped realize The Ungovernables (carpenters, curators, editors, museum office workers, artists, etc.) about their dinner habits. She then went out and bought groceries based on their answers, with the intent to cook them a meal at their homes after the reception. The idea was that those who chose to participate in the act would carry their bag of groceries around the opening reception and then when asked why he or she was doing so Park’s contribution to the Triennial would be revealed.  Apparently Park has “reverse[d] the public positions of the many people who work behind the scenes in preparation of an exhibition.” I’m not so sure. There is something sweet in the piece, but it ends there. What we find in so much of The Ungovernables is a deafening earnestness. In many ways it is appreciated, real earnestness is in short supply in art these days and the faux earnestness of Jeff Koons does not count. Earnestness, however, is not enough.

As with all New Museum group shows, there is ridiculousness masquerading as moral depth. None more so than Vietnam-born, Berlin-based artist Danh Vo’s We the People, a full scale replica of the “exterior skin” of the Statue of Liberty that he had fabricated in China, but can only display pieces of. As a group of objects, the sculpture is quite beautiful, but the intended message behind it nonsensical, even ridiculous. Vo and the New Museum claim that he has “emancipate[d] Liberty Enlightening the World from her symbolic burden.” Indeed, Vo even goes so far as to claim that “She should be like water digging its own way to the sea, escaping through our fingers. I wish only to deal with [her] through the logistics, economy, and practicality…Why should we impose more interpretation or use at all, hasn’t she been raped enough?” Raped? This is ludicrous. What rape is Vo referring to, when was it, and where? The metaphor of rape is lost on me and is patently unkind to those who have actually been raped. Where the work would have been impressive on its own right, the explicit reference to sexual violence and the subsequent desire to save the statue from a predatory world renders the sculpture absurd. Rape is too violent an act to transform casually into metaphor.

This is not to claim, however, that there is nothing worthwhile at The Ungovernables. The very problem with the exhibition is that much of it is quite captivating, even worth seeing a second time. Two artists are particularly impressive: Finnish artist Pilva Takala’s The Trainee, a video/performance work from 2008 in which Takala posed as a new employee at an accounting firm, produced nothing, and gave up the pretense of productivity. Somehow she was able to film the whole thing and even acquire emails from her superiors discussing her odd behavior as she just sat at her desk staring out or riding the elevator all day. It is marvelously interesting, providing real tension as we watch her relationships with fellow employees begin to change as they become more unsure of her place in the corporate structure. Julie Dault, a Canadian now living in New York, makes muscular yet delicate sculptures out of plexiglass, Tambour, Everlast boxing wraps, and string. She builds them onsite and the titles reference the date and time it took to produce the work. The result is dependent not only on her own strength that day, but on the conditions within which she is allowed to create. They have a real physicality, yet also a disarming delicateness, as if the bent Plexiglas and Tambour could snap the strings that bind them at any time.

Yet what makes the show unsuccessful and the New Museum a deeply problematic institution is that it is ultimately undermined by its own self-conscious agenda. Where institutions like MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim never take any real risks, the New Museum is willing to put itself out there and give my generation a chance to speak. On the surface this is a good thing as it allows artists who are young and relatively little known a bit of spotlight in the staid art world. Eugenie Joo and Ryan Inouye inform us that The Ungovernables is an “exhibition about the urgencies of a generation who came of age after the independence and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s,” and takes its inspiration “from the concept of ‘ungovernability’ and its transformation from a pejorative term used to describe unruly ‘natives’ to a strategy of civil disobedience and self determination embraced by the African National Congress in South Africa in 1986. ‘The Ungovernables’ is meant to suggest both anarchic and organized resistance and a dark humor about the limitations and potentials of this generation.”

This is nonsense. Very little on view is anarchic or possessed of dark humor, except  perhaps Cairo-based artist Hassan Khan’s strangely moving film Jewel, in which two men dance facing each other in a way that is both erotic and combative. As for the limitations and potentials of this generation of which the curators speak, and I’m probably displaying my own ideological stance here, apparently we’re quite good at video art yet are having a hard time producing a really great painter. Collectives like Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project, in which ten to twelve writers and photographers take an annual road trip to cross the “invisible borders” that divide nations and people on the African continent, and the Israeli group Public Movement, who sponsor screenings, lectures, and other forms of gathering as a “performative research body which investigates and stages political action in public spaces,” give a sense of organization but are so overtly political and socially conscious that they have become something other than museum worthy, perhaps something entirely different from art itself. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does confuse the difference between art making and social action and subsumes the very real question of whether or not the two can be the same thing. If we are to go by the Triennial, the answer is no.

