Bring the Occupy Everything tour to your campus!

[dru...@gmail.com]

A message to SUNY campus activists--

Open up a discussion of tactics surrounding the March 4th student mobilization with students from the New School and NYU about our ongoing campus struggles.

 

We have made ourselves available to visit campus throughout late January and February. The following is a bio of  our tourdate for Maryland, however we will be tailoring our SUNY tour towards March 4th and specific situations/potential on your campus.

 

Please email dru...@gmail.com to get in touch!

Solidarity,

Andy Folk

 

 

Bio: A group of students involved with the new school and NYU occupations, willing to give their experiences. A back round New School, We will first attempt to orient ourselves within the University by grappling with the radical transformations in higher education over the past decade. We look at the corporatization of private universities like the New School, the privatization of public universities in Europe and the United States, and the backlash against the rising costs of tuition, the lack of employment potentials, and the ubiquitous burden of student debt. We then describe the specific political ethos of the New School and the series of events leading up to the December and April occupations of 65 Fifth Avenue. This begins with the founding of the New School in 1919 by scholars fleeing Columbia University after refusing political loyalty oaths during WWI and then the creation of the University in Exile in 1933 as a haven for persecuted European scholars during WWII. Then, we jump to the presidency of Bob Kerrey beginning in 2001, his personal and political histories, the commercialization of the New School, and why students and faculty want him gone. Lastly, we will discuss the faculty no confidence vote that led to the December occupation, that occupation itself, the April 10 occupation, and the aftermath of these events.

Finally, we discuss occupation as a political tactic and medium of
dissent, attempting to answer questions like: Is occupation a means to an
end, or is it a “pure means?” Is it effective in the sense that it ‘gets
something done,’ or is it better employed as an affective form protest?
What is affective protest? And why not lobby for reform, picket, or join
the student senate? Above all, we hope to offer what we’ve learned from
our experiences at the New School to other university communities with a
desire to resist and affect change.

WHAT IS AN OCCUPATION?

An occupation is a break in capitalist reality that occurs when people
directly take control of a space, suspending its normal functions and
animating it as a site of struggle and a weapon for autonomous power.

Occupations are a common part of student struggles in France, where for
example in 2006 a massive youth movement against the CPE (a new law that
would allow employers to fire first-time workers who had been employed for
up to 2 years without cause) occupied high schools and universities and
blockaded transit routes. In 1999, the National Autonomous University of
Mexico City was occupied for close to a year to prevent tuition from being
charged. Both of these struggles were successful. In Greece and Chile,
long and determined student struggles have turned campuses into cop-free
zones, which has in turn led to their use as vital organizing spaces for
social movement involving other groups like undocumented migrants and
indigenous people.