Next Left Notes: SDS Issues Demands To New School Board Of Trustees

SDS Issues Demands To New School Board Of Trustees

NEW YORK — The New School chapter of Students for a Democratic Society rallied today, calling on students, staff, and faculty to support its campaign “for a socially just, responsible, and democratic university.” By the end of the protest SDS had convinced the New School administration to meet with students to discuss “four core demands.”

The rally started at 2:30 P.M. and grew as classes let out. By 3:30 P.M. a group of 35 students had assembled in the New School courtyard. The students were protesting because they said they have been excluded from participation in the decision-making process at their university. The SDS campaign “for a democratic university” raises a number of concerns the students want the administration to address.

New School University’s ties to war profiteers is a key issue. Robert B. Millard, the Treasurer of the New School Board of Trustees, is the chairman of the executive committee of L-3 Communications, one of the largest military contractors in the U.S. SDS has been protesting against L-3 for several months, accusing the contractor of being directly implicated in the violation of international law. Eight students were arrested for blocking the entrance to L-3 on March 19 - the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. This lockdown was followed by a graphic die-in outside L-3 on April 18. New School SDS is demanding the removal of Millard from the Board of Trustees. The students are also demanding that all university ties to L-3 be severed.

According to a recent SDS statement, New School has labor problems too - students argue that the New School administration “ignores the concerns of workers by hiring labor-rights violating companies like New York Insulation and refusing to hear the demands of the Local 78 labor union.” SDS wants New School to cease doing business with New York Insulation.

Students and alumni are also challenging the New School administration’s refusal to renew the contract of Professor Barrie Karp, a popular professor in the cultural studies department. Students say this decision is indicative of the administration’s push to restructure the curriculum - and is part of a general shift away from the school’s progressive tradition. Students argue that the school is being “corporatized” and they are demanding Karp’s contract be renewed.

In addition SDS is calling for full disclosure of all university investments and financial statements “to the students, faculty, staff, and alumni of The New School.”

Determined to be heard, 15 students left the rally and attempted to get access to a Board of Trustees meeting, being held a short distance from the protest.

“We entered the meeting peacefully and quietly,” said Pat Korte, a New School SDS organizer.

The trustees asked the students to leave the private meeting but the students insisted that their demands be heard. In response, the trustees asked the students to submit a written list of their demands, promising to review the list at a later date. The students refused and eventually the Dean of Eugene Lang College offered a compromise.

“The trustees and the administration agreed to meet with us to discuss our demands…by no later than May 14,” Korte said. Korte and the other activists asked for this agreement in writing — and they got it.

Noting that it is finals week and students are “feeling pressured”, Korte said he was pleased with the turnout and with the agreement reached with the New School administration.

“I think the action was a success. We presented our demands in an assertive manner,” Korte said.

Anyone looking for more information on the New School SDS campaign can write to newschoolsds@riseup.com or visit www.newschoolsds.org.

Ending on a High!

Hey y'all!

So we can chalk up this year as a success! Today, after a short rally, SDS activists took the bold step of directly confronting the Board of Trustees of New School University, demanding the means for ensuring direct accountability to students, including full financial disclosure and student representation on the board of trustees. We also raised several issues we have campaigning around all semester. We announced our distress at Treasurer Robert B. Millard's connection with war profiteer L3 communications (who was, ironically, today named in a lawsuit by victims of the concentration camp at Abu Grahib). We demanded justice for New School construction workers, exploited, underpaid and forced to work in dangerous conditions by contractor Arun Bhatia. And we raised the issue of the $3000 tuition hike that has caused distress to thousands of students already struggling to afford their education. Security around the building was heavy (in fact, most of the 11th street building was locked down), but protesters managed to outflank them and make it to the door of the meeting. At that point, the administration decided to negotiate rather that risk their meeting being disrupted.

After talking with the Dean of Lang College, our folks secured a written promise that we would be allowed to meet with the President of the University and members of the Board of Trustees to raise our concerns directly by May 14th. We consider our action, therefore, a great success, in that we have brought the issues to the spotlight and have forced them to the negotiating table when they refused, previously, to even acknowledge students' voices. We were put in the position of having to use direct action to accomplish our goals, but we'd like to remind you SDS is not just about protest. A huge amount of planning, outreach and research went into this action, and we have also spent considerable time participating in indirect action such as student government and education programs. There is lots of work yet to be done, but we look forward to a productive summer and an amazing next semester!

Remember, it's never too late to get involved, and there's lots of great work you could be doing to help out! Email us at newschoolsds(at)riseup[dot]net, or come to our final meeting of the semester on Monday at 6pm in the student activities space, room 101, 55w. 13th!

Party This Friday!

Hey!

Before I forget!
Come party! We're not all about politics! And we know you're as stressed as we are from Finals! We'll have drinks and music!

This Friday (the 2nd May)
6th St. Community Center
638 East 6th Street (BTW B & C)
7.30PM - 1AM

Rally for a Responsible University II

Tuesday, May 6th @ 2:30 PM
13th St. and 5th Ave

Cut The New School's Ties to Torture
&
Rally for a Responsible University

Demands:
That the New School ends all their ties to L3 Communications, a company profiting off of torture
No Tuition Increase without Student Representation on the Board of Trustees!
No more University contracts to Labor-Rights-Abusing/Environmentally Destructive companies
Student Oversight over Investment and Financial Disclosure
New Contract for Dr. Barrie Karp, the vastly popular Anti-Racist Feminist Professor

This is our last Rally of the semester! Show your commitment to a Democratic University!

