Inside the Current Issue

From the Editor: The CUNY Graduate Center as a Bastion of Conservatism

While David Horowitz may claim that CUNY is a hotbed of radicalism, I think that the GC is one of the more socially conservative institutions in New York City.

When I came to school here, I was shocked. I had moved to New York several years before, attracted to the city's reputation as a cultural and intellectual capital, and ended up living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. I worked for a few years in various jobs, with bankers and bureaucrats, kids from the Bronx and ex-cops turned library bouncers. When I finally came to grad school here because of the affordable prices, I did not realize that it was a trap: unless you scab for the CUNY system as an adjunct (and thereby decreasing your own chance at getting a job when you graduate), there is zero funding for you until Level III. Compare this to other schools like NYU and Fordham, where (despite their price tags), they usually waive your tuition and give you a nice job while you study away. (Not that GC students who adjunct two classes - the bare minimum to make it in NYC - have any time to read the texts assigned in their GC classes.)

But this all dawned on me later. The first thing that hit me was how conservative everything here was, especially in comparison to the rest of this city. Now, in case you moved here directly from Peroria, let's be clear: despite its pretensions, New York City is as conservative as liberal gets. The content of its "radicalism" is mostly style and chic. The only place that I have been where feminism was less in effect was Russia. Having grown up in a small town in the Deep South, I find the racial segregation here truly appalling. And believe that Marxism continues to be prominent here (in NYC in general, but especially at CUNY) not so much because people are convinced about dialectics and materialism, but more because of the blatant class differences that are apparent to everyone in the city, especially in how they play out in racial terms.

And not just the GC - but New York City in general - is incredibly sexually conservative as well. Having lived on the West Coast for some years before coming here, I can't imagine what a pro-feminist, free sexuality could possibly look in this town. Could there even be such a thing in the capital of the patriarchal image factory? After a couple years, even the most ardent feminist probably feels compelled to shave her body hair: it's fit in or die. Or simply be isolated from what the lifeblood of the city has to offer, and live in a bubble of expatriates from whichever country, language or (sub)culture you emigrated from. But why do that when you can move back to Oregon?

So while it's absolutely drab to denounce capitalism at the GC, it is also clear (but always unstated) that substantive social change is never anything to be actually to be lived out in one's own everyday life. It's best savored dead and cold, especially as a foreclosed historical possibility that only exists now as critique. And if it must be contemporary, it should involve people very remote from our own everyday lives. The current hip spots to spend one's student loans to visit during the holidays are Latin America (Venezuela being the favorite, although Bolivia is now a possible contender for that #1 spot) or the Middle East (currently a tie between the occupations of the West Bank/Gaza Strip, and Iraq).

It's been rumored around the fifth floor hallways that members of the administration have been asking to reign THE ADVOCATE in. However, the most feedback I have received was related to an off-hand comment in my first editorial, about where the best place to have sex inside of the GC was (and no - to all the spurned contributors - I did not mean where the best place to masturbate was). Not that I personally ever had either defiled, (or consecrated, whichever the case may be) these premises. But in the aftermath, I was told several good suggestions as to where to go about doing that if one had the inclination. Please see the Student Forum for more details.

There are many wonderful ideas bouncing around the Graduate Center. Unfortunately, few of them seem related to concrete changes in everyday lives. Although I personally find many of the articles in this issue to be problematic in their assumptions about gender and sexuality (especially in that almost all of them assume people to be either "straight" or "gay," or that all "men" are one way and all "women" are another), I am happy to provide a forum where people can express their sexual, romantic and marital concerns. (In Efthymiou's instance, I very much respect that, while she made a conservative cultural choice, she did so after thinking critically about these ideas and considering them in the context of her everyday life.) After all, as Wilhelm Reich suggests, those who are sexually repressed often turn to fascist authoritarianism for release. Better you find release in the pages of THE ADVOCATE. But, if you do (or have), please don't mistake that for a substitute in demanding and making radical changes in your own lives, as well as in the lives of those around you.