Therefore, what is so confounding is that New Museum should be better than it is, a touchstone instead of the petulant younger sibling to New York’s more respected, and for that matter, skillful, museums. While MoMA has never really realized that people continued to make art after the 1970s ended, the New Museum, as it’s presently constituted since its move from its old space on Broadway to its current location on the Bowery in 2007, seems to believe that art did not begin until after 9/11. This may appear an insensitive, even cynical, statement, but it is not. What I am arguing is that the New Museum has made a decidedly reactionary decision to champion art that is emblematic of an increasingly unstable world. 9/11 did shake us. It proved our vulnerability: that the wolves were out there waiting. But the reality is that we should have known we were unsafe, at the very least we might have seen Timothy McVeigh as a sign of things to come and not an isolated incident. America has never gotten over its millenialist longings; we were founded on them and continue to believe in our special brand of divine providence.

This fantasy was there when John Winthrop dreamt of a city on a hill; when the Puritans felt abandoned by the eyes of Great Britain and made their errand into the wilderness; when we screamed of tyranny and declared our independence; when we moved west and slaughtered the buffalo and exterminated the Indians; when we engaged in civil war; and when we came to the edge of the continent, the frontier finally closed, and only wanted more. The point of an institution like the New Museum is that it should constantly remind us that the millennium never came. It should let us in America know that there are other artists out there, other modes of thought and practice that are foreign to us and equally legitimate to our own homegrown greatness. In some ways the New Museum does this, and this is why I argue that it does not believe that art existed before 9/11, not that its curators actually think art is a product of the past ten years, but as an institution, the New Museum seems to be saying that an art that speaks to us in the wake of unfathomable tragedy has only now come into real and tangible existence. This is why the New Museum looks to youth and newness because as an institution it seems generally interested in trying to find a way to use art to understand the post-9/11 world.

Yet it is for that reason the New Museum is so vexing. It proposes to give voice to a generation’s discontent. There is no question that my generation has much to be discontented about. The enlightened, moral, and well-meaning liberals of our parents’ generation made serious mistakes in the 1960s and 1970s while the suburban warriors, to borrow a phrase from Lisa McGirr, of the sunbelt managed to bide their time after Barry Goldwater’s failure and keep their heads down and work away at fomenting their own quiet revolution that saw its greatest triumph in Reagan and then its resurgence with George W. Bush. The radicals of the 1960s and 1970s look back with fondness to the years of their youth, but the conservatives march ever further ahead. They face the future, while our well meaning parents stand bewildered by the times, unable to reconcile the failures of their vision with the world that their mistakes brought into existence. It is for this reason that they embrace their own deeply personal rebellion so much and see often in their children an apathy that is not actually there.

This should not be confused as a distinctly American phenomenon. It is not. The revolutions have failed. The result of the forward looking of the right and retrograde longings of the left is that we, the very sons and daughters, the ungovernables, that the New Museum hopes to represent and speak to, are compelled to grapple with the wreckage that is the present. But the New Museum sets the terms by which that wounded voice can be heard. It would do well to abandon its ideological stance, to show a bit of restraint from the lure of youth and newness, and its overly affected posture. There is real potential there, but that potential is being wasted by an ideological mission that is neither clear nor particularly profound. The danger for the New Museum, as is the danger for all dogmatic agendas, is that if one goes looking for anarchy and resistance, just as if one goes looking for complacency and cooptation, one will always find it. The New Museum might consider allowing the work to speak for itself. More often than not it won’t, as most art, just as most everything, says nothing. Yet sometimes art does speak to us, it helps us to handle the chaos of life.  Rather than holding our hand and telling us what to look for in the wilderness of the present, the New Museum would do well to let us embrace the starkness we now find ourselves in.

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Louis Reyes Rivera—poet laureate and people’s historian of the CUNY movement—passed away in the early hours of March 3, 2012, leaving behind a legacy as vibrant as the Africana, Latin@merican, and Caribbean communities for whom he dedicated his life to document and praise. As evident in the dozens of public remembrances that have already surfaced since his death, Rivera will be celebrated as a tirelessly principled elder and radical artist par excellence to a huge extended family in the social justice, performance, and writing scenes in CUNY and around NYC. Rivera is survived by his wife, Barbara Killens Rivera; two daughters, Abiba Deceus and Kutisha Booker; son Barra Wyn; and four grandchildren, James Booker, Akalia Booker, Quamey Venable, and Jean-Oliver Deceus.

Many of us revere Rivera as an active participant and chronicler of the 1969 City College of New York Strike for Open Admissions and the formation of an Ethnic Studies department, during which Black and Latino students occupied campus buildings as part of a massive city-wide student and community rebellion linking social movements to higher education. With his classmate and fellow poet Sekou Sundiata, Rivera co-founded The Paper, the first CUNY student newspaper under the control of Black and Puerto Rican students that still operates today as a leading political and artistic forum for students of color at City College. His name and tremendous inspiration continues to resound in staff discussions of The Paper’s past, present, and future mission.

