Yesterday was May Day, the international day of leftist protest. This year, college and high school kids from around the City converged at Cooper Union. From its founding in 1859 Cooper Union had not charged students tuition; that is, until April 23rd, when the school’s Board of Trustees announced that students would have to pay because of the Union’s shrinking endowment. Otherwise, it would go bankrupt. Read more…
Students Converge At Cooper Union For May Day
May 2nd, 2013 by Paul PastoreNYU Local Went Undercover On An NYU Admissions Tour
April 26th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
People that go to NYU and live in New York seem to love to shit on it. Everyone’s always complaining about the school being overly expensive, about the city being too expensive, about the lack of community–it goes on and on. What it comes down to, though, is that a lot of kids come here bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They watch shows like Gossip Girl and feel like life here will be glamorous.
To test out just how fast we’ve fallen down the disillusionment cliff, this NYU Local reporter decided to go undercover on an admissions tour to remind us all of our 17-year-old high school fantasies—the ones that made us want to come here in the first place. Read more…
A Preview of NYU’s May Day Activities
April 19th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
May 1st will mark International Workers’ Day, or May Day. International Workers’ Day is a day of labor action to commemorate the Haymarket affair, which involved the 1886 massacre of on-strike Chicago factory workers. In the decades after the Haymarket affair, the efforts of many in the working class led May Day has become an official holiday all over the world. It also become a movement in which student action has been instrumental, and in this tradition NYU student organizations will converge to protest on May 1. Below is our preview of NYU’s May Day activities. Read more…
NYU Professor Sharon Olds Wins Pulitzer Prize
April 18th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
On Monday it was announced that NYU English Professor Sharon Olds won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She won for a collection of poems entitled “Stag’s Leap”. From 1998-2000 Olds was the Poet Laureate of New York State. She had previously published 11 volumes of poetry and now teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU.
She joins literary figures like Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and John Steinbeck who have won the Pulitzer Prize in the past. The first Prize was given in 1917. Each year 103 judges are selected to serve on 20 separate juries to determine a winner in each of the 21 categories from thousands of applicants.
Olds wrote the poems contained in Stags Leap to cope with her marriage of 32 years coming to a close in 1997. She decided to publish them a decade and a half later after her children were adults. She told the Huffington Post ”I had to tune each poem, and tune the book, to get the balance of its qualities feeling right to me; the idealizing, the anger, the self-pity”. The Pulitzer Prize Board called the volume ”a book of unflinching poems” that “examine love, sorrow and the limits of self-knowledge”. Read more…
Student Labor Action Movement Calls Foul On NYU Law Trustee Daniel Straus
April 12th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
At last night’s Deans Cup Basketball game between NYU Law School and Columbia Law School members of the Student Labor Action Movement or S.L.A.M. unfurled two banners in protest of Law School Trustee Daniel Strauss. He has sat on the Law School’s Board of Trustees since 1998 and endows the University with an ongoing gift of $1.25 million a year to run the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, which is located in a townhouse at 22 Washington Square North.
The students also handed out popcorn with flyers attached asking NYU to cut ties with Strauss. Strauss owns both the CareOne and Healthbridge management companies which own dozens of nursing homes in New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. S.L.A.M. claimed in an April 11 press release that Strauss’ companies had “illegally intimidated, fired, and locked out nursing home workers in their facilities in New Jersey and Connecticut”. Read more…
Students Hold Protest Against Sexton’s Policies, NYU 2031, And High Tuition Costs
April 10th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
Yesterday the newly formed group “NYU Students Against the Sexton Plan” held their first protest of the 2031 Plan and John Sexton’s policies. Though the group is in its infancy, its founders plan for it to be a student led organization that will be vocally opposed to NYU administrators and their policies.
A crowd of about twenty protestors chanted things such as “NYU we won’t let you keep building off our debt.” Some students held signs with slogans like “Why is John Sexton’s salary $1,476,625?” and “Why are NYU students among the most indebted in the nation?”
Protest organizer Kristina Mayman, a sophomore in Metropolitan Studies, said that “our main focus is the money, how our tuition is spent.” Mayman called the 2031 expansion plan “unnecessary,” offering the alternative that NYU could “not admit as many students.” Beyond wider budgetary concerns, the group also aims to highlight the discrepancy between the compensation of administrators and those of adjunct professors and teaching assistants. Mayman characterized administrator salaries as “inexcusably huge.” Read more…
John Sexton Adressed Some Of His Haters At The Last Town Hall Meeting Of The Year
April 3rd, 2013 by Paul Pastore
Yesterday President Sexton held his last Town Hall meeting of the year, where he took questions from both graduate and undergraduate students. The event took place in the Global Center for Spiritual life, and was sponsored by the Student Senate Council. Sexton touched upon a wide range of issues, from the no-confidence vote to the NYU 2031 Plan, and gave us some of his thoughts on both the way the university is run and his goals for its future. Read more…
NYU Local Considers Huffing Poppers, Part One
March 28th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
What are poppers? Who does them? Should we try them? *sniffs* Ohhhh my God, it feels like I’m laughing while doing a headstand!… Okay, let’s investigate. Here’s one writer’s take on the weird little bottle that you sniff.
A couple of weeks ago, when I found out something called poppers existed, I felt completely out of the loop. It’s the same feeling as being excluded from that cool birthday party at the bowling ally in first grade because you threw sand at the birthday girl’s head.
Or, it’s like the time someone asked me if I had ever been to a circuit party and I had no idea what a circuit party was. As a gay man, there are just certain things I guess I should know. I had to invite myself to the party.
I started asking around, and it turns out that a lot of people are poppers enthusiasts. I heard stuff like “everyone does poppers,” and “you haven’t seen poppers around?” When I asked someone what doing poppers feels like, this was the reply: “It’s like holding your breath deep underwater… and it opens up your butt.”
That is definitively the most unpleasant-sounding thing I have ever heard, but apparently a lot of people still do them, so poppers obviously merited investigation. Read more…
After CAS Vote Of No Confidence, Tisch May Be Next
March 26th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
If you’ve been checking NYU Local over the past couple of weeks (or just haven’t been under a rock), you definitely know about the vote of no confidence against President John Sexton. What you might not have realized is that the vote was confined to CAS; only Arts and Science faculty could participate.
While it is still a big deal that the motion passed, ultimately the Board of Trustees determines whether or not Sexton stays or goes. Considering the sweet digs that come with being an administrator at NYU, it isn’t likely that the CAS vote is the resounding condemnation that would unseat JSex. In fact, when the motion of no confidence passed the trustees responded with a resolution of support for him. Read more…
Considering The Possible Retirement Plans For John Sexton
March 12th, 2013 by Paul Pastore
The vote of no confidence against Sexton has descended upon us. Considering some of the really sketchy stuff we’ve been reporting, like administrators getting penthouses and shady bonuses, it seems like J-Sexy’s departure could potentially be imminent. To help him transition into life after NYU, whether that’s in a week or years down the line, we’ve made a super helpful list of alternate lives he could adopt if/when he leaves the University:
Start a baseball-centric cult where his book is the Bible
Sexton just released his new book Baseball as a Road to God. Last week he went on the Colbert Report to promote it; his explanation of what the book is about made no sense and was really incoherent, but still somehow sounded smart. Whenever JSex talks about anything, he usually comes off as being convincing without saying anything (except for NYT‘s interview from yesterday). Read more…
