StudentNation | The Nation

Giorgio Jackson. Photo by Brittany Peterson.

Giorgio Jackson, 26, was vice president of a chapter of the Chile Student Federation in 2011 when the movement saw regular marches of over 100,000 people take over the streets. Universities and high schools were occupied for months. The demands were clear: students wanted free, quality, public education and an end to profiteering. Jackson participated in regular dialogues with government ministers and congresspeople, and was disappointed with the indifference he found despite his movement’s massive 80 percent public support. “I felt frustrated that no one understood our proposal, or would defend it, or that there wasn’t a single voice to remain firm in defending our alternative,” said Jackson. “We deserve to have a space there.”

In a logical next step for the young negotiator, Jackson has decided to run for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress.

Jackson isn’t the only one strategizing a new political era for Chile. Twenty thirteen is a presidential election year, and with the return of former President Michelle Bachelet after nearly three years as the director of UN Women, the debate has heated up as to who is fit to lead the country for the next four-year term.

Twenty-thirteen will also mark the forty-year anniversary of the US-backed military coup that toppled democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende and installed army general Augusto Pinochet. After Pinochet was ousted by a national referendum, Chile saw twenty years of democracy under the center-left coalition, called the Concertación. The right-wing Alianza coalition gained power in 2010 with President Sebastián Piñera.

In today’s election debates, no widely supported candidate (not even Bachelet, who is a member of the same party as Allende) has seriously entertained the possibility of a national platform similar to his. That would require drastic changes to the neoliberal economic model installed during the dictatorship that ultimately created a stable economy in Chile. Although far from perfect, Allende’s abandoned “Chilean Path to Socialism” made healthcare and education public, nationalized large industries, implemented rural land reform, and expanded social security to part-time workers, among other significant public initiatives.

The national social movements that have emerged since 2011 demand a revisiting of some of these concepts through reforming privatized resources and services such as water and education in Chile. These movements have proven to wield significant mobilizing power, and have brought the country to a halt, as recently witnessed with the massive worker strikes at Chile’s largest ports and copper mining companies. Many of the individuals involved are deciding whether to back an existing presidential candidate who can be trusted to support their demands. The highly coordinated education movement is at the forefront of this debate.

“The ideal would be a candidate genuinely bound to the agenda of change toward universal rights, participatory democracy, a model of development based on a new, productive, diverse matrix, and who pushes the other candidates to broaden the margins of the topics we are discussing,” said Francisco Figueroa, former vice president of the University of Chile Student Federation and candidate for the Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left), in an interview with The Clinic magazine.

The right-wing Alianza coalition inherently does not support this platform, but Bachelet has announced her desire to do so. “We dedicated to making adjustments and changes to the model. Some were good, others insufficient,” Bachelet said at her candidacy launch on March 27, referring to her previous term. “We have to carry out more profound reforms,” she said, the first of which she promised would be working toward free public education.

Yet Bachelet governed during the 2006 Revolución Pengüina, when high school students in black-and-white school uniforms mobilized for education reform, alleging that Bachelet had not fulfilled promises made to movement leaders. “Just like the other Concertación coalition governments, she was also responsible for deepening the current model we have,” said Eloísa González, spokesperson for the Coordination Assembly of High School Students. “So evidently we can’t trust even the good intention of her speeches.”

Despite criticism of Bachelet, her party and her coalition, some students have decided to support the candidate, who is likely to win the Concertación’s primary election on June 30.

Juan Cristóbal Hoppe, a 20-year-old journalism student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, plans to vote for Bachelet in hopes of recovering the once-further-left Socialist Party. “If the will of the people is to truly begin to criticize what [the government] is doing and how they are doing it, as they have done since 2011, the Concertación will become more left,” Hoppe said in a hopeful tone, while his peers socialized nearby in the university courtyard during lunch hour. “A type of real socialism that Allende brought forth, not the socialism that exists today.”

Fabián Araneda, a Libertarian and the vice president of the University of Chile Student Federation, said he observed good intentions in presidential candidates Marcel Claude (Independent) and Roxana Miranda of the Igualdad Party, but it is unlikely they will receive much support. “There still isn’t enough size and organization among the people to back a candidate outside of the two large coalitions,” said Araneda. A law passed in 2012 to make voting optional may present a challenge this year to encouraging young, disillusioned citizens to vote, many of whom may have leaned toward independent or alternative party candidates.

