What are we going to do as students in the high prestige departments of Masters and Doctorate education in NYU to systematically change a high powered global institution from within, and how then will we share this with other universities in the United States, and ones imitating the US higher education system globally?

For my birthday in 2018, I received the book by Ta Nehisi Coates that Davidson quotes in her introduction describing how April 22 1993 changed the history of education forever. The first public internet browsing, 1993, a year after my birth. This year, my birthday was a special one for me, having completed two years as immigrant mother and also having news that I will be a Masters Student in Tisch School of the Arts. I didn’t read that book though, maybe my friend who gifted it to me, now the first of my group to be asked back to NYU as an adjunct professor in Journalism was giving me a big hint. He was telling me not to fret when coming back to the education I suffered so much in as an undergraduate immigrant. Well, the hint was that I was winning and that as long as I keep writing, I’ll keep winning, as Professor Moten says from our Department of Performance Studies, when I sit in his completely non-assignment non-syllabus oriented class-room, and he repeatedly stops the lectures to make sure that we are aware of where we are, that we agree, that we know that we can combat the “noxious,” to quote my Fierce Warrior Goddess Annie. No teacher ever has taught me as much as silently as our Teacher’s Assistant Annie. Not that she is silent in any way, as I said, Fierce, but she is absolutely showing how to efficiently intervene in classroom structures of power that Cathy Davidson argues needs a complete re-understanding of in her book. She does not need to tell me much about how to push for my space in the institution and then use my education “beyond campus borders,” (Davidson 205). Annie is just there for us. That’s what she revolutionizes. I’m here and I’m queer and I’m in charge, I will help you figure this place out and how it can help you when you graduate. And Annie has never even offered this advise to me, her Presence is the advise. “Presente!” (Taylor) Don’t ever co-opt me you noxious racist sexist homophobic, and the list goes on, Institution of the University. If I don’t like your stage you offer, I’ll make my own. Seems like I won extra since in my first semester at Tisch, all 3 of my professors are not anything like the Professors from 1893 where they hardly would have had the chance to attend university, yet alone teach at it. 1893 is the year Davidson argues our educational system is stuck in (Davidson, 9). 

Fierce Goddess sounds way better than underpaid Teaching Assistant to me, which is how Davidson describes is one of the Extreme conflicts of education, when we as students see all our TAs, adjunct-professors, and even tenured professors still being abused financially, and in a multitude of other ways Davidson describes in her book: from Ipads landing in the classroom, funding dishearteningly getting less accessible than ever, to education reformers pushing for student-consumers. I had to stop when she came to this solution of consumer trade in the University as she described some of the different modules being used to address our failing education system. Wait? Aren’t we consumers already? Is going in debt from our choice to pay for something, not in-fact the definition of credit capitalism. “Un horror!” Como se dice la Politica y Artista Jesusa Rodriguez, sentando cerca de su amiga, Diana Taylor explicando otra metodo de caminar con ojos digitales que la industria esta creando ahora, en una clase donde tambien todas las estructuras de la Universidad no existen. We are the in-between, the ones that see digitally, and not digitally, and the tone of hope that Davidson steadily relies on in the multitude of examples of this New Education, and where it is reaching, and where it is also challenged, and where in history we can look to for guidance on remodeling a failing model. I was not at all forced to ask Google for answers, the way that Coates describes to his son is the difference between his technological access at school and his own, the example Davidson provided, until actually my first Higher Education began in 2010. That is when after 1993, when I was merely one, Google became a personal companion, having been the first sibling and person in my whole extended family to attend university in America. I remember my father’s face buying me my laptop, I was so scared it would break and I would have to call him abroad and tell him something so shameful like that. That he was still working as a senior for the rest of his daughters to find scholarships for school and to pay for their laptops, and that I had broke the first one. That laptop, completely out of programming with any website today, still works fine. Upon knowing I was attending graduate study, it was now my little sister’s turn to tell me I needed better technology, so she actually bought me my second updated laptop. The thing is none of these laptops, or google searches, wrote me my essays. I chose to study Gender and Sexuality studies, the only department Davidson quotes to describe reformers pushing for occupational based education to return to universities, so primarily to do the work within my family of 8 siblings raised under strict tribal Islamic sexism, so that they knew nobody could define their gender and sexuality anymore now that I was Plugged in and telling them what I was learning (Davidson 12). If you know what I mean, family, because all of you in this classroom are now my family too. From 1993-2010. From 2010-2018, these time periods all can show extreme horrors of our world, but we are still able to use the university to help. I believe it. I am here because of that. Because of Coates and Davidson, and Taylor, and Moten, and Lepecki, all working in their space within the institution to radically re-model it. Gracias para el trabajo. I come back to this question: So we are here. What can we do? How can we ensure we continue this amazing University classroom collaborative work after our assignments are handed in? Should we meet monthly? Bi-annually, as long as we are in the university? Who should we invite along our journey?