How Not to Protest

Last Wednesday, a friend of mine went to New York University’s Kimmel Center to cover Take Back NYU!’s Second Study Breakdown for NYU’s blog, NYULocal. Here’s how Charlie’s initial liveblog of the student takeover began:

9:18 PM – I’m sitting on the 3rd floor of Kimmel watching as a ton of students roll in for Take Back NYU’s 2nd Study Breakdown. Except it seems that there won’t be any dancing and somebody just asked me if I needed a number for legal counsel if I get thrown in jail. Looks like this might be a bit more than a dance party.

The fringe student activism group’s first Study Breakdown had been a short-lived dance party in the university library the previous semester. As Charlie quickly learned, this one was going to be a little more ambitious.

EJ Henricks, a New York University student and activist, shouts in support of other students who were barricaded in the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life on the New York University campus.
(AP Photo/Robert Mecea)

Not long after he published the post above, Take Back NYU! members barricaded themselves inside the Kimmel cafeteria and announced that they would remain there until the NYU administration met their demands, which included everything from budget disclosure to aiding the rebuilding of the University of Gaza. The list was a poorly conceived mess, a bizarre smorgasbord of stereotypically liberal concerns with nothing to bind them together. It did, however, reveal something very important about the protest: that it was seemingly less about a productive strategy on its own merits, and more about allowing the members of TBNYU! to role play all of their favorite fantasies of 1960s activism.

It’s too bad they didn’t take a harder look at the models they were emulating. The sit-ins of the ‘60s, like the one that occurred in 1968 at NYU’s uptown cousin, Columbia University, were frequently marred by violence and met very little, if any, success. Nobody who is serious about campus activism would have expected them to push a massive bureaucracy like NYU into disclosing its investments, helping to rebuild Gaza, banning Coca-Cola products, and so on merely by throwing an illegal drum circle in one of the cafeterias for three straight days.

The TBNYU! protest was one of the strangest farces in NYU’s 178-year history. By the end of the 40-hour occupation, only 10 protesters remained, which NYU security* unceremoniously removed from the building. Each one was suspended and kicked out of campus housing, and NYU did not meet a single one of the group’s demands. Nevertheless, the official TBNYU! blog, with characteristic detachment from reality, insisted that the occupation had “made a difference.”

And perhaps it had, but not in the way they expected. The group had managed to unite the NYU Democrats and Republicans in denunciation of the occupation. And as Jessica Roy, another friend and NYU Local staff member said, “The administration will most likely now be more tight-lipped, dodgy and suspicious of the idea of discussing these important issues than they ever were before.”

In other words, the protest was an unmitigated fiasco, and a solid model of how not to effect positive change on your local campus. And what else could it have been? Although TBNYU!’s sit-in tactics were clearly inspired by a similar protest at the neighboring New School in December, the way the two incidents played out, and the events leading up to them, could not have been more different.

For one thing, in the case of the New School sit-in, the participants had good reason to believe that they had no other recourse. The New School’s tenured faculty had already passed a nearly unanimous vote of no confidence against university President Bob Kerrey, largely in protest of his decision to appoint himself provost. The catalyst for the sit-in came when Kerrey chose to ignore the vote, saying that only the board of trustees could have him dismissed. New School students only took extreme measures when it became clear that no amount of lobbying through the system was going to get him to step down as provost.

Take Back NYU!, on the other hand, can’t claim that they tried everything else first. Besides the “dance party,” most of its campus activism before the sit-in had been limited to writing slogans in chalk on the sidewalk and rude behavior at town hall meetings. Given that NYU President John Sexton has shown willingness to compromise whenever it will save the school some embarrassment, there’s no question that TBNYU! would have gotten further with fewer Code Pink-style antics.

Once the New School protesters took extreme measures, they were also sure to make it clear exactly what they wanted. Although the initial list of eight demands was a little muddled, by the second day of the occupation they had refocused it into something that made it clear what their priorities were. That was why they were able to negotiate with Kerrey and the administration, and get most of what they wanted.

TBNYU!’s list of demands, on the other hand, was an unfocused mess, with no clear organizational principle behind it. TBNYU! has long made budget disclosure and transparency its pet issue, but the thirteen demands also included such bizarre items as annual scholarships for 13 students and an administration investigation into the student council’s decision to lift a ban of Coca-Cola distribution on campus. The list was so eclectic and bizarre that the senior vice president for university relations, Lynne Brown, said of the initial negotiations: “We’ll be trying to clarify the exact nature of their complaints, and try to engage them in colloquy and conversation. It’s a little unclear for us now.”

The exterior of Kimmel reflected the group’s disorganization and terrible messaging. Banners demanding budget transparency were mixed in with others expressing solidarity with Palestine, and there was nothing to link the two ideas together. Outside, anarchists in black masks and two topless female undergrads showed their support with the squatters. It was a circus, and the average passerby walked away with absolutely no idea what TBNYU! was protesting.

If the leaders of TBNYU! were more prudent, or even competent, they would have at least attempted realizing their demands through reasonable engagement with the student government and university administration before they jumped straight ahead to illegally occupying school property. They could have at least tried to make their demands ideologically coherent. Instead, they fulfilled every ugly stereotype of the immature college hippie, trying to relive a grand fantasy of ‘60s campus activism.

Ned Resnikoff is a sophomore at NYU and a regular contributor to Campus Progress.

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