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“When people talk about “the sixties,” what they are thinking of is about two years. You know, 1968, 1969, roughly. A little bit before, a little bit later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements. I mean, they’re from the seventies. Take the International Solidarity Movement — that’s from the eighties. Take the Global Justice Movement, which just had another huge meeting in Brazil. That’s from this century. Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
“Elite sectors and centers of power want students to be passive and apathetic. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students. You know, if you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re gonna have to work it off. I mean, you’re gonna have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism. The students of the sixties could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, ‘Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on.’ Now, that’s much harder today. And not by accident. These are disciplinary techniques.”
Happy birthday, Noam Chomsky.
The Cooper Union occupation in support of good university governance and a continuation of the college’s century-plus history of free tuition is now in its fifth day, and it shows no sign of fizzling out.
Eleven students barricaded themselves inside the top floor of Cooper Union’s iconic Foundation Building in New York’s East Village on Monday, calling for reforms in the running of the college, a commitment to keep tuition free, and the resignation of Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha. Campus security made an effort to drill or saw through their doors that afternoon, but soon relented and haven’t again tried to dislodge them.
Since then, students have staged a series of support actions outside the building. They’ve also hoisted pizza up to the occupiers with a balloon-launched pulley.
On Wednesday supporters of the occupation disrupted a meeting of the Cooper Union board of trustees, which went on to give its unanimous approval to president Bharucha — even as a growing list of faculty members have publicly affirmed their support for the college’s free education mission.
Despite several scares — police helicopters overhead a few days ago, NYPD in the Foundation Building earlier this afternoon — there have been no arrests or threats of arrest. Cooper Union administration statements have been critical of the occupation, but non-threatening, saying most recently that their “primary concern is for the safety of all students and to ensure that the actions of a few do not disrupt classes and final exams” while also expressing “concern” about “actions and conditions that could affect the safety of the public.”
For their part, the occupiers tweeted just moments ago that they remain “safe, secure, and in good health.”
Tomorrow there’s another day of action planned, starting with a Washington Square Park rally and culminating in a pots-and-pans march to Cooper Union and an “after party” at four.
Monday Update | The occupation has ended peacefully.
Twenty-three years ago today 14 women — 13 students and a staff member — were murdered on the campus of the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Their killer, Marc Lepine, targeted female students in an engineering class and claimed to be “fighting feminism.”
The fourteen who died were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznick-Widajewicz.
The 20th anniversary of the killings drew a lot of attention in the Canadian media and blogosphere, and I collected a number of links then:
- A look back at the shootings, their aftermath, and the larger struggle against misogynist violence.
- A survivor of the massacre — then an engineering student, now a government official and a mother of four — comes to terms with her feminism.
- An essay on the impact of the killings on Canadian society.
- Another collection of links from the blog Spare Candy.
As the occupation continues at Cooper Union, a new action has propped up further down the Eastern seaboard — students and faculty at Emory University are currently sitting in to protest what activists call “devastating” cuts to academic programs. From a statement released yesterday:
“These cuts, which are occurring against the backdrop of a budget surplus and a $105-million growth in the school’s $5.4 billion endowment, include the total elimination of Emory’s renowned Division of Educational Studies, the Institute for Liberal Arts, Journalism, and more. … These cuts were enacted in secret, without any pretense of systematic or transparent review, and in direct defiance of Emory’s own governance protocols. Moreover, the administration’s own data reveals that these cuts have a grossly disproportionate impact on minorities and women. …
“The Emory community has had enough. … Time and again, the University has doubled-down on the cuts without engaging in any candor whatsoever about its decision-making processes – leaving Emory community members with no other option than to see their leaders’ actions as the products of racism, sexism, cronyism, and greed. …
“Tomorrow, Tuesday, December 4th, Emory will see its first campus-wide work stoppage and walkout in forty years. Students, faculty, and staff from both affected departments and others standing in solidarity with them will converge on the quad to voice their outrage and demand answers. … Tuesday’s action represents a pivotal moment in the history of Emory.”
At the time of this writing (4:30 pm Eastern) students and faculty have been occupying the hallway outside of Emory president’s office for several hours. Six demonstrators are meeting with the president, and have been for some time. Local media reports that some 150 students are participating in the action. Arrests have reportedly been threatened, but have not yet taken place.
#EmoryCuts is the Twitter hashtag for the protest, and activists are tweeting from the scene via the @EmoryCuts account. Organizers also have a blog and a Facebook page.
More as the situation develops.
7:30 pm | The occupiers left the building voluntarily after representatives held a lengthy meeting with the college president. Though police locked down the occupation site at one point in the early evening, there were no arrests and the occupiers apparently face no legal or disciplinary sanctions. Reports on Twitter say that the president has committed to a future meeting with the demonstrators, but the specifics of what was agreed to have not yet been made public.
Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton helped establish the Chicago Panthers as an organization providing community services for the poor and brokered a treaty between the street gangs of the city — all before his twenty-first birthday.
Hampton was murdered by police on this date in 1969, shot down in his bed as he slept with his heavily pregnant girlfriend beside him.
Here’s Hampton, just weeks before he died, responding to the Days of Rage, a Weatherman riot in his hometown of Chicago.
“We believe that the Weatherman action is anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic. It’s chauvinistic, it’s Custeristic. And that’s the bad part about it. It’s Custeristic in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred — and they call that a revolution. It’s nothing but child’s play, it’s folly. We think these people may be sincere but they’re misguided. They’re muddleheads and they’re scatterbrains.”
Video:
studentactivism.net 
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