The NYU College Democrats

There are a number of difficulties with political organizing at a University like NYU…it’s hard to get students to show up to programming on campus…difficult to motivate enthusiasm for your cause and generate publicity when you need it the most.

But perhaps nothing has been as personally disappointing to me over the years as the lack of participation from the NYU faculty. I’ve been at this University for four years now, and cannot for the life of me recall the last time I saw a Professor on campus participating in any kind of student-led programming.

That’s not to say that I haven’t had a number of great professors – some of whom I’ve worked with and gotten to know quite well. But when it comes to forming relationships with students that extend beyond the classroom, our professors largely disappear. In three years of planning for the NYU Democrats, I have never been successful at getting a single NYU Professor to join an on-campus event, despite scores of invitations and personal pleas. I’ve had a number of disagreements with the NYU administration – just in this semester alone – but I’ve grown accustomed to being shat upon by the NYU bureaucracy at every waking moment. I never expected it from the NYU faculty, many of whom are brilliant leaders in their fields.

There are of course, the pleasant exceptions. The success of the Faculty in Residence and Residential College programs, for instance,  are a sign that the Administration recognized a problem and sought to make a difference in NYU’s student-faculty campus life.

And we appreciate that effort. It’s nice to know that the 300 students at Broome Street Dormitory can have bagels every other Sunday at a faculty member’s apartment.  Just be sure not to encourage the kids at Broome Street to knock on their neighbor’s doors with voter registration forms – such an egregious violation of personal privacy could land them with a citation from the friendly shitheads at NYU Housing. After all, there are faculty in that building! What if their door accidentally gets knocked on??? Chaos! Pure chaos will ensue!!

You know, NYU students put up with a lot of crap…crap that makes many of us cynical about our school and our community. Grade inflation is rampant in certain not-to-be-named Departments and Schools while a decision to take a class in Economics, Politics, or the Stern School of Business could prove to be a GPA fatality. None of our TA’s speak English because we import them by the boatload from a land far, far away where union organizers are violently crushed before GSOC can inflate their giant rat and demand…whatever they were demanding. And our RA’s are trained to swiftly crush whatever budding social life develops in our dormitories in order to reduce NYU’s legal liability from the occasional drunken idiot sent to the ER.

They even covered our library in Plexiglas to prevent kids from jumping over the railings. And the most visible presence during welcome week for most students is that from the nice folks at ‘NYU Wellness Exchange’ who really want you to know that the abusively annoying hipster roommate you got stuck with is not worth ending your life over – at least not on NYU property – where the gruesome details of your poorly-executed “toaster in the bathtub” suicide may cause an embarrassing PR blurb in the Daily News.

Despite it all, there are a number of people who work hard to try to change the reputation we students have on campus of being completely disengaged from our University and our community. Scores of different clubs and organizations put together programming and leadership opportunities for students to get involved with, even though planning events at this University can be a somewhat disastrous part-time job for an NYU student to take up.

You might learn, for instance, that our University has crammed so many thousands of kids onto this campus that one cannot reserve even the smallest room in our state-of-the-art Kimmel Center for Student Life on a weekday evening, even more than 2 months in advance. Part of the problem is that our student center somehow got confused with a convention center, and entire floors of our “completely booked” student center are routinely rented out to third parties for a hefty some…none of which will ever go toward student programming.

You might think it’d be easy to get around such a minor problem. Why not host an event in the nearby Silver Center,  a huge building full of spaces and classrooms, most of which are completely empty at night. Or our brand new Department of Politics? Or the brand new Gallatin building? There, too, you would be sorely disappointed.  Space outside of the Kimmel center can only be reserved if you’re one of those outside groups willing to fork over a hefty sum – or a member of the NYU faculty. Students, for whom these buildings were ostensibly constructed with your Citibank student loans, are not part of the agenda.

This brings me and my rant back to our original point. Where  are the faculty at this University? What are you so busy doing? You spend 150 minutes a week teaching a class of students whose papers are graded by a graduate student you met twice over the summer. You show up for a few hours each week to the immaculate office where you are supposed to be employed in a full-time job and spend months writing a paper that’s so groundbreaking it almost gets published in a journal that nobody reads! What a fascinating life you lead!

The truth is that the only people less interested in participating in NYU’s campus life than NYU students themselves are NYU’s prestigious faculty members. Our prestigious, overpaid, and for all intents and purposes,  sociopathic faculty.

Now I don’t want to set off a round of comparisons between NYU and other Universities. I’m not trying to start a discussion about the campus life at Yale and how much different our University is. I’m merely suggesting that greater involvement from faculty and from the various schools and departments in student programming and campus life would go a long way toward making much-needed improvement. Here’s my plan:

1. Require every school at NYU to set aside at least two spaces or classrooms for night-time student programming.

2. Require every NYU Department to host or sponsor at least three events a semester which are co-hosted by at least one OSA-sponsored student organization.

3. Require every NYU Department to encourage full-time faculty members to spend at least four hours a semester with students or student groups outside of office hours and class time. Keep track of progress as you would with a community service goal.

Neal Shechter