Hoppe said most of his classmates have already decided they will turn out to vote, but will vote null for a presidential candidate. Despite his plans to support Bachelet, Hoppe practices his political ideas through involvement in neighborhood assemblies and a student organization, CRECER, that works closely with labor unions. His hope is to “create a common sense within the left that is different from what the Concertación has today.”

The Embers of a New Left

Another hopeful mini-trend are the several former leaders of the 2011 and 2012 student movement capitalizing on their high approval ratings and the current national discontent to run for Congress. Giorgio Jackson is running for the Chamber of Deputies this year as an independent, although he may run within the Concertación coalition. Additionally, he is supported by the political movement (likely to become a political party) that he helped create to promote a simple and participatory democracy. The Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution, or RD) movement focuses on creating a democracy where “rights are guaranteed by society, by the State, while at the same time, maintaining a sustainable development model,” said Jackson.

While the movement’s platform is heavily inspired by left political thought, the word “left” doesn’t appear on its website or, seemingly, in any of its public discourse.

“Today’s Chileans are tired of defining themselves, because they are depoliticized, unfortunately.” Jackson said. “They don’t like to say ‘I’m with the left’ or ‘I’m with the right.” Although Jackson personally defines his political beliefs as left, he doesn’t bring it up unless he is asked.

This new political movement is trying to build itself by presenting ideas that people identify with, and allowing them to define themselves as they see fit. The use of inclusive language allows for a spectrum of citizens who feel unrepresented by current political parties to identify with the RD, from young people who don’t identify with the traditional left parties formed in the twentieth century, to Concertación supporters who feel their politicians have abandoned their parties’ core values.

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“We want to form a new majority,” said Jackson. “And that implies having the disposition to work with groups that may think differently, but their central ideas are about seeing transformation and advancements.”

A fairly new political collective, the Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left), was initially formed in 2005, and now includes numerous former and current student movement leaders. Though the collective is more outspoken about its left ideology than the RD, both play significant roles in what is becoming Chile’s “new left” and challenging the binomial system, Chile’s controversial voting process that was created under Pinochet to foster political stability between the Concertación and Alianza political coalitions, but makes it nearly impossible for candidates unassociated with those coalitions to get elected.

Among them, Figueroa intends to run for deputy, and Gabriel Boric, 2012 president of the University of Chile Student Federation, will possibly join him. Both would run as independent candidates, since their collectives are not yet official parties. “For the first time, if we all work together and focus our strength in a few areas, the binominal system can be defeated, or threatened,” he said.

Hoppe is concerned that creating a “new left” means abandoning the ideology of the Socialist Party, and could possibly push the Concertación even more toward the center, causing it to grow as its ideas become more appealing to the right. But Hoppe believes this could be avoided if these newer political movements are able to push the traditional center-left coalition to recover and reclaim some of its parties’ original values. “Not act separately, nor attack them, but rather be critical of the [Concertación] so it becomes more left,” said Hoppe.

Boric thinks this would be a lost cause. “I believe that strategy is incorrect and the idea of making the Concertación ‘more left’ has already proved a failure on multiple occasions and there is no premise that would cause us to think otherwise,” he said.

On the other end of the spectrum, González, the spokesperson for the Coordination Assembly of High School Students, expressed serious doubts that even former student leaders will have any influence as voices for change inside Congress. Their candidacy is symbolic, she said, and “it won’t constitute anything truly effective and concrete for the social and student movements.” González is among many students who are disappointed that the former student movement leaders are beginning political careers instead of continuing as movement leaders. Hoppe agrees with this assessment as well. “I would have loved that instead of running for parliament, Giorgio Jackson would have run [a local] citizen assembly,” he said, explaining that politics are made from working with the people, not from working in Congress.

This may not be the year in which newer social and political movements achieve the organization and consensus required to support a single presidential candidate. Yet despite their differences, it is clear that they are committed to working for change and understand that it is a long process. Araneda pointed out that the last time social movements in Chile organized to support a candidate “of the people,” they elected Allende who was overthrown three years later. “So we need to evaluate strategy a bit,” he said.

For more student activism, read the latest Dispatches from the US Student Movement, featuring sit-ins, walkouts and civil disobedience.

