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Quick updates on a bunch of stories we’ve been following…
- The University of North Carolina has become the twenty-first US campus to dump Russell Athletic in response to labor violations.
- A three-part analysis of the Power Shift 2009 conference: Background, Tactics, and The Future.
- A hundred NYU grad students held a “work-in” at Bobst Library yesterday afternoon.
- The economic crisis is leading students to transfer to cheaper colleges.
- Hillary Clinton has announced a million-dollar scholarship program for Palestinian students.
- President Obama will be providing major new details of his education plan at a speech this morning.
Our ongoing coverage of the NYU takeover continues here and on our twitter feed.
Most of the Take Back NYU protest’s demands relate to campus governance and accountability – student representation on the NYU board of trustees, disclosure of financial data, fair labor practices within the university. In that list, two demands stand out:
- That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.
- That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.
A lot of people are asking where these demands came from, and an overnight statement from TBNYU provides a partial answer. Here’s an excerpt:
By demanding investigation into war and genocide profiteers, providing aid to Gaza, and offering scholarshipts to Palestinian students, we are demanding that the University heed our own voices immediately. Through these demands we are also stating our solidarity with the students who have occupied their universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere demanding aid for war-torn Gaza.
That last sentence is crucial. Since early January, students at more than twenty universities across Britain have staged sit-ins demanding administration action on Palestinian issues. Two weeks ago, students at the University of Rochester in upstate New York held a similar protest. Today’s NYU occupation follows those actions in form, and by making Palestinian issues part of their list of demands, TBNYU is linking its protest to the others in content as well.
By calling for support for Palestinian students and the University of Gaza, TBNYU is sending a message to student activists on both sides of the Atlantic. It is declaring itself to be part of a new international student movement.
Will that movement materialize? Will student sit-ins start to spread in the US as they continue to do in the UK? Too soon to tell, obviously. But the inclusion of the Palestinian demands wasn’t random, it was calculated.
Observers, like commenters here, who claim that it shows a lack of strategic sophistication on TBNYU’s part have it exactly backwards.
According to the London School of Economics Gaza protest blog, two new British university occupations in response to Israeli policy began on Wednesday, at the University of Strathclyde and Manchester University.
This brings to at least seventeen the number of such occupations since mid-January, all of which — with the exception of Manchester University — have ended. (Other sources say there have been as many as 22 actions.)
The activist group Stop the War is hosting a meeting of protest organizers from around Britain tomorrow in London.
The National Union of Students, Britain’s main national student organization, is calling for an end to the nation’s wave of student sit-ins protesting Israeli policies toward Gaza.
“The protesters need to find new ways to campaign vocally without causing disruption to students on campus,” NUS president Wes Streeting told CNN.
A bit over a week ago we brought you news of a sit-in at the London School of Economics protesting the Israeli military offensive in Gaza.
Since then, the LSE sit-in has ended in a qualified victory for the student protesters, and more than a dozen other sit-ins have begun in Britain around the Gaza issue.
The LSE protesters have set up a blog that they’re using to get out word about the other student protests going on, and it’s being updated several times a day.
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