Police Violence on the Campus
Police Violence on the Campus
Police Violence on the Campus
In the last few weeks, a number of campus protests (some aligned with the Occupy movement) against tuition increases have encountered violence on the part of law enforcement. Below are two quick reflections from CUNY affiliates on the protests at Baruch College last night. In the coming hours and days we will bring you more from others at CUNY and the University of California.
UPDATE: Two new posts below, from Sarah Brown and Michael Busch.
The police riot against protesters at Baruch College is the latest of many well-publicized crackdowns against protest this fall. But it?s also just the latest episode in the struggle at CUNY, where we?ve been fighting for some time against privatization, budget cuts, rising tuition, increasing class size, and precarious working conditions for meagerly paid and overworked adjuncts. In 2010, I attended a previous Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College, along with many other activists from throughout the CUNY system. We were ejected from the meeting after we raised our voices to protest proposed tuition hikes and lack of student input; after being ejected, we continued to rally in lobby. In this video from last year, you can see police facing down activists in the same atrium where protesters were beaten and arrested on Monday night. As depressing as it is to see students once again attacked by police thugs at their own university, one thing about this year?s protest is very encouraging: the Occupy movement and the protests at the University of California have helped create a unifying narrative that?s attracting attention to other ongoing struggles that would previously have attracted little mainstream coverage.
-Peter Frase, Ph.D. student in sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
I wasn?t at the police riot at Baruch College yesterday. Instead, I attended a Brooklyn College General Assembly. It was student-led, peaceful, and electrifying. I listened to young people, all of them women, many of color, talk about their desire for education and their difficulty in getting one. They were sharp and funny, quirky and considered. Everything they said was their own; no canned speeches, no prefab rhetoric. They had gathered in front of Boylan Hall, one of the main academic buildings on campus that houses various humanities departments as well as some administration offices. Standing between the students and Boylan Hall was a phalanx of police. It was a perfect tableau of our times: students talking passionately?intelligently, caustically, inventively?about their education; cops standing between them and that education. I didn?t need to be at Baruch College yesterday to see the crude show of force; it?s everywhere. Administrative officials and politicians will claim that they are defending humane values from a violent horde. But anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows on which side stands humaneness and which side violence.
-Corey Robin, associate professor of political science, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center
On Monday I found myself rather literally occupying the divide between the CUNY I am very proud to be a part of?vibrant, serious, intelligent?and the CUNY I have recently come to expect?inexorable, simpleminded, hostile. I can be clearly seen and heard in this clip just before the three-minute mark. To my right (your left), campus security wield billy clubs and a man empties violent, non-specific threats into a bullhorn, such as ?this is your last chance to get out.? To my left, a group of mostly students and some faculty?who had a moment before presented their IDs at the turnstile, only to be met with open, seemingly zealous, aggression?respond to the sight of clubs and the disavowal of their right to attend an open hearing by making a series of radical suggestions like sitting down and the ever-dangerous having of a discussion.
The protesters create a distance between themselves and the officers and they never cross it.
Around the fifty-second mark you can easily see a man in a suit making his way to the back of the crowd. This man had issued a number of threats to the group as a whole and was seemingly giving orders to security. At two minutes and fifty seconds you can see him make his way back. The respectful, unprovoked clearing of the crowd to allow him to pass paints a clear picture of the level of maturity and composure the students maintained prior to being attacked.
There are now a number of YouTube videos that better illustrate the extent of the violence that follows than I could. What I can attest to is my own personal sense of the violence that has been done to us all?that is to all of us who are CUNY. These and other similar, recent acts of violence or intimidation on CUNY campuses are disgraceful. We are left to conclude that the position of this administration is that they are prepared to defend themselves, at great cost to the university, against being inconvenienced by the voices of their students–students frustrated by the increasing demands placed upon them and fearful that a more promising future may soon be out of reach.
-Sarah Brown, adjunct instructor, Brooklyn College, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College alumnus
The coercive police response to an otherwise peaceful student protest at Baruch College on Monday highlights a number of worrisome and, frankly, unacceptable developments within CUNY that deserve sustained attention. Chief among them, it bears repeating that security personnel?paid to protect CUNY?s student body?used violent force to prevent students from accessing public space that is otherwise theirs by right. In the end, five were arrested (all of them students of color, incidentally) for trespassing on their own college campus, among other phony charges, while the undemocratically appointed and largely unaccountable Board of Trustees met upstairs to implement a series of tuition hikes in the coming years.
At the same time, the events at Baruch are only the most shocking expression of a beefed-up security presence on CUNY campuses across the city. This takes most curious shape at the Graduate Center, where teams of private guards and public safety officers currently roam the building to protect against the possibility of students occupying classrooms and lounges?which, of course, is the express purpose of each?and where one group of officers is now permanently stationed on the fifth floor to make sure rumors of a rowdy protest by political scientists do not come to pass. The effect is chilling, especially in view of the fact that GC brass recently undertook a slash-and-burn campaign against the building?s security budget, leaving some officers suddenly without jobs or benefits, and others with reduced hourly wages. Austerity was the tired explanation, but now it?s clear that the move offers tremendous flexibility in getting more security bang for the buck.
The halls of the Graduate Center have never been particularly inviting as an environment of learning. Yet they?ve been rendered bleaker still by the suffocating presence of constant monitoring, surveillance that has no purpose other than the intimidation of those it supposedly protects.
-Michael Busch, Ph.D. student in political science, CUNY Grad Center, instructor of international relations, City College of New York.
Image from CUNY demonstrations on 11/21/11 (Timothy Krause, Flickr creative commons)