University of Michigan students protest tuition inequality. (Credit: Michigan Daily)

E-mail questions, tips or proposals to studentmovement@thenation.com. For earlier dispatches, check out posts from January 18, February 1, February 15, March 1, March 15, April 2 and April 15.

1. Ohio Board of Trustees Disrupts Peaceful Student Gathering
Last year, the Ohio University Board of Trustees voted to increase tuition while shelling out half a million dollars in raises and bonuses to administrators and continuing to pay athletic coaches up to nearly $500,000. Since then, the Ohio University Student Union has worked to build student power on campus through demonstrations, teach-ins and educational and awareness-building events. On April 16, 200 students clashed with police in protest against the tuition hike. Three days later, fifteen students engaged in spirited civil disobedience to disrupt the Board of Trustees meeting, and four were arrested. We are demanding that all administrator and athletic coach salaries over $100,000 be frozen until our tuition is frozen. On April 25, 200 students demonstrated to reiterate these demands.
—Ohio University Student Union

2. Hundreds of Chicago Students Boycott State Exam
On April 24, high school students across Chicago mobilized against the educational injustices faced by the city’s youth. The Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools facilitated a citywide boycott of the state exam, the PSAE, which is used to evaluate schools, and simultaneously protested the fifty-four school closures in low-income, black and Latino communities. A press conference was held outside CPS headquarters where hundreds of students chanted and held signs—asserting that standardized tests and school closures deteriorate education. A second demonstration was held in front of Benjamin Banneker Elementary School, one of the fifty-four schools on the hit list. Parents, alumni and students spoke at the event, which ended with a human chain and a poem by Malcolm London. The CSOSOS anticipates larger demonstrations in May and aims to establish itself next fall as a city-wide Chicago Student Union.
—Israel Munoz

3. Undaunted by Arrests, Michiganders Demand Tuition Equality
On April 17, the Coalition for Tuition Equality stood in solidarity with One Michigan and the 29,000 undocumented youth in the state of Michigan. We mobilized and participated in an action of civil disobedience which led to the arrest of eight students. As University of Michigan students, we stand against our current residency policy, which systematically discriminates against undocumented Michiganders by denying their right to in-state tuition. The goal is to ensure that Michigan’s 29,000 undocumented students command equal access to a university education.
—The Coalition for Tuition Equality

4. After 45 Years, Black Students at Wittenberg Keep Rallying for Diversity
Concerned Black Students was founded to provide a stable support system for black students at Wittenberg University, a predominately white school. To date, there are only 112 African-American students among a student body of 1,750. In 1968, thirty-eight of the school’s forty-five black students set a precedent for action. On April 24, CBS held its forty-fifth annual walkout around a set of demands relating to the lack of campus diversity—including bolstering the multicultural affairs office and recruiting more students of color. Sadly, the ten demands from 2013 demands are similar to the original thirteen from 1968. Nonetheless, the primary goal of the movement has been to promote campus and community awareness around issues and concerns of diversity and inclusion, a goal we will continue to pursue.
—Karlos Marshall

5. National Collective Launches Campaign to Educate Students on Title IX
As recent headlines from UNC to Swarthmore to Occidental have demonstrated, US colleges are disregarding their responsibilities under Title IX, including federal requirements to combat sexual violence and accommodate survivors’ needs. Such abuses have been rampant on campuses since coeducation, but students are finally pushing back as they learn their rights. That’s why we’re working with an online collective of young activists across the country to build Know Your IX, an educational campaign to make sure that, by the start of the Fall 2013 semester, every student knows what he or she is guaranteed under Title IX. The campaign will rely on a robust website, an aggressive social media campaign to disseminate the information virally and full-page educational ads placed in campus newspapers the first week of school. Right now we’re crowdsourcing funds to support our efforts, and will launch Know Your IX in full over the summer.
—Dana Bolger and Alexandra Brodsky

6. In Newark, Students Face Retaliation for Walking Out
On April 9, the Newark Student Union organized a mass, district-wide walkout in which students voiced their grievances at the New Jersey Assembly Budget Committee’s hearing on the state education budget. The budget would take $1.4 billion from students across New Jersey, with $56 million dollars from Newark itself. The deeper travesty is that students were either intimidated from walking out or given direct disciplinary action for doing so. Alongside sixty other students, Angel Plaza, student union ally and student representative for the Newark Board of Education, was suspended for three days as a result of walking out—and giving testimony before the budget committee. Moving forward, we as students won’t let this blatant display of force deter us from our simple goal of rejecting Governor Christie’s cuts and ensuring a good education.
—Newark Student Union

