Gordon Lafer in the Washington Square News:
To an outside observer, the most dramatic fact about the current strike may be that all signs suggest that the Graduate Student Organizing Committee is on the verge of a huge victory. Since this fact seems to be counterintuitive to many people, it’s worth laying out the reasons I think so.
First, the Draconian threats that the administration has made — every one of which is illegal under federal labor law — are impossible to carry out. The university claims that its intimidation tactics have succeeded in scaring three-quarters of GAs into giving up the strike. This number may or may not be real — they probably have no accurate way of knowing, and given the history of administrative hyper-spin, it’s probably exaggerated. But even if just 250 GAs keep striking, the administration can’t afford to enact its threats. If NYU President John Sexton were to ban 250 graduate students from teaching and cut all their funding for the spring semester, some of them would be forced to drop out, and some international students would be forced to leave the country. Departments with strong participation in the union might find their graduate programs hurt. There would be an enormous outcry of protest from both graduate students and faculty.
More here. [Those are strike leaders Mike Palm and Asad Raza in the picture.]