Revolution #159, March 22, 2009
A Fresh Wind Out of NYU
Students Occupy Building… Unrepentant in Face of Repression…
On February 19, dozens of students occupied the third floor of the Kimmel student center in the heart of the New York University (NYU) campus. They barricaded doors and made 13 demands on the University, including budget disclosure, endowment disclosure, student representation on the Board of Trustees, and—in the wake of the devastating Israeli invasion of Gaza—that NYU donate spare equipment to the Islamic University in Gaza that was the target of Israeli attacks, and grant 13 scholarships to students from Gaza. (The entire list of demands are online at www.takebacknyu.com).
NYU is the largest private, nonprofit institution of higher education in the United States. The students’ actions have created an ongoing, charged, politicized atmosphere on campus; sent out a message across the country; and inspired messages of support from students and others around the world.
Takeover at New School In late December of last year, students at the New School—a university with several campuses in New York City—occupied the Graduate Faculty building for 32 hours. They were violently attacked by campus security. Among their demands was the resignation of school president Bob Kerrey, whose initial appointment in 2002 drew widespread student protest due to Kerrey’s prominent role in the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a ruling class venture to prepare public opinion for the Iraq war. Kerrey’s invitation to John McCain to deliver the keynote address at the school’s 2006 commencement resulted in protests, a tumultuous graduation ceremony and a “die-in.” During the recent occupation, some students and their supporters chanted, “War criminal Kerrey, get out now,” referring to an incident during the Vietnam War in 1969, when a Navy SEAL team led by Kerrey killed 21 civilians — women, young children and an elderly man—while on a mission in Thanh Phong village. The current demand for Kerrey’s resignation revolves around his mission to transform the school into a profit-making enterprise. One student leader, speaking outside the occupation, said that “Kerrey’s way of running the school — the top-down corporate structure — leaves very little room for students and faculty to guide the learning community here.” |
The occupation—which was joined by some students from other area schools—lasted nearly 40 hours. On midnight of the 19th, a thousand people, mostly students from area colleges, filled the streets outside the Kimmel Center in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in solidarity with the protest.
The occupation of the Kimmel Center was broken up by campus police and administrators who cut off power and Internet connections, pushed through barricades, and physically forced the students out of the building. Eighteen NYU students were initially suspended—a punishment later revised to academic probation after widespread outrage, including a letter of protest signed by 170 faculty.
Corporate Education in America
At a Revolution Books-sponsored forum on campus on March 10, a woman undergraduate at NYU painted this picture of the climate on campus that gave rise to the occupation: “Education has been becoming increasingly corporate in America, and specifically at NYU, and that is a power that is really unquestioned and accepted in a lot of ways.” She said students are given the message that: “You’re a customer here, you’re here to purchase your education.” And she explained that: “What we’ve been trying to do this whole time is to challenge that logic, and challenge the logic that education is something that can be purchased by those who can afford to purchase it, that it is a commodity that can be charged accepted prices for, and that as customers we have no rights to demand that we can participate in our education, that we can have a say in how it works. So from the beginning, the idea has been challenging that idea, and reclaiming our university, Thus the name ‘Take Back NYU!’.”
Another NYU student at the same forum posed that “Goals like transparency and accountability don’t sound that radical, or shocking. So you might imagine you could get accountability and transparency through things like petitions. But what was shocking is that the university doesn’t want any part of it.” He recounted how when a member of Take Back NYU! was elected to the student government, administrators literally laughed when they brought up the issues of endowment disclosure, and budget disclosure.
