Yesterday my wife took advantage of her weekly furlough day to visit Son #2 in New York. She met him around lunchtime. Turns out he was fresh from occupying a building at NYU, which the authorities appear to have re-taken shortly after he exited to keep his date with his Mom. The tactics were oddly reminiscent of a dim and distant era, though the non-negotiable demands were not:
The N.Y.U. students created a Web site (takebacknyu.com) where they published their demands, including thorough annual reporting of the university’s operating budget, expenditures and endowment. They also want the university to provide 13 scholarships a year to students from the Gaza Strip and give surplus supplies to the Islamic University of Gaza.
The students also called on the school to allow graduate teaching assistants to unionize and to freeze tuition.
One caveat: the demand is not that tuition be frozen, but that increases not apply to students currently attending, i.e., that the tuition you pay as a senior will be the same you paid as a freshman. As things stand now a freshman paying almost $50,000.00 a year might find his or her tuition increased by 10-20% a year, imposing a tremendous and unpredictable financial burden. The real cost of a private college education, adjusted for inflation, has skyrocketed and is rapidly exceeding the grasp of all but the most affluent.
I won’t say who might have been pushing for the graduate student demand, except to note that my son, a grad student, is a seasoned union hand. The grad students were previously unionized, until their right to do so was rescinded by the Bush NLRB. (Just another example, Mr. Nader, of how there was a substantial difference between Bush and Gore, and another reason we can be thankful for Obama. The NLRB has been virulently anti-worker since Bush gained a majority of its five members). As soon as it legally could, the school refused to deal with the union.
The other demands, which can be found at the link in the quote, are actually quite reasonable. Some might regard the entire process of “issuing demands” as a quaint, archaic relic of a bygone era. But as Frederick Douglass said, Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Here’s hoping this is the opening act in a new era of activism.
Needless to say we did not greet the news of our own son’s participation in this incident with delight. It’s all very well for other people’s kids to put their necks on the line, but we’d much prefer our little boy keep his head down and neck safe. For the life of me I can’t figure out where he got the political views that lead him to do these things.
Here’s some video. What I find interesting is that the cops holding back, and using nightsticks on, the protestors, look most uncomfortable when the kids drop the profanity and start chanting “Shame on You”. That’s a tactic we never tried in the 60s, so far as I know, but in my opinion, it’s brilliant.
I blame all this on Obama. My son told my wife that there’s a new optimism in the air. People are beginning to think they can actually change things. Who knows, Obama may have released forces even he can’t control. There’s a word for it. Rhymes with “pope”.
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