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!