NYU students occupied the marketplace in the Kimmel Center a 10 p.m. Wednesday, their stay to last until the administration agreed to talk.’
Come Friday, they were lured out under the guise of negotiation and suspended.
‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ came the cry from protesters outside the Kimmel Center late Thursday evening.’
Police safeguarded the building and eventually forced protesters back. Take Back NYU!, the organization’s Web site, released a video showing an officer thrashing aimlessly toward the crowd with his baton.’
According to Minding the Campus, a Web site dedicated to conversation on U.S. universities, protesters wanted public disclosure of NYU’s endowment and operating budget, a student on the university’s board of trustees, tuition kept at or below the rate of inflation, access to the library for the general public, and priority for student groups in buildings owned or leased by NYU.’
They also demanded scholarships for 13 Gaza students, extra NYU supplies sent to rebuild Gaza University, amnesty for all occupiers and a reconsideration of the lifting of the campus ban against Coca-Cola.’
According to the Web site, ‘the occupiers, 18 of them now under suspension, just got their timing wrong. Takeovers and non-negotiable demands seem to work better in the spring and fall, when the weather is better.’
Mike Riley and Will Schwartz, NYU class of ’08, created a Fake Back NYU blog to point out what they see as absurdity from the protesters. They claimed the students merely wished to ‘assuage [their] white guilt’ and called them laughable, ‘largely because they speak a language of knee-jerk-faux-liberal-college speak that only they can understand,’ making their disapproval for the protest clear.’
The key demand seemed to be transparency of NYU’s budget and endowment. This would be accomplished partially through appointing students to the university’s board of trustees.’
Unfortunately, when The Washington Square News interviewed 30 NYU students, not one of them fully supported the list of demands.
The issue here seems to be a combination of information overload and a lack of salience. Few students truly feel affected by the demands listed by Take Back NYU!. Without prominence and applicability, causes fail and occupations only last three days.’
A good question to ask any student who becomes involved in on-campus protests would be, ‘How important is this issue to you?”
Unions and protests usually pick a specific issue to argue. For this reason, they usually only reach about 10 percent of students and fizzle out quickly. Take Back NYU! chose the big issues and combined them, but the end result was an eclectic group of demands which no one fully understood.
The occupation of Kimmel is finished and those who blockaded themselves inside are subject to the consequences, which look bleak. This occupation had the fewest occupiers, shortest occupation, least support among the student body and longest list of demands in the history of NYU. Students who have been identified as being involved have lost their housing status, but NYU is graciously offering them alternative housing.’
