Fifty students, professors and community members rallied on October 20 at City College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), to demand that the Morales-Shakur Center be returned to students who had it stolen from them. One year ago today, without notice, university police seized the Center — which for years had been an important meeting space for students who fight back — as well as thousands of dollars worth of personal property, which still hasn’t been returned.
One student after another spoke eloquently and passionately about what the Center meant to them. It was a place for women students to share their experiences of sexual harassment and discrimination, a space for black and Latin students to talk about the racism they encountered at college and in their communities, and was a vitally important site for organizing — planning forums and demonstrations, writing flyers, and having political discussions. Members of the community used the Center as well, to plan campaigns against gentrification and police brutality.
In between each speech we chanted, “No center, no peace!” and “We will fight! We will dream! We’re not cogs in your machine!” One faculty member reminded students that open admissions was won at the City University in 1969 through militant struggle, the seizure of buildings on CCNY’s South Campus, abutting Harlem. By the early 1990s, CUNY was awarding more Master’s degrees to black and Latin candidates than any university in the country. But then the racist reversal began, first with the imposition of tuition in 1976 and then with the ending of open admissions in 1999. The percentage of first-year black students at five of the senior CUNY colleges dropped from 17 to 10 percent from 2001 to today, while the percentage of new Latin students  went from 22 percent in 2008 to 19 percent today.
However, tuition and the end to open admissions were met with mass, militant protests of thousands of CUNY students, who have continued over the years to fight repeated tuition hikes. One of the reasons that the Morales-Shakur Center was taken away was to deny students a space to organize.
Another faculty member pointed to a second reason. CUNY administrators eagerly brought Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC) back to City College, an officer-training program that prepares recruits — in its words — “to master the fundamentals of following orders.” These orders are to violently occupy and control countries for the benefit of U.S. corporate interests. Five million Asians were slaughtered in Korea in the 1950’s and Vietnam in the 1960’s; My Lai in Vietnam was one of many places where U.S. soldiers followed orders to “kill anything that moves.” More recently, soldiers and officers followed orders that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In contrast, the Center was a place where black, Latin, Asian and white students, men and women, gay and straight, came together to challenge authority and the capitalist status quo. Because it was a center of independent thought and activity, CUNY officials couldn’t tolerate it. It was a threat to their plans to militarize the campus (which includes instituting ROTC and military recruiters, conducting war research and having war criminal David Petraeus teach a seminar class), and to drive students from poorer families out of college with rising tuