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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.”
Reader Suzanne passed along word last night that there’s going to be a massive statewide rally in California tomorrow against higher ed budget cuts and fee hikes, with students from across the state busing in to Sacramento. Between six and seven thousand are expected to participate.
Accordng to iwillmarch.com, the march will begin at 10 am, with a rally at the State Capitol at noon and lobby visits beginning at 2 pm.
Here’s some of the stuff that happened in the world this week…
On Monday, two hundred French students blockaded the entrance to the main campus of the Sorbonne, forcing administrators to cancel classes at that university for the day. The students were protesting planned budget cuts at France’s state universities.
On Tuesday, thousands of students took to the streets of Nairobi, Kenya to protest police killings, including the shooting of a student demonstrator last week. (Here’s an interesting critical take on that protest from a professor at the University of Nairobi.)
On Wednesday, students at West Virginia University protested a speech on campus by J. Phillipe Rushton, who has claimed that race is linked to intelligence and other cognitive and behavioral traits. The same day, five hundred students at the University of Liverpool protested planned department closures.
On Friday, forty students from Grand Valley State University in Michigan staged a four-hour campus rally to protest the shooting of a GVSU student in a police raid on an off-campus apartment on Wednesday night, while — as I noted earlier — three hundred Finnish students occupied the main administration building of the University of Helsinki.
There was, of course, much more. That’s just a taste.
Finnish students have been occupying the main administration building of the University of Helsinki since Friday.
Approximately three hundred students took over the building on Friday evening to protest a new education law that would open up Finnish colleges and universities to greater business influence. The occupation followed a day of coordinated protests across Finland.
Students staged an overnight sit-in in the same space in late February. According to one news report, the February protesters discussed the education bill with a vice-chancellor and “served coffee to the returning staff” before leaving the building.
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.
studentactivism.net 
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