7. At Macalester, Sit-In Keeps Wells Fargo on Hold
Last year, working in solidarity with Occupy Homes MN and Minnesotans for a Fair Economy, students at Macalester College launched a campaign demanding the school cut its ties with Wells Fargo, the bank responsible for the most foreclosures and worst predatory lending practices in Minnesota. Currently, Macalester runs its purchasing card system through Wells Fargo. Students and administrators have been meeting for months to explore feasible banking alternatives, and have identified a community bank that reflects Macalester’s values and can handle the school’s business. On April 22, the Macalester administration ended a months-long process by deciding not to cut the school’s contract with Wells Fargo. But after two days of sitting in, protesting and blocking administrators from entering the main administrative building on campus, a meeting with college President Brian Rosenberg was negotiated on terms set by the protesting students. On the table at the meeting, scheduled for April 26, is the renewed possibility of terminating the contract.
—Macalester Kick Wells Fargo Off Campus

8. On the Brink of Striking, Illinois Grads Settle Their Contract
The Graduate Employee Organization at the University of Illinois at Chicago has held multiple rallies and letter-writing campaigns, ultimately calling a strike authorization vote to demand a fair contract. After a year of negotiations, thanks to the sustained efforts of its membership, the GEO has reached a tentative agreement with the university. The organization has been requesting that the university pay its graduate students a living wage, reduce additional fees and provide affordable access to healthcare. While wages remain low, tuition and student fees continue to rise—which means students take on an increasingly large debt load. This undermines the University’s stated commitment to social justice. The GEO will continue to fight for a living wage for its members and lower fees and tuition for all UIC students.
—Davis Brecheisen

9. “School Safety” at the Cost of Education?
Los Angeles is known for school and public safety practices—like zero tolerance codes, school police, metal detectors and random searches—that lead students to drop out or be pushed out of school. In South and East LA, less than half the students graduate. What we need is to bring in peace builders, or people from the neighborhood who can resolve conflicts and build relationships with students; counseling and mental health services for young people in school as well as those transitioning from juvenile halls and probation camps; and transformative justice practices, where those affected by a conflict are quickly separated and later brought into a circle to talk about the real issues that caused the incident. As a young person of color, organizing for me is a very difficult task. Not only am I a target for police harassment, but my family also runs the risk of being deported back to Mexico because of their immigration status. Still, I’m working with the Youth Justice Coalition to push for transformative practices and peacebuilders in schools, because young people’s lives are at stake in school safety—including my own.
—Leslie Mendoza

10. Immigration Reform for All Orientations?
GetEQUAL is a national LGBT organization fighting for full equality under the law. This includes “the pursuit of happiness” by LGBT immigrants, people like me who came to this country seeking a better life and instead found oppression and fear. We have been organizing actions all over the country demanding the full inclusion and protection of LGBT immigrants in comprehensive immigration reform. For us, full inclusion of LGBT immigrants in the bill means a direct pathway to citizenship for an estimated 267,000 undocumented LGBT immigrants, protections for 40,000 same-sex binational couples living in fear of deportation and separation, the end of the one-year filing bar for asylum seekers and of harsh enforcement that has expedited deportations. Over the next ten months, we will push the Senate Judiciary Committee to improve the current bill, and we will continue organizing a grassroots movement of LGBT people to fight for full inclusion in immigration reform.
—Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez

My little sister texted me during school recently requesting a “serious polemic” against the honor roll. (She knows I like to write polemics.) Why? “Because the honor roll’s demeaning to little children!” she fired back. I put it in the back of my mind and went on with my day, which came to prove her point.

Midway through my Government class, I was pulled out to talk to my administrator. I chatted with a few kids in the waiting room, trying to find out why we were all there. As people shuffled in and out, we heard snippets of conversations about “getting that D up” and “graduating on time” and “getting one last chance.”

Uh-oh. I chastised myself for not knowing immediately, for letting schooling’s be-all and end-all temporarily slip under my radar. Of course, we were there to talk about grades. What else? We were all borderline cases thrown together for last-minute lectures and discipline.

