NYU and Term Limits

I’ve kept from writing about the term limits vote because:

1. the fix was in from the start

2. I think that this is a pretty clearly bad move, and that’s been made evident elsewhere on this blog.

But here’s an interesting tidbit by way of Cathryn of the Washington Square Park blog – NYU President John Sexton took time from flying to Abu Dhabi to wander down to city hall and testify for the repeal of term limits.

NYU requires a load of favors from New York City, from tax breaks to zoning changes to park renovations, and John Sexton knows who is scratching his back.  Sexton became NYU President not long after Bloomberg became mayor, and their fates and goals are linked – a transformation of the city to a upper-middle class ‘global’ playground, with an economy that relies on service industry and cultural labor.  Sexton’s testimony shows just how public ‘private’ universities can be, and the fate of the city under a 3rd Bloomberg term.

NYU’s Corporate Space Crunch

Nope.

Once upon a time, there was an NYU building called the Loeb Student Center.  It had student club offices, rooms to meet, and served a few administrative functions.  Then, in 2004, it was demolished.  It was replaced by the Kimmel Center for University Life.  Note the change in title – and a change in function.

Kimmel has no student group offices, but rather a maze of administrative functions, lounges with no desks or tables, and lots of locked rooms.  It’s a place for sitting and chatting, not organizing or plotting.  NYU has been endlessly pimping out the building to all comers – including this week, the CMJ Music Marathon, which despite being the COLLEGE Music Journalism conference, seems to primarily involve lots of older folks in Vans and thick glasses milling about looking cool and important both.  CMJ is one example of how NYU has turned it’s buildings into symbols of institutional prestige at the cost of student life.

Despite huge investments in expansion lately, NYU is running really low on space right now – the Tisch Building for the Stern School is under renovation, with a loss of student space and classrooms that have put pressure on the Kimmel Center and the Library.  It’s now a weekly struggle to find space in the library to study.  The space/building situation at NYU embodies NYU’s real priorities – they’ll build new buildings for scientific research that builds prestige, law school buildings for that cash-cow, and new dorms to keep expanding the student body – but very little goes into the general student body doing the day-to-day work of studying and learning.

Cross-posted to the TBNYU! blog