Ah, the school protest. It begins with a few extremely earnest and
hard-nosed idealists with some usually noble demands. Then emerge the
hippies, who hibernate all year in preparation for moments like these.
They remove their shoes and shirts and boogie down while someone plays
the djembe. Then there's the guy who was just on his way to class and
thought better of it when he saw that achingly hot girl from Brittany
Hall holding a cardboard sign by the front of the building. Eventually
it blossoms into something like Take Back NYU!'s occupation of Kimmel
dining hall, which went on for more than 40 hours. Power was recently cut off to the wall outlets, depriving the students of vital iPod and cell phone rejuvenation. According to Take Back NYU!'s blog, is that university administers offered negotiation meetings with five of the protesters, only to serve them expulsion papers as soon as they stepped out of the fray. Just a few minutes ago, the group declared the occupation finished. On their blog, they write:
[Our] action made national and international news, and showcased the real power of the new student movement sweeping the globe.
No doubt NYU will begin attempting disciplinary action, but no suspensions, expulsions or arrests can contain what began in the last two days. This fight will carry on in the hands of the dozens of people who made it inside, and the hundreds more who came out to support the occupation. NYU showed it’s irrational need to defend secrecy and its exclusive hold on power, and that alone will drive this movement forward.
After a few minutes digging through the home page of Take Back NYU! (an SDS-type student group), I was able to find some of their demands. Confusing the matter was the fact that the group's "demands" are different from its "occupation demands". Some of those were respectable, if lofty: Granting scholarships to 13 Palestinian students and donating excess materials to a Gaza university that was half-wrecked by Israeli attacks; publicly releasing NYU's budget and endowment to ensure ethical investment; tuition stabilization and a fair labor contract. Others were unreasonable, like general public access to Bobst library and collective bargaining for TAs. To demand the lifting of the "Coke ban" is stupid.
But the saddest thing about this protest was that the group's number one demand was "amnesty for all parties involved". Aren't protesters supposed to have bigger balls than most? That's basically saying, can our civil disobedience please actually be considered obedient? Can you imagine Ghandi demanding, before freedom for the Indian people, that the British government be extra nice to him? If you really care about your cause, expose your bones to the billy clubs of academic probation. If you care more about your GPA, then I guess it's all right to make some involuted demand for self-protection your top priority.
