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Student activists at New York City’s New School have reportedly launched another building occupation.
According to the activist group Take Back NYU, students from the New School have occupied “the entire building” at 65 Fifth Avenue. (65 Fifth is at 14th Street: map.)
The occupation looks very much like the work of The New School In Exile, As of 8 am, there’s been no news directly from the NSIE’s website or blog. More details as they become available, here and on our Twitter feed.
9 am: The New School Free Press is liveblogging the occupation. They say about 60 students entered the building at five o’clock this morning. Cops have cordoned off the sidewalk, and NS president Bob Kerrey says “this is an NYPD situation.” Kerrey claims students “broke and entered” the building, and assaulted a guard. A student inside said the group made a “peaceful entrance.”
9:30 am: News media are starting to cover the story (NY1, AP/Fox), but still no statement from the occupiers.
9:55 am: NY1 has a statement from student Andy Folk: “”Our demand for them to resign is consistent with the faculty’s ‘no confidence’ vote in Bob Kerrey. That demand was not met. Other demands were met, such as starting a socially-responsible investment committee, which Bob Kerrey is trying to bury in red tape. So, we need to show him by force and civil disobedience that students have a right over the school that they pay money for. This is just a demonstration of students taking back their space.”
10:00 am: New post up here.
10:08 am: Cable news channel NY1 is airing a lengthy live report from the scene of the occupation. They say cops have closed down some streets, cleared protesters from sidewalks. Report included video of masked occupiers on the roof of 65 Fifth Avenue waving black-and-red flags.
10:30 am: The New York Times and Gawker weigh in.
10:50 am: Blogpost up from the Village Voice, with photos. Says cops are blocking students from going to class. 13th Street shut down. “Massive police presence … helicopters whirring overhead.”
11:05 am: NY1 reports dozens of cops “preparing to go inside 65 Fifth Avenue.” Cops wearing helmets, shields, carrying plastic handcuffs.
11:20 am: http://reoccupied.wordpress.com/ claims to be blogging from inside occupation. Latest post says cops are storming the building, have used pepper spray and tear gas. Trying to get confirmation…
11:35 am: NY1 news reporting that police are inside the building and on the roof, and that “at least two” students have been removed. No mention of pepper spray or tear gas, no word on mass arrests.
11:45 am: Village Voice blog: “The cops have pulled paddy wagons between the press pen and the front of the building so the press can’t see any of the actual arrests.”
11:50 am: http://reoccupied.wordpress.com/: “Rally NOW at 6th Precinct! Let’s get them free!!! 233 w10th st at Bleecker. NOW NOW NOW Until every last one is out!”
12:05 pm: NY1 reporting that NYPD entered 65 Fifth Ave at 11:15, and cleared the building by noon. Nineteen arrests — fifteen men, four women.
12:30 pm: The New School has released a statement to the media on this morning’s occupation. That statement, and subsequent developments, will be covered in this follow-up post.
Before dawn on July 18, 1992, members of a Peruvian government death squad entered the dorms of Enrique Guzmán y Valle National Education University, known as La Cantuta. They rousted the students from their beds, abducting nine of them.
La Cantuta had a long history of radical Maoist politics, and the nine students were suspected of involvement in a recent car bombing.
The death squad members took the students, and a professor who they abducted from his home, to an off-campus location. There the ten were tortured and killed. The corpses of four of those killed were discovered in an unmarked grave a year later; the other six bodies have never been accounted for.
Yesterday a Peruvian court convicted Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimori, of having ordered the La Cantuta killings, as well as a massacre the previous year in which fifteen people were killed. Fujimori served as Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000.
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a 34-year-old member of the Peruvian national congress, will be a candidate in Peru’s presidential elections next year. If elected, she has pledged to grant her father a full pardon.
A big victory for students’ rights: a federal judge has blocked a Pennsylvania prosecutor’s plans to file child pornography charges against three teenage girls who stored suggestive photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Two of the three were wearing opaque bras in the photographs at issue, and the third was topless. None was engaging in sexual activity. The three were among twenty students in Pennsylvania’s Tunkhannock School District who were contacted by the prosecutor after school officials confiscated their cell phones, searched them, and found nude or revealing photos on them.
The prosecutor told the twenty students that they had a choice — they could sign up for an ongoing educational program on “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and mandatory drug tests, or they could be charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, a felony.
Seventeen of the students signed up for the program. The other three sued. And yesterday a federal judge took their side.
The prosecutor, reached for comment yesterday, refused to say whether he would appeal the judge’s decision.
A student who prosecutors say hacked into his university’s computer network last fall, raising students’ grades and cutting their tuition charges, has been found guilty of five federal charges.
The government says that Marcus Barrington, then a student at Florida A&M University, conspired with a group of other students to alter fellow students’ grades and change residency records from out-of-state to in-state. The university is said to have lost more than $100,000 in out-of-state tuition revenue as a result.
Barrington’s two co-defendants, Lawrence Secrease and Christopher Jacquette, filed guilty pleas. Both testified against him in his trial, which ended Friday. The jury took just two hours to find Barrington guilty on all charges.
Barrington’s attorney made a statement after the verdict. “It’s sad to see these young people get in trouble especially on this kind of conduct,” he said. “In my day, it would have been a cheating incident and today it’s a federal crime. I just don’t understand what the difference is.”
Barrington faces a possible prison term of nearly thirty years when he is sentenced in June.
(via UWire)
An Australian friend draws our attention to two stories that appeared in the Australian press last week:
The government of Western Australia is considering placing police officers in that state’s high schools, in response to a recent increase in assaults on teachers there…
…And an officer assigned to an “elite unit designed to be the public face of [the] police in high schools” in the state of New South Wales has been arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a child.
This is just one incident, of course. But it does serve as a reminder that whatever the benefits to teachers and students of bringing police onto school grounds may be, the practice carries real costs as well.
(Thanks to lauredhel of Hoyden About Town for the tip.)
studentactivism.net 
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