the minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004)Rachel RiednerStrategies of ContainmentOn March 29, 2004, 11 undergraduate students who organized a sit-in support of adjunct faculty and service employee workers at The George Washington University (GW) were arrested by Washington, DC police as a result of a university complaint for trespassing in the Marvin Center, the designated student center. Considering the arrest of the eleven students provides a moment in which to re-conceptualize the corporate university. Most of the students who were arrested were members of the Progressive Student Union (PSU). Over the past few years this organization has studied workers and working conditions on the GW campus. Among others, students in PSU are in contact with parking lot workers in GW garages, housekeepers who clean GW dorm rooms, unionized cafeteria workers on campus, and GW part-time faculty who are involved in an attempt to unionize. The PSU-initiated sit-in was a response to labor abuses observed by students throughout the year, as well as their feeling that GW failed to respond to student objections to these labor abuses. In the fall of the 2003-2004 academic year, it was reported that the Aramark Company, contracted by GW to operate campus food services, dismissed approximately 28 workers. The workers—many of whom the PSU students know personally—were replaced with non-unionized temporary employees. In addition, several of the food stalls in the cafeteria were outsourced to non-unionized contractors. At the same time, PSU students learned from parking workers about the anti-union efforts of their employer, Colonial Parking Company. According to Holly Smith, a member of the PSU, PSU efforts to develop a conversation with the GW administration about labor abuses were met with silence. Smith reports that the PSU made good faith efforts to communicate its concerns to the administration by several means, for example writing letters, publishing editorials, holding rallies, and producing thousands of petition signatures. The PSU efforts to draw labor abuses to the attention of the university were largely ignored. A rally, including what was termed a "dorm storming" signature drive, took place in the fall of 2003, organized on behalf of the fired cafeteria workers. The rally elicited no response from the university. Smith reports that GW refused to seriously consider the Workers Rights Consortium, in effect refusing to ensure that GW logo apparel not be made in sweatshops. Campus teach-ins and performance pieces designed to raise awareness on campus failed to galvanize broad support. On March 29, 2004, the PSU decided that an escalation of tactics was needed because of lack of response from the GW administration and community. With the support of the AFL-CIO, the national union supporting the part-time faculty union effort, plus other campus workers' groups, the PSU held a rally in front of the main administrative building on the GW campus. After speeches by a variety of campus workers and student leaders, the group marched from the administrative building to the student center, the Marvin Center. There eleven students, members of the PSU, a member of the Muslim Students Association, a student from the Global AIDS campaign, two students from Georgetown University, and an unaffiliated friend, set up tents in the Marvin Center foyer. The students—who became known as the GW 11—were asked to leave by a Marvin Center manager and a GW administrator. The students declared they would not leave until GW President Steven Joel Tracktenberg agreed to meet with them. After they were told that there would be no negotiations, students once more refused to leave. After the refusal, Washington, DC police were called in. The students were arrested, handcuffed, and held in jail for over eight hours. Female students in the group were initially charged with illegal entry and the male students were initially charged with illegal and disorderly conduct. Two weeks later, the cases were heard before a Washington, DC magistrate. Without explanation, all charges were dropped. Council for GW did not appear for this hearing (Smith). The use of force is not a new event at universities; there are numerous examples in which universities have called in the state to control unruly student voices and bodies. It is a residual moment, in Raymond Williams' words, where a neoliberal university relies on older forms of control which recall "earlier social formations and phases of the cultural process, in which certain meanings and values were generated." (123). The conjuncture in which "explicit or implicit interrelations and social effects" of the arrests tells us about the newest phase of the corporate university. A private, urban university located in downtown Washington, DC, GW prides itself on its proximity to internships, occupational opportunities that its DC location offers its students. GW is also one of the most expensive universities in the nation: tuition for undergraduate students is upwards of $45,000 per annum. Up to the moment of the arrests, GW relied upon strategies of inclusion, including a rhetoric of diversity, describing the university as a free and open space that is tolerant of ideas and identities. GW prides itself on tolerance and acceptance of different identities: there is a Multicultural Student Center, a Lesbian/Gay/Bi Student group, Hispanic Student Group, etc. However, diversity disguises how members of these groups are able to enter into the GW community. While appearing to offer inclusion, it diverts attention from issues of how traditionally excluded voices are permitted to enter into university space and how these voices are allowed to speak and exist within the university community. Kevin Mahoney argues that diversity "is such a useful term to spearhead a new hegemony because many different groups can agree with its general goal of tolerance and acceptance. But when we ask what 'diversity' means, we are lead down a road of such vagueness that the term is useless for solving the persistent problems of racism . . ." (qtd. in Powell). As Robert Mcruer writes: "Inclusion" is such a dangerous word, and I would encourage you to generate alternatives to it: resistance, dissent. . . . The communities that I move through—gay or queer communities, communities of people with disabilities, and others—are constantly hearing, these days, about inclusion: neoliberal and corporate boosters have figured out that "including" us is a way to contain us, to dilute our critiques, to transform us into window dressing or entertainment in the world of "happy family multiculturalism" that corporate elites have planned for the future. (Letter to Students) In classrooms, public spaces, and residential halls, voices, identities, questions and dissent are ignored, explained away, or dismissed as "youthful idealism." In the case of the PSU, questions that undergraduate students posed to the university administration about working conditions on campus were ignored, put off, or