The folks behind the Take Back NYU protests have come in for a lot of abuse in the last week, and though some of it has been on-target, quite a bit has fallen wide of the mark. I’ll be posting my own take on the occupation itself soon, but before I do that I want to explore a few of the critics’ more telling errors and misstatements. 

 

1. “The sit-ins of the ‘60s … met very little, if any, success.”

This assessment of TBNYU’s historical context is about as wrong-headed as it could be. The student protests of the late 1960s won local concessions on issues ranging from university involvement with the military to the place of ethnic studies in the curriculum. More broadly, they provoked administrators to bring students into university governance in hopes of avoiding future crises. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the sit-ins of the 1960s and 1970s transformed the American university forever.

What’s more, the movements of the sixties aren’t the be-all and end-all of American student activism, and the TBNYU clearly recognized that. They drew strategy from recent successful sit-ins at the New School and in the UK and made use of internet-age tactics that the sixties generation couldn’t have dreamed of. This protest was hardly a sixties retread.

 

2. “We’ll be trying to clarify the exact nature of their complaints, and try to engage them in colloquy and conversation. It’s a little unclear for us now.”

This line from NYU Senior Vice President for University Relations Lynne Brown appeared in the New York Times just hours after the occupation began, and it’s been quoted dozens of times since.

It was, and is, pure spin. 

TBNYU’s list of demands was unwieldy, yes. It didn’t lend itself to soundbite summary, and the group did a poor job of articulating its underlying rationale. But the list itself was straightforward, and it was made available to whoever was interested, both at the occupation and on the TBNYU website, from the start of the protest.

If Brown didn’t know what TBNYU was looking to achieve when she spoke to the Times, it’s because she hadn’t bothered to find out. Those who have so gleefully reproduced her quote don’t even have that excuse, since the very same article that reported Brown’s expression of befuddlement carried a succinct overview of TBNYU’s goals.

 

3. “TBNYU’s tactics … prevent the university from constructive and respectful engagement.”

This claim, from a joint statement by (among others) NYU’s College Democrats and College Republicans, is a broader version of the “sixties sit-ins didn’t accomplish anything” argument noted above. It rests on a belief that “confrontational and disrespectful” tactics preclude a productive response, a belief that the history of social activism shows to be without foundation.

Confrontational and disrespectful tactics don’t prevent your opponents from engaging with you. They do, however, give opponents who are already disinclined to engage with you an excuse for refusing to engage, and that fact is one that must be taken into account when planning and executing an action.

 

4. “TBNYU!’s list of demands … included … an administration investigation into the student council’s decision to lift a ban of Coca-Cola distribution on campus.”

The demands that TBNYU put forward were mostly well-received by outside observers, with three major exceptions: Gaza, Bobst, and Coca Cola. I’ve written about their embrace of the Palestinian cause here, and I’d want to know more about the background to the Bobst demand before saying much about it. The Coca Cola demand, generally summarized along the lines of the above quote, is worth exploring not just because the critique is factually wrong, but because it’s wrong in ways that reveal larger misunderstandings of what TBNYU was up to.

The background is this: NYU’s University Senate banned sales of Coca Cola products on campus  in 2005 in response to allegations of its involvement in the death of union organizers in Colombia. At the beginning of this month, the senate reversed that decision in a 28-22 vote. 

In spite of what’s claimed above, the University Senate is not NYU’s  “student council.” It is a joint student-administration-faculty governance body, and only one-fourth of its members are students.

According to TBNYU member Caitlin Boehne, a member of the Senate, a majority of the students on that body voted to retain the ban, and were outvoted by faculty and administrators. And just as the decision TBNYU objected to was not a student-made decision, the remedy they sought was not “an administration investigation.” They demanded that a review of the Coke ban be conducted by a new NYU Socially Responsible Finance Committee whose members would be elected by students.

There are grounds for criticism of this request, but it should be characterized accurately: It was a demand for a student review of a university policy that was enacted over the objections of elected student leadership. In this, as throughout their demands, TBNYU sought a greater role in NYU governance for democratically elected student leaders.

 

5. “Their first demand … amnesty for all parties, goes against one of the core principles of civil disobedience — willingness to accept the penalty.”

This is a line of attack that re-appears again and again in critiques of TBNYU — a charge that real protesters are willing to accept the consequences of their actions.

Of course, eighteen of the NYU students who participated in the occupation did willingly shoulder those consequences, at significant risk to themselves. In the early hours of Friday morning, as the prospects of a successful outcome to the protest grew ever-more remote, the NYU administration repeatedly offered a limited immunity from punishment to students who left the building before NYU retook it. Some of the protesters accepted the offer, but more refused it. The eighteen students who have been suspended from the university would all be in class right now if they had taken the reprieve that was extended to them.

Their demand for amnesty was, moreover, an entirely legitimate one. Yes, TBNYU blundered in putting it at the top of their list, but the demand itself is standard in such protests. It is particularly important at a private university, where protesters’ due process rights are often limited. As has been noted in the Washington Square News, for instance, NYU’s residential life contracts give the university the power to evict students from university housing at any time for any reason. A negotiated amnesty protects students who participate in protests from excessive and arbitrary retribution.

In an upcoming post on the NYU occupation, I’ll discuss three things TBNYU got right … and three things they got wrong.