Reclaim Student Space!

For the rest of the semester, New School SDS will be leading a campaign to reclaim student space. The meager three rooms on the ground floor of 55 West 13th Street are all that suffices as 'our' space, and yet even then we are routinely kicked out. The New School administration has promised to keep that area open for us at all times, and used their commitment to do so to justify a $3000 tuition hike. Yet, as usual, VP Murtha and others have showed themselves to be not as good as their word - students trying to study, amongst them Free Press reporters, were kicked out and forced to go to NYU's Bobst to complete the insane amounts of work we have.

It's our space. We're going to make it so. We're planning on setting up our computers and books, starting Thursday, and provide snacks, hugs and emotional support to our fellow students. So, starting at 10pm on Thursday and continuing till the end of Finals, stop by! We'll be hanging out, and we'll have food!
Also, we're working on ideas for next year, so come let us know what you think we should work on!!

Update!

Sorry this hasn't been updated, folks! A lot of stuff has been going on!

Most critical I think, in recent news, has been the acquittal of Sean Bell's murderers, NYPD Officers Gescard Isnora, Michael Oliver and Det. Marc Cooper, who fired fifty times at the unarmed man, killing him on his wedding night. The acquittal shows the racism and authoritarianism inhereant in our justice system and implies that the New York Police Department is above the law, the constitution and the ethics we have in our society. If you shoot an unarmed person 50 times as an offensive action, you are a murderer.

Dozens of New Schoolers and other SDSers attended the rally and unpermitted march in Queens this past Friday to demand justice for Sean Bell's killers. Despite it being a spontaneous action, over 1000 people showed up to show support for Popular Justice.
Learn more about the Sean Bell case and what you can do to demand justice at
http://www.justiceforsean.net/

Wednesday Night, New School Students working in coalition with the Picture the Homeless campaign will be staging a Sleep-Out to protest the criminilization and gross neglect of New York's homeless population. Thousands of people in New York are deprived of the basic right to shelter, and what is more, treated like criminals for being unable to find housing in the City. All this is happening while millions of square feet lie unused, kept empty to inflate prices by greedy landlords. Help draw attention to the problem by joining us as we sleep out on the corner of 13th Street and 5th Avenue from 7PM Wednesday. Email sleepoutapril30@gmail.com for last minute info.

The NorthEast Regional Convention

Last weekend, a number of us went up to Harvard for the Northeast Regional SDS Convention. We came to work on our regional unity, to get certain matters of business taken care of, to get in touch with the other people in our region who we don't usually get a chance to meet up with, and to have fun. Those who could took cars, but most of us took the china town bus.

On Friday, when we arrived at the palatial campus, there were break out groups in progress. We participated in these by exclaiming greetings to our friends who we had not seen in a while, and to our friends who we were just then meeting. We eventually settled down and got broken up into other groups to talk about sexual abuse and a culture of support in SDS. Some of our groups turned out to be inspiring and deep discussions about male privilege and our personal culpability in the social scenes we find ourselves in, while others tended toward dogma and platitudes. Later on there was an open mic which devolved into heavy socializing and an attempt to crash some Harvard parties which turned out to be awful.

The food was constantly edible and available in mass quantity throughout the convention.

On Saturday night, there was a very long discussion about the discussion of privilege and race/orientation/gender, and afterwards there was a valiant attempt at that actual discussion. Most people seemed to grow weary of the talk fairly fast, partly because the facilitation was not clear, and partly because people consistently failed to completely understand one another. It did become clear by the end of the night that we in SDS have no common language or even a common set of concepts for discussing these issues. Not enough of us have done enough reading on (or asking about) the struggles of our friends and co-organizers, and not enough of us have been brave enough to question our own privilege to the point where our own self-image is the same as what would be seen by someone with less privilege than us. However, those who were not as wearied by the length of time it took to come to no conclusion at all felt that the discussion was a vital first step if we are ever to seriously tackle and take down these issues. And we must deal with these issues head on if we are ever to create the truly Democratic Society we want.

Earlier on Saturday, there was an Info Share about those national working groups which are up and (at least mostly) running. There must have been about 20 or so, with things like creating standard welcome packets for new chapters, a better newspaper, better relations with other social justice groups, fundraising, and training some mobile chapter-starting people. Particularly of note were the chapter census and the welcome packet people, who informed us that we were growing at an alarming rate and they were worried because we don't have enough people to properly attend to all the new chapters which are forming up all over the country.

The convention dragged on and the agenda needed more and more adjustment as presenters and conventioneers were less and less punctual. That talk on Saturday night was supposed to have happened in two separate sections earlier the same day. People began speaking to one another in slightly pleading tones, and taking extended cigarette breaks under an arched brick entryway which channeled echoes. The only proposal brought up during the convention was brought up on Sunday, after most of the chapters had left. It concerned a reading list for the topics implied from the discussion on Saturday night. It was eventually tabled, which was not even an action provided for in the official convention rules of order. Many of our crew were exhausted from an exceptionally hard night of partying the night before, and thus, the convention dribbled to a close.

A declaration was delivered at one point by the delegate from Los Angeles (which is not in fact in the Northeast, but he's a friend of ours) to those who happened to be in the room. 'We have a long way to go,' he said something very much like, 'but we are moving very quickly. The new SDS has only been around for three years, and it's getting new chapters at a rate no one could have foreseen at the beginning. At this time next year, will either be a force to be reckoned with on a national level, or we will be irrelevant. Only time will tell, but we have incredible potential here'. We also have a lot of work to do.