violently eviscerated by smooth rhetoric of experienced administrators. When inclusion failed to work as a strategy of containment, the state was called in. Along with the rhetoric of diversity, GW's promotional rhetoric is carefully designed to promote inclusion: political involvement, civic engagement, and critical thinking, all to enhance job prospects created through a combination of educational training, job experience, and connections generated by its DC location. According to its mission statement, GW "dedicates itself to furthering human well-being. The university values a dynamic student-focused community stimulated by cultural and intellectual diversity and built on a foundation of integrity, creativity, and openness to the exploration of new ideas" (GWU Handbook 2003-2004, emphasis added). While this liberatory educational rhetoric invokes inclusion, it excludes an analysis of what work makes the exploration of new ideas possible. For example, it does not mention GW's annexation of property in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, it does not mention rising tuition costs, and it does not mention the cadre of underpaid faculty and service workers, by and large mostly African-American and immigrant communities, who provide services that make the university's educational mission possible. GW's rhetoric obfuscates labor policies that makes it possible for mostly white, middle-class students and faculty to value cultural, racial, and intellectual diversity. An authorized version of diversity actually preserves the status quo. (Powell 452) The students who protested workers' rights on March 29th became a threat to the university for a variety of reasons, first, because of where they were protesting. They occupied crucial "advertising or brand space" (in Lauren Berlant's phrase) in the Marvin Center, which houses the cafeteria, space for student organizations, meeting space, and the bookstore; however, its entrance, where prospective students and their parents arrive for campus tours, is a large, spacious room with fake gold "columns of knowledge" and lots of fake marble. By camping out in public advertising space, students invaded the space that most signifies the university's ideological and economic position. Second, they were a threat because of what they said. They introduced an economic argument into university space. By protesting the contingent, replaceable, low-paid status of adjunct faculty and service workers, the students challenged the university's separation of diversity from economic policies. As Lisa Duggan suggests in Twilight of Equality, diversity is designed to give the appearance of a new freedom and tolerance, but disguises the economic objectives of neoliberalism, which is the upward mobility of capital. Neoliberalism promotes tolerance and inclusion, emphasizing identity politics or rights-based groups that engage language of equality through reform rather than more radical critiques which argue for downward redistribution of "money, political power, cultural capital, pleasure, and freedom" (xviii). Finally, the students' bodies as well as their voices were a threat to the university. This is a moment, as Robert Mcruer has argued, where the university is particularly obsessed with the "kinds of selves [it] produces" (13). GW is interested in producing normalized bodies which it can graduate as efficient workers in the neoliberal economy. Sexuality and race differences which in different eras were themselves sites of exclusion can be accommodated if they fit into the current construction of normalcy and the preservation of the economic status quo. Thus the student protestors defied normalcy, resisting efforts to impose a shared identity and voice. As a result, the police were called in to remove, discipline, and contain both their bodies and voices. Two days after the arrest, the PSU received an unsolicited email from the President Tracktenberg. Tracktenberg could have chosen to communicate with the students through official channels—which he refused in the past—but he deliberately chose email, a method of communication which often is thought as informal, personal address. The email scolded the students for breaking university rules because they did not protest "peacefully," it claims that the students are "anti-social" in their actions, and it states that the students jeopardized the safety of other GW students that the administration is "obliged to protect." As the email states: So if it's a matter of being ashamed, the GW Administration is ashamed—but not of itself. It is ashamed of you. You knew the rules. You agreed to the rules. You violated the rules. That said, you're students. It follows that you are here to learn. I'm hopeful that this will prove an educational experience and that we will be able to work together in harmony in the future. Immediately after, many people on campus—both faculty and students—said that the arrests were a tactical error by the university. By publicly demonstrating that it would use force, the argument went, the university exposed itself to critique, ridicule, and most damningly, bad publicity. Indeed, the most immediate result of the student's arrest was a letter, circulated and signed by over 60 faculty members, condemning the arrest. There was a well-attended public rally in support of the students. Senator Edward Kennedy spoke at the rally, as did leaders of the AFL-CIO who warned that they were "watching GW." But clearly we live in an historical moment where public force and violence of the state against its citizens or the citizens of other nations can occur with few public consequences. The Bush Administration can invade Iraq and Senator Kennedy can criticize the invasion with few public consequences. This is not to disparage Senator Kennedy; rather, it is a statement about the ability of public discourse to influence corporate universities. In other words, GW can have its students arrested with few public consequences. Indeed, the incident was not widely reported either locally or nationally. The Washington Post, for example, had a short by-line that just said that students had been arrested; the arrest itself was not explained. At GW, the student newspaper covered the arrest in one edition, moving onto the end of the semester rush. There was a resolution put before the Student Association condemning the arrests, but it was vetoed by the Student Association President (Smith). These events signal a new phase in the university that is part of wider neoliberal moment to achieve upward redistribution of capital by imposing a shared identity, and by bringing the force of the state to control bodies and voices that will not be subject to this shared identity. What kind of political movement can be constructed as an alternative to the authorized notion of diversity? The following people contributed to this paper: Holly Smith, Dan Moshenberg, Bob Mcruer, and Mark Mullen. Works Cited
Rachel Riedner is assistant professor of University Writing at George Washington University. |