It turns out that my administrator had actually called me in to help plan the school’s voter registration drive, but to the best of my knowledge, everyone else was in that waiting room because of inadequate report cards. And that freaked me out. At the time, I suddenly felt that I was caught in the basement of the meritocracy, and I couldn’t bear to think that everyone there saw me as an academic lightweight, a flake, a do-nothing. I almost felt like an innocent suspect of a crime, sitting in a cell with other accused offenders, simply waiting to be exonerated and released from my false detention.

The crime, in this case, was the serious transgression of bad grades, an offense dirtier than academic cheating, which students know is pervasive across America and basically accepted by everyone, from Ivy League deans to ambitious school superintendents to stressed-out teachers to depressed students. For a moment, I felt degraded by mere association with the kids getting Ds and Fs, the ones who couldn’t even cheat their way to safety.

Then, I snapped back to reality. I remembered that our grim situation was not the fault of the “low achievers,” but of the grading system itself. Grades today are more than letters. They are a comprehensive lifestyle. They mold your identity and self-perception in school. They tell you how “smart” others think you are and dictate the amount of teachers’ acclaim you receive. They determine which classes you take, honors or normal, which in turn determine how security guards and passers-by treat you in the hallway. They shape your post-high school life far more than is appropriate, ethical, or logical. They put you in a class, literally and figuratively, that perpetuates its own types of socializing, fraternizing and schmoozing. Once removed from your comfort zone, you become slightly unsure of how to carry yourself. You become graded and class-bound.

So, let me be the first to say it on the off-chance that nobody else yet has: the honor roll is a shoddy excuse for schooling, a purveyor of tawdry “education,” and an indefensible obstacle to student progress. And that’s being polite.

My junior year of high school, I started getting straight As. When I saw that first report card, I cried. Really. It was monumental. It was probably the first time since the age of nine that grades had made me cry.

I used to not get straight A’s. In seventh grade, I wasn’t on the honor roll. School administrators exploit people like me who ascend the GPA ladder, using us as poster children for their “rags to riches” pedagogy.  Not me though—I know what grades really are, what they mean, and whom they help, and if you think for a second that I’d let honor-roll-apologists use my name to propagate that garbage about “working your way up to the honor roll like that guy did,” then you’re out of your mind. That’s because the honor roll’s a joke, a tool, a compilation of hustlers and cheaters, of over-worked disciples, sycophants and snide academic snobs, of miserable minions prepared to regurgitate whatever their educators “teach” them, and of lovely adolescents, like many I know, who desperately avoid the wrath of their high-strung parents by copying off a friend during a math test.

My middle school hosted “Straight A parties” with pizza and games for the “highest achievers.” Hah. I wonder just how many of these students, at the end of the school day, returned to neighborhoods with gangs lining their streets or to homes in which inebriated parents pummeled the living daylights out of each other. About 10 million children witness domestic violence every year, and somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of violent partners also abuse their children. Does anyone honestly believe that many of these victims make it onto their schools’ honor rolls, that all-out domestic brawls are conducive to the “stable study spaces” needed for academic success?

Of course not, but domestic violence victims—just like kids with disabilities, kids with sick parents, kids who are bullied, kids who are gay, kids without parents, kids without homes, kids in poverty, kids in crime-ridden neighborhoods, kids without educated parents, kids too poor for tutors, and kids in fear of deportation—are screwed anyway. That’s our mentality. Valorize society’s achievers, throw them parties and plaster their names on the blackboard. Show them off to potential donors and lavish them with perks. Tell them how brilliant they are and how everyone else ought to be like them. Make them their own class, an exclusive conglomerate of kids who were smart enough to have been born into good families without hardship. Forget about everyone else.

Once, while debating a good friend and terrific Teach for America educator about whether America’s obsessive new testing dogma is good for education, I was pressed to concede the following point: that student subcultures are drastically different, and the fact that I get stressed about the honor roll doesn’t mean that all students do, since they may have other things to worry about. In fact, it was argued that I am probably more critical of the exclusionary honor roll than are all the students who are routinely excluded from it.

I demonstrated that the teacher’s latter claim is false, as I have many friends with mediocre grades who are totally bummed whenever the honor roll goes up and disenchanted with the educational system. But the claim that there are different student subcultures is certainly true. Some students don’t care about being left off of the honor roll as much as they care about the tyranny of athleticism or attractiveness and good looks or drug dealing and gang violence or anti-intellectualism.

