“Power to disrupt: limits and possibilities of campus sit-ins” [Part 3 of the Campus Power Project] (JK)

  • November 6, 2019 7:39 pm

from Radical Education Department

By Jason Koslowski

Introduction to the Campus Power Project

This is Part 3 of the Campus Power Project: an ongoing series of interviews, articles, and podcasts.  (For Part 1 of the Campus Power Project, click here.  For Part 2, click here)

Campus struggles in the US have surged recently: at Johns Hopkins, at Yale, at Evergreen State, at the University of Pennsylvania, and well beyond.

This series aims to help take stock of our campus struggles for radical, bottom-up, antiauthoritarian power on college campuses, so that we can make those struggles more powerful in the coming years.  The focus is on concrete organizing lessons we can learn from comrades in revolt.

The media series is only one half of the Campus Power Project.  The other half aims to help build up—across Philadelphia and beyond—lines of communication and coordination among radical campus struggles.

If you are working with leftist campus organizations and want to get involved, please reach out to us!

College campuses are systems of capitalist domination: of workers, students and surrounding communities. But campus revolts have been on the rise in recent years. In the US, for instance, as the university system comes to rely more and more on cheap, precarious labor, teacher and graduate student union struggles have been on the rise.

As public funds for colleges are slashed, tuitions increase, and campuses become key sites for fascist recruitment among disillusioned youth, many students are pushing back in occupations, walk-outs, demonstrations and other actions.

In struggles for power on-campus, the sit-in is one of the most often-used tools — although the results are mixed. Sit-ins can be powerful weapons helping shift the balance of university power for the dominated class. But they can also become sinkholes of time and energy leading to reprisals from administrators, burn-out and infighting.

Now that a new school year has begun, what lessons can we learn from recent sit-ins about how and when to use them well? And what other, and more radical, possibilities can sit-ins point us towards? To answer these questions, I look at a few recent sit-ins that happened on very different kinds of campuses. Allowing for differences, we can mine those struggles for organizing lessons.

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JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, MD

The 35-day Hopkins sit-in that began on April 3, 2019 exploded out of a longer struggle against the administration’s push for an armed, private police force on campus. Hopkins justifies that push for the sake of both public safety and keeping up with its “urban university peers” — relying on a method that has already had deadly results across the country. In the process the school strengthens its links to Baltimore’s violently racist police force.

For about a year beforehand, the fight at Hopkins focused on contacting the JHU admins for more information and asking for a reversal of the decision. The sit-in was organized by grad and undergrad groups like Students Against Private Police and Hopkins Coalition Against ICE, with the anti-ICE coalition spearheading campus tour disruptions to affect Hopkins’ bottom line. But organizers drew on a wider base than just students, connecting, for instance, with nurses in the process of unionizing at Johns Hopkins Hospital and coordinating closely with the “the West Wednesdays” weekly demos against police violence, which began to protest the police murder of Tyrone West in Baltimore.

Originally, organizers planned a single-day occupation of the lobby of the administration building that houses the university president’s office. Once the action began, though, the occupiers decided to escalate to an indefinite occupation until administrators met their demands: disband the private police force being prepared for Hopkins; end the medical school’s training of ICE agents; and push for justice for Tyrone West.

For most of its duration the occupation was symbolic. The building functioned much as it had before: admininstrators, staff and students could freely enter and leave. Throughout, a key focus of the struggle was an aggressive media campaign against Hopkins, with organizers winning high visibility for their struggle in national media outlets like the Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. The administration, however, refused to budge on the demands. And so on May 8, the sit-in escalated. Occupiers locked the doors and shut down all access to non-protesters.

The administration’s response was swift. That night, 100 armed police forcibly evicted the handful of remaning occupiers. Protesters primarily turned to social media to attack the university while continuing support for West Wednesdays.

Despite the highly publicized eviction, the results of the sit-in have been mixed. Admins only agreed to meet after the eviction — at the end of July, when many of the students had left campus. At the meeting they agreed only to a vague campus event about the private police force and ignored calls to end ICE collaboration and disband the private police force. The meeting ended with admins announcing investigations of students and possible retaliation against occupiers.

Yet at the start of the fall term administrators folded to one key demand: the medical school announced it would not renew its contract with ICE. While the struggle is now on a weaker footing after the eviction and with impending reprisals, there is a possibility of escalation by protesters this academic year — especially if solidarity with the nurses’ unionizing efforts develops into a more coordinated and active struggle.

laughing all the way to the bank

  • April 30, 2019 8:55 pm

Submission

We had a May Day pre-party at a Wells Fargo and now none of their ATMs work.

atms glued

  • July 22, 2018 4:38 pm

Submission

We fucked up ATM’s at 3 Wells Fargo banks in Philadelphia using half-sized credit cards and super glue. We chose this bank franchise because it profits from migrant imprisonment, but we know they all have it coming.