Rivera never ceased to engage with his political action roots at CUNY. I first had the honor to meet him at City College during a March 4, 2010 student walkout as part of a national education day of action. I had anticipated this opportunity ever since beginning my studies there in 2006 and hearing stories about him within our school’s richly subversive history. On that cold and wet day in March, Rivera came to speak with the few hundred students gathered outside the North Academic Center, laughing and chanting with critical purpose despite the rain that dampened our posters and banners. At a stature of less than five feet, with his loud, steady, luminous flow of prose-poetry, Rivera was the embodiment of the idea that we, history’s little folks, could galvanize and transform any space we occupied.  

More recently, in 2011, Rivera joined two panels that spoke to students and faculty about these histories. At a February 22 event on “CUNY Student Strikes,” hosted by Students United for a Free CUNY, Rivera stated, “You have to be willing to challenge everything, even the assumption that you have to go to school and pay for it. Students leave either through the front door with a degree in one hand and a debt in the other or the leave through the backdoor with no degree but a debt. That makes you an indentured servant.” For many student activists in the room, these prescient remarks would bridge the over three decades-long struggle for CUNY tuition to be free again with the Occupy Student Debt campaign and debt statement-burnings at protests that arose in the fall of 2011.

At a November 2011 event on “Black Student Radicalism: Past, Present, and Future,” co-hosted by the Africana Studies Group and the Adjunct Project at the CUNY Graduate Center, Rivera recounted the conditions for why students of color have rebelled, noting that only 10 percent of all CUNY students were from non-European American backgrounds in 1968. He shared how the CCNY campus had become an extraordinary political realm for discussion and debate. H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael spoke to packed rooms, films like Battle of Algiers were screened in the wake of anti-colonial revolutions in Africa. Future leaders of the Young Lords Party and the Puerto Rican Student Union engaged with Black students in the Onyx Society, as well as committed anti-racist white students, to form an alliance that led them to take over buildings upon coming to the conclusion that, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., the administration’s call to “wait almost always means never.”  
Rivera’s contribution electrified the room at a time when many of us in the CUNY community had become actively involved in the Occupy movement, and desired to learn how immense concrete victories had been won in the past. Kristin Moriah, Africana Studies Group Co-chair, offers these words of remembrance about the event: “We wanted to assemble a group of people who could speak to the diverse forms of activism at CUNY that often get obscured. The word “activist” tends to conjure a certain sort of white male image that doesn’t necessarily hold true at CUNY. Holding the panel was a way of refuting that and emphasizing the importance of cross-racial solidarity in student activism.

“Luis Reyes Rivera had an incredible presence; he was a small powerhouse. With his flowing beard and yellow dashiki he was striking. It was impossible not to be struck by his wit, wry humor and passion for activism. He captivated everyone in the audience during his last talk at the Graduate Center. He was able to crystallize so many of the issues that concern us, especially the importance of access to a liberal arts education and the development of critical thinking skills. He wanted us to know our own history. He loved the people of New York and he believed that CUNY was worth fighting for because of these people. He was so generous with his wisdom. It was a tough act to follow.

“I think that he really came to speak to us at the right time. In so many ways, that panel was a gift. Watching the reaction of the crowd reemphasized how important it is that that link to our activist past be maintained and that the contributions of black and Latino student not be erased from our institutional history. We have a lot of incredibly talented and committed young activists at CUNY. We’re doing a lot of amazing work right now, but we didn’t invent the wheel. It’s important for us to remember that we are part of a long tradition. Even though the battles we’re facing now might seem uphill, we have faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles before AND won. There’s a great comfort in that. For me, Louis Reyes Rivera’s passing really means losing an important link to CUNY history. It’s so important that Louis and his work not be forgotten.”

Rivera’s involvement in the CUNY movement represented only one of a spectacular array of his projects that could easily fill several lifetimes. Many respected, worked alongside, and learned from Rivera as an esteemed poet and performer. CCNY professor Herb Boyd writes, “At the National Writers Union, a steering committee in which Rivera was a key component called an emergency meeting and set in motion a number of ways to remember their tireless member.  ‘He was intricately involved in so many activities that it will probably take a team of us to fulfill just half of what he was doing and what was on his agenda,’ said Loretta Campbell.”

In a stunning display of persistence to share knowledge for all, Rivera helped publish over 200 books, including John Oliver Killens’ Great Black Russian, Adal Maldonado’s Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, and Sekou Sundiata’s Free! He also co-edited Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam with Tony Medina, and Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates with Bruce George. Rivera’s publishing company Shamal Books regularly released collections from some of the city’s finest poets. During this time, Rivera published four books of his own work: Who Pays The Cost (1978), This One For You (1983), In Control of English (1988 and 1992), and Scattered Scripture (1996).

Sandra Maria Estevez writes of Rivera’s own award-winning collection Scattered Scripture, “A volume of highly crafted poems of militant and radical perspective, it is a literary masterpiece that attempts to translate history into poetry, covering the chapters missing from official renditions of history. This collection took twenty years of research to create. The first poem completed for the book, “(what are they doing),” was written in 1974, and the last poem, “(like toussaint, so marti)” was written in 1995. In between came all the other works as responses to his research. Scattered Scripture contains forty-one pages of notes that provide the sources and historical context for the poems, making the book complete as a poetic song, a historical document, and an instructional device.”

Before his death, Rivera had just finalized for publication a 150-page epic poem Jazz in Jail. In a Spring 2009 interview with Eric Serrano, Rivera explained its purpose: “This project began roughly seven years ago. What happens if Jazz (personified) gets busted and put in jail? For what? For trying to stand against the exploitation of music by the music industry… For trying to bring together all of the music that comes out of the Diaspora—Reggae, Samba, Mambo, Calypso, Merengue, Hard bop, Cool bop, Be bop, the Blues, Mother Blues (the mother of Jazz), Grandpa Dirge, Grandma Praise Song, Work Song, Birth Song, the Chant—into one huge convention of the music, a family reunion – Let’s discuss our condition… So I had an opportunity to pay homage to poetry and music, to show you the conditions inside a prison and inside the court room, and I could even trace the history of it.”

Rivera’s dedication to changing—as well as documenting and performing—people’s histories was infused in the ongoing community literacy and orality programs he led at Sistas’ Place in what he liked to call the “People’s Independent Republic of Brooklyn.” For many years he ran a four-hour writing workshop on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays, as well as “Jazzoetry” and open mic sessions on the 1st and 3rd Sundays. Moreover, for several years River hosted the WBAI radio show “Perspective,” a dynamic forum on all matters political and cultural for the people of New York. One of his students, Rich Villar, reminisced after Rivera’s death: “Documentation is a behavior I learned from him. Archive is a survival instinct he tried to teach us all.”

Indeed, Rivera was precisely the kind of representative educator who CUNY students have continually fought to include in our schools: “I come from a peasant background (i.e., Puerto Rico), from the lumpen proletariat (i.e., urban ghetto), and from the dispossessed (i.e., of African and Amerindian descent), and I choose deliberately not to forget or forsake that there is beauty and relevance in that lineage. No shame. But no arrogance either.” He repeatedly said that he wished to be remembered “as a bridge between the various currents of the underclass.” Rivera also once clarified, “If I am an academic, it’s by default. I never looked at it as teaching as much as sharing with others. Information is supposed to be part of our natural inheritance, just by virtue of our birth. What we call education is really more like being tricked and trained to meet the demands of labor.”

One part bell hooks, one part Howard Zinn, Rivera “distinguished himself as a professor of creative writing, Pan-African literature, African-American culture and history, Caribbean history, Puerto Rican history, and Nuyorican literature at such institutions as State University of New York-Stony Brook, Hunter College, College of New Rochelle, LaGuardia College, Pratt Institute, and Boricua College,” writes National Writers Union member Barry Hock. Throughout his life, Rivera was honored with numerous awards, including a lifetime achievement award from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1995), a Special Congressional Recognition award (1988), and City College of New York’s 125th Anniversary Medal (1973).    

Because of these myriad achievements, Rivera’s legacy must be both honored and extended for more people to learn. Hank Williams, another panelist in the “Black Student Radicalism” event, argues, “Louis Reyes Rivera, known as ‘the janitor of history,’ is the type of person who we often allow to fall through the cracks of recorded ‘official’ history, but whose memory is passed on through the African oral tradition. In some ways, that’s fitting, because that’s how he often operated himself. Anyone who’s seen or heard his incredibly gripping poem on being in the room during Malcolm X’s assassination [“Bullet Cry”] can attest to the power of the spoken word when used by him. In 2011, he was honored at the Harlem Book Fair and said that he understood that his mastery of words and as a storyteller came with a great responsibility: that of telling the truth. This is what he did. It will get you in trouble if your concern is mainstream acclaim, but his concern was more for those who, like him, were on the underside of history. He repped us proudly and well.”

In the essay “Inside the River of Poetry,” Rivera asserted the profound stakes that guided this quality of fiercely conscientous and loving interaction with our communities. “Always there is need for song… And every human has a poem to write, a compulsion to contemplate out loud, an urge to dig out that ore of confusion locked up inside. But with the contradictions of privilege and caste, of class and gender distinctions regulating access, of those ever present distortions in textbooks with their one-sided measure of human worth, and with the culture of white man still serving as ultimate yardstick to what is acceptable as matter, not everyone is permitted to learn to read, much less to study poetry or hone the art and take the risk of putting one’s self on paper.” May we all contribute to Louis Reyes Rivera’s memory by endeavoring to create a society that one day welcomes poetry from everyone.

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