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Jacob Blumenfeld, a member of the New School In Exile activist group, was arrested outside the home of New School president Bob Kerrey at 3:55 am on Thursday morning. Blumenfeld had allegedly been spraypainting the words “Bye Bob” on Kerrey’s front door.
Sarah Paley, Kerrey’s wife, said that Blumenfeld and two other individuals had attracted police attention because they wearing ski masks in mild weather. Blumenfeld, the only one of the three who was apprehended, is reportedly facing five criminal counts.
The New School In Exile announced in February that they would “shut down” the university on April 1 if Kerrey and New School vice president Jim Murtha did not resign by that date. Their deadline is now sixteen days away.
A Friday morning post on the NSIE blog made the following declaration: “We stand together, We have Solidarity, We do what we do because of love for each other and love for our future.”
April 10 update: If you’re looking for news on this morning’s New School building occupation, you can find it here.
Dozens of New York City police swarmed into Washington Square Park late last night in response to rumors of a planned midnight protest at NYU’s Bobst library.
An NYU spokesperson said the university had received word that student activists at the New School had been discussing an upcoming Bobst action, and requested the police presence — fifty cops, thirty police cars, and at least one paddy wagon — as a “precaution.”
The cops set up barricades on Washington Square South, but stood down by 2 am when it became clear that no protest was taking place.
NYU student activists Take Back NYU! mounted a 40-hour occupation of the university’s Kimmel Center last month, and New School students sat in at a campus dining hall for 30 hours in December. The New School activists, who call themselves The New School In Exile, have pledged to shut down that campus on April 1 if the university’s widely-reviled president and vice president do not resign before then.
April first is twenty-one days from today. This is shaping up to be a jittery three weeks for NYU and New School administrators.
Evening update: There was an anonymous flyer drop into the atrium of the Bobst library this afternoon. Text: “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?”
Morning update: NYU Local has a video from the flyer-droppers.
Coverage continues from here. Additional updates can be found on our twitter feed. For a discussion of the protesters’ demands, see this post.
At 10 PM on Wednesday, more than sixty students from NYU and various other colleges barricaded themselves into a dining area on the third floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center on Washington Square South. On Thursday afternoon they forced a door and gained access to a balcony overlooking the park, while supporters twice evaded campus security to add more numbers to the protest’s ranks.
On Thursday evening NYU administrators threatened students who remained in Kimmel after the building’s scheduled 1 AM closing time with arrest and expulsion, but 1 o’clock came and went with no movement from inside. Supporters of the protest on the street below clashedwith police a few minutes after 1 AM, but when the dust cleared from those scuffles students were still occupying the third floor.
There was only one arrest last night, of an NYU student who tried to climb a No Parking sign on Washington Square South. I’ve seen no reports of serious injuries to protesters, police, or bystanders during the one o’clock clash, and no update on the condition of the NYU security guard who was taken away in an ambulance earlier in the evening. About twenty protesters remain on the third floor of Kimmel, having rejected a late-night “safe harbor” offer that would have suspended disciplinary action against them as long as they stayed out of trouble for the remainder of their time on campus.
The protesters who remain have been given no assurances about how they will be treated going forward. No word on how many, if any, of them are non-NYU.
A liveblogger from the website NYULocal was in Kimmel from the start of the occupation, but he left the building late last night, and is not expected to be allowed to re-enter. The Washington Square News, a student newspaper, is providing ongoing online coverage of events. Take Back NYU!, the group that organized the protest, is providing regular updates on its website and twitter feed. In their first twitter update of the morning, however, they announced that NYU has cut off internet access to the occupied building.
That’s where things stand as of 9:30 this morning.
11:30 am Update: Yesterday, NYU kept most of the Kimmel building open, using security to (ineffectively) control access to the occupied third floor. Today they’ve shut the whole building down. Also, TBNYU is reporting that NYU has cut off not just internet access, but also power flow to electrical outlets in the occupied space. If the report is accurate, and NYU maintains this policy, the protesters will lose all ability to communicate with the outside world other than by megaphone as soon as their batteries run down.
TBNYU has another rally planned for the front of the building at noon today.
12:30 pm Update: NYU is shutting down the Kimmel occupation. Most of the news on the ground is coming via Twitter at this point, so it’s fragmentary. We’re not going to post moment-by-moment updates — we’ll wait for the situation to shake out, and provide a full report when we can.
Look for follow-up analysis from us in the hours and days to come, as well. It seems clear that the NYU administration’s approach to this sit-in was, like the sit-in itself, influenced by an awareness of its relationship to a broader student movement. How that played out, and what it means for students on other campuses, is going to be something worth exploring going forward.
1:15 pm Update: NYULocal reported at 12:50 that all protesters had left Kimmel except for four who remained on the balcony. According to the Take Back NYU twitter feed, at least ten NYU students have been suspended, and an unspecified number have been escorted to their dorms to collect their belongings. There are conflicting reports on the fate of the non-NYU protesters who left the building in the last hour.
3:00 pm Update: The building has been cleared.
Quoting Amy Goodman:
An unprecedented case of judicial corruption is unfolding in Pennsylvania. Several hundred families have filed a class-action lawsuit against two former judges who have pleaded guilty to taking bribes in return for placing youths in privately owned jails. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan are said to have received $2.6 million for ensuring that juvenile suspects were jailed in prisons operated by the companies Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care. Some of the young people were jailed over the objections of their probation officers. An estimated 5,000 juveniles have been sentenced by Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2002.
I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I’m passing it along anyway. Here’s a collection of three essays by participants in last semester’s occupation/protest at the New School in NYC — a “list of lessons and thoughts,” as the introduction puts it.
The link is to a 25-page PDF.
studentactivism.net 
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