Shout out to the Indonesian Anarchists facing state repression! Solidarity with other anarchists fighting more of the same, and those that oppose the borders in their totality.

The Rainy Day Glues

Philly’s War on Papi Stores and the Limits of Liberalism

  • January 13, 2018 11:54 am

from Tubman-Brown Organization

By Tubman-Brown

On November 2nd, Philadelphia Councilwoman Cindy Bass introduced legislation to further regulate corner stores and restaurants — specifically to introduce new restrictions and reinforce existing restrictions on these stores. The bill has passed through City Council and has now been signed by Mayor Jim Kenney as of December 20th. The contents of the bill can be viewed on the city’s website, here.

News about this bill has been circulating around the internet. The articles are generally condemning the Councilwoman’s bill as an unfair imposition on business owner’s rights to operate as they please. The Conservative Tribune claims, in an article called “Big City Dem Wants Bulletproof Glass Banned for Being Racist“, that the bill is evidence that: “We now live in a world where almost anyone and everything can and will be labelled ‘racist.’ Some store owners in Philadelphia are the latest victims of the PC police.” But the liberal majority in the city government agrees that the bill would improve quality of life in the city and passed it unanimously. We would like to criticize both of these positions and provide our own view from the perspective of poor Philadelphia, and use this example to draw attention to larger problems in American politics, particularly how the interests of the poor and working class are never represented. A better source for this story is Philadelphia’s The Inquirer, who published a more balanced article called “Barrier windows in Philly beer delis: Symbols of safety or distrust?” that tries to present both arguments and provides good testimony from some stores owners, but as a piece of reporting it does not look at the wider situation.

Councilwoman Bass is a liberal and a Democratic Party politician, and a black woman from North Philadelphia. She told Fox29 News: “We want to make sure that there isn’t this sort of indignity, in my opinion, to serving food through a Plexiglas only in certain neighborhoods.” This is in reference to the statements of Yale sociology professor, Dr. Elijah Anderson, who describes the presence of bulletproof plexiglass as a “symbol of distrust”, a suggestion that the customers are not “…civil, honest people.”

Bass’s statement is strange. Why would the plexiglass barrier make us indignant? Is it because it shows that we live “…only in certain neighborhoods”? Well, those “certain neighborhoods” are poor neighborhoods. If you live in a poor neighborhood you know it, and your problems definitely have a lot more to do with affording your groceries than whether or not the cashier selling you them is behind glass and wire. What Dr. Anderson of Yale fails to recognize, or does not say clearly enough, is that if the glass and wire is ugly it’s ugly because it reminds us of our own desperation and the desperation we are surrounded by. If it were not a symbol of the reality of poverty and violence it would not be troublesome. The trendy coffee shops and restaurants of University City and the recently deceased neighborhood of Fishtown are often decorated like warehouses and factories, with exposed piping, steel, and gritty lighting to create an urban atmosphere — the people eating there are not reminded of the reality of hard labor and poverty because it is not a reality to them, it is an aesthetic choice. Dr. Anderson and Councilwoman Bass equate the presence of bulletproof plexiglass with an aesthetic choice meant only to impart a message and ignore the circumstances that created it. The most important factor, regardless of whether the plexiglass is necessary or not, is finding out why it is there in the first place.

Poverty is violent. Most of the danger comes from the lack of jobs, healthcare, and education, but those threats sometimes spill over into robberies and shootings. Bulletproof glass is a sad reality in poor neighborhoods, a reminder of the interaction between one person robbing a store because they’re struggling and another person trying to run a little store. And these people running the stores are treated as the primary opposition to Councilwoman Bass’s bill. Bass claims that “…the bill has been mischaracterized by the people who run those stores – people who are exploiting a loophole in state law and hurting the neediest neighborhoods in Philadelphia.” The stores she is referring to are corner stores in poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia. These are redlined neighborhoods (Philadelphia is such a good example of redlining that a map of our extensive racial segregation is used for the Wikipedia picture describing redlining). In short, these are neighborhoods where there are none or fewer of the Wawas and Acmes and stores of similar reputation as are available in places like the Far Northeast, Chestnut Hill, or Center City. That’s because opening them in Strawberry Mansion, East Germantown, Kensington, and similar neighborhoods is considered a bad investment due to the high poverty and the crime that comes with that poverty. The owners of Acme and Wawa can afford higher rent in wealthier neighborhoods, or can place their stores strategically on the edges of poor areas.