But the presence of all these other worries does not excuse the injuries of the honor roll; it compounds them. If students faced no external strife, many more would try to do well academically, and I might be prepared to reconsider my opposition to honor roll. But, with so many students facing so many serious assaults to their well-being, the honor roll just adds aggressive official insult to the injuries of social life. Whether or not students are deeply offended by it, not being on the honor roll counts as a strike against them in the combative academic and economic competition that our country has structured.

I have gone to some of the country’s most diverse schools my entire life, so I have seen how the honor roll affects different student communities. If the benefits of good grades incentivize kids to study, it’s generally just for students in the 2.5 to 4.0 GPA stratosphere. When these children are put under pressure to succeed, many rely on cheating during tests to achieve high marks. More than 70 percent of college students today admit to having cheated as teenagers. The whole country is waking up to the way that the dubious tyranny of testing has generated a dubious resistance of cheating, and often times it is the test-givers who promote cheating to make themselves look like school turn-around heroes.

To kids with low GPAs, roughly 2.4 points or below, the perks of the honor roll operate as disincentives to academic study; instead of losing a game they know they can’t win against students with highly educated parents and stable family backgrounds, the low achievers simply refuse to play. Practically speaking, that means such students drop out or pay minimal attention to their studies.

Saying that honor roll perks are academic incentives for profoundly disadvantaged students is like saying that an extra big parade, as a prize, will incentivize a novice runner to “try harder” and “actually win” a marathon. What hogwash. If anything, the promised parade will only scare away the novice who, anticipating a loss, will wish to save himself the humiliation of witnessing the parade participants chanting someone else’s name when it is all over. In fact, the novice’s incentive to save face might even get him to convince himself he hates running.

I don’t know why school has to be designed like a competition. But if it is going to be, the way we get everyone in the race is by making it fair, by actually training the novice, by bringing the novice “up to speed” with the other runners. Until such parity exists, the race will be fixed and cruel. Until all students enter school with the domestic stability and resources needed to concentrate academically, no honor roll system can be justified, and any existing honor roll system will only further stimulate anti-academic sentiments among low-achieving students.

School could be a haven of pure learning for children who, in the outside world, are on the bottom of social hierarchies. Instead, the school system chooses to reinforce hierarchical distinctions, pitting kids against each other, enabling some students to use outside resources (i.e., knowledgeable parents, secure homes, SAT review classes) to their decisive advantage. And, at the end of it all, these lucky few get their names posted in the front hallway to remind everyone that they’re society’s winners and that the non-included students are, well, implicitly, losers.

Cooper Union erupts into protest, April 23, 2013. (YouTube)

In December, I wrote an article about the occupation of Cooper Union in protest against the proposed implementation of tuition for undergraduates at the historically free art and engineering program.

This morning, at a public meeting, the Cooper Union Board of Trustees announced that they have ratified this proposal behind the backs of students and faculty. Cooper Union, which has been a tuition-free for undergraduates for more than one hundred years, will begin charging new students annual tuition of around $20,000 starting in the fall of 2014.

More than 200 students and faculty gathered today outside of the Foundation building in Cooper Square in Manhattan for a walk-out at 2 pm. Using similar theatrical tools that activists have employed in previous demonstrations, Cooper art and architecture students ran around the building hugging the walls in a human chain while chanting “Free as air and water…Save Cooper Union”. The students also held an “Irish wake”, setting a hat ablaze on the pavement and singing satirically in front of the same building students occupied some months ago. While some students seem disillusioned by the school’s decision, many more are angered that the Board of Trustees met secretly in the morning while students were in class to avoid any disruption of their meeting.

Many faculty members came out in support of the demonstration, canceling their classes so their students could attend. “We can not let them squander 150 years of civic and cultural capital” said Day Gleeson to MSNBC, referring to the Board of Trustees of Cooper. Professor Peter Buckley of the History Department at Cooper, sporting a bright blue sweater, also consulted with press and addressed the demonstration speaking out against the implementation of tuition calling out the trustees for their hypocrisy in their betrayal of the mission of the schools.

The Cooper students are planning on continuing their fight for a free and democratic university system; however, as the school year draws to an end, we fear that this tuition decision marks the end of free higher education in the United States. Still looking forward, students from across New York City are planning a May Day Student Convergence in Cooper Square where more festivities, theatrical demonstrations and popular teach-ins will be taking place under the umbrella of the NYC Free University.

Stay tuned.