CUNY's Aging Leftists Gather, Blather, Disperse

"The position of the adjunct is analogous to that of a building trades worker," writes CUNY sociology Prof. Stanley Aronowitz, to the surprise of building trades workers everywhere and the fey writers who pretend to know them. "The major difference between the two occupations is that, in this country, because of the extreme mobility and insecurity of the building trades, workers have organized a strong guild to protect their benefits and their wages wherever they work... So far adjunct professors are, except in the small number of fields marked by labor shortages, at the mercy of those who hire them."

Inside the City College Center for Worker Education's clown-car of an auditorium, adjunct Marcia Newfield decided her days hoisting the steel crossbeams undergirding the city's ivory tower for company-store scrip have ended. A representative of CUNY Adjuncts Unite!, Newfield took to the well-scuffed stage to voice her complaints. "They work so hard"?15 credits a semester, typically?"they travel all over the place," she claimed.

Many in the audience were tenured full-time professors in the City University system, who expressed their solidarity with Newfield's beleaguered "subway schleppers," clapping ferociously and opening their wallets when the wicker basket was passed between the aisles.

That was as far as new business got at the center last Friday?red palms and crumpled dollar bills. This was a fundraiser for Adjuncts Unite! and the New Caucus, the radical "participatory democracy" firebrand faction of academics and faculty (my mother's a member) that upset the incumbent leadership of the Professional Staff Congress, the CUNY professionals' union, in last April's election. Following a campaign characterized by heated rhetoric?one New Caucus member, reflecting, bandied around the term "red-baiting"?the New Caucus won all four executive officer positions in the PSC and 13 of the 17 other executive council slots. New Caucus are unapologetic left-wingers, who talk about living wages and promise, in organizer Lorraine Cohen's words, "a new kind of labor movement"?oh?"that combats the persistence of institutional racism, income inequality and the absence of real democracy."

And James Traub says the left is dead in New York. The left is incapable of dying. However, it's supremely capable of the sort of navel-gazing that engenders apoplexy and is functionally indistinguishable from rigor mortis. What a tremendous disappointment, given that the New Caucus accomplished more than anyone on the outside thought imaginable. Anyone not already a part of New Caucus trekked downtown to hear a panel discussion about the lessons and alleged relevance of the 1960s radical left and how it impacts the current state of organized thought-labor, following a documentary. What they got was a lot less.

So with the cursory introduction out of the way, the ranting extinguished and the basket passed around for Peter to pay Mary, it was time for the movie. Screened that night was Helen Garvy's Rebels with a Cause, a hagiography of Students for a Democratic Society, the mythical vanguard of the enlightened generation past, where a fourth of the audience cut its teeth before joining the academy it once protested. ("In the early 1960s, a student movement grew in America.")

This little light of mine...

Birmingham hoses bombard vigilant desegregation agitators in 1963. SDS luminary Carl Oglesby speaks of abject human terror as a formative, mobilizing experience. "Carl Oglesby's still alive?" someone wondered. Someone else might snicker. The usual suspects pop up, all in front of installations of hell-no-etc.-etc. protest artwork from the era: Todd Gitlin, Juan Gonzalez, Bernadine Dohrn, Mike Spiegel, the iconic Tom Hayden. It's the March on Washington, it's the Port Huron statement, it's SNCC in Newark, it's the Columbia siege, it's the 1968 Democratic Convention, it's the COINTELPRO infiltration, it's the Weathermen ("Their name was a line from a Bob Dylan song..."), it's over.

New Caucus members decided that They Shall Overcome as the credits rolled.

Fine. The panel convened. Executive Board member Aronowitz, a soft-boiled egg of a man, took his seat beside new PSC-CUNY President Barbara Bowen and Monifa Akinwole-Bandele, a Panther's daughter and executive director of Brooklyn's Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Aronowitz launched into a vigorous critique of the sunny-side history Garvy presented.

"PLP [the Progressive Labor Party, a band of Maoists, now Stalinists] was completely excluded from the film," he inveighed. "The fact of the matter is they were a very significant part of the movement." Akinwole-Bandele attempted to introduce her organization by contrasting its activism with the activism portrayed in the film, but the finer points about present-day class stratification and hiphop in radical politics were wasted on the assemblage. Earnest Mr. Rogers-type Pacifica junkies and shawl-shrouded leftwomen intoned about the inspiration that sustained them through those turbulent days and beyond. New Caucus member after New Caucus member rose to display activist credentialing. The most substantive, practical issue of present import addressed was the question of why flier art doesn't measure up to the kick-ass batik and silkscreening of days passed. Cohen attempted to bring the focus to the current situation, but 15 more minutes of nostalgia, namedropping and arguments over revisionism ensued unabated.

"So Todd took me aside and said?"

"It all comes back to participatory democracy?"

Group therapy replaced any discussion of the relevance of contemporary unionism. No arguments made, consensus blanketed over?it was time to go to the bar. Maybe at the next fundraiser, the New Caucus will articulate what it means by announcing itself part of a new kind of labor movement.