Hampshire College Students Win Demand for Divestment from Israel On February 7 of this year, in response to student demands, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts became the first college or university in the U.S. to divest from companies on the grounds of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Student activists pressured Hampshire College’s Board of Trustees to divest from six specific companies due to human rights concerns in occupied Palestine. More than 800 students, professors and alumni signed a statement initiated by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) calling for the divestment. According to a statement issued by SJP, the six corporations, all of which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, are: Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex. The divestment from Israel movement has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rashid Khalidi, Vice President of the EU Parliament Luisa Morganitini, Cynthia McKinney, former member of the African National Congress Ronnie Kasrils, Mustafa Barghouti, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, John Berger, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, among others, and is seen by activists as part of a movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. The statement from SJP expresses hope that “this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the U.S. to take similar stands.” |
Up against a wall of administration arrogant disdain, including from University head John Sexton (student activists call him “CEO,” not President), students began launching direct action protests. Last December, they organized a protest dance party in the lobby of a campus library, where the administration occupies the upper floors. One of the students at the Revolution Books event described the building as “a physical representation of the way our university is run: We have a very vertical building, and the administration sits at the top, and students do most of their work literally below ground, in the bottom, where there is only iridescent, very frustrating neon lights, and you are down there at the bottom, and you never see the people on the top floor, and you never know what they’re doing, and you don’t know how to talk to them, and you don’t know how to reach them. The elevators that go to those floors, we literally are not allowed to take.”
The Impact of Gaza
When Israel invaded Gaza, many of the activist students at NYU felt a tremendous need to act. Two weeks before the occupation of the Kimmel Center, six NYU students, along with four other people, bound themselves together and barricaded a $1,500 a plate reception sponsored by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in support of Israel. Ten people were arrested after two hours, and face criminal charges. Support for them, and demanding charges be dropped, is an important challenge.
The inclusion of the demands around Gaza was controversial—some mainstream news accounts featured students saying they would have supported the occupation except for those demands. Debate over Israel, and the relationship between that country and the U.S., and NYU—which has a special relationship with Tel Aviv University—has been part of the politicized atmosphere on campus, along with larger questions of the role of the University in the world.
A recent forum on campus, “NYU-Tel Aviv University: A Partnership in Occupation,” posed: “Tel Aviv University has long played a vital part in the occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, and proudly trumpets its support for the Israeli military and its role in designing new weapons systems with which Israel wages war on the Palestinians. Despite these criminal activities, NYU has partnered with Tel Aviv University, thereby tying itself more directly to the occupation of Palestine and the oppression of the Palestinians than ever before. NYU’s expansion to Tel Aviv is not an isolated event, but part of a larger vision of becoming a ‘global university.’ This corporatized vision entails the expansion of the university at the expense of populations variously deprived of elementary human, labor, economic, and social rights, be they Palestinians under occupation, workers at NYU’s branch campus in Abu Dhabi, or workers at its home campus in the heart of New York City. It is a vision which, by its partnership in occupation, oppression, and autocracy, repudiates the mission of higher education to serve humanity.”
A Challenge: “Will you rise with us?”
The spirit and attitude represented by the NYU occupation, and the ongoing protests on campus, are all the more precious given the ice sheet of repression and intimidation that has descended on U.S. campuses particularly in the wake of 911 and as part of the so-called “War on Terror”—really a war for empire. The firing of tenured University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill for controversial remarks in the wake of 911 was a key nodal point in the assault on critical thinking on campuses (see “Ward Churchill Lawsuit Against University of Colorado Begins March 9th,” at revcom.us). Joel Kovel, an outspoken critic of Zionism whose book Overcoming Zionism has been suppressed, and who himself was recently fired from Bard College for his views on Israel, spoke in solidarity with the NYU activists at the March 10 Revolution Books event at NYU.
Students at NYU are finding creative ways to continue the struggle, and challenge others. On March 12, a snowfall of flyers, for which no organization took credit, blanketed the lobby of the University’s Bobst Library. One flyer read: “We are PEOPLE not PROFIT.”
Another had this message: “The time has come to begin our refusal. We cannot allow ourselves to stand idly by while NYU profits by our intelligence, lining other people’s pockets while our future slips away. The crises we face are too great for self-interest-as-usual. This is the beginning of their end, and our beginning. Out of their fall, we will rise. Will you rise with us?”
That is a challenge to every student, and the people in this country in general.
See also a letter from a reader, “Spreading Revolution and Communism at NYU and the New School.”
For more coverage of student protests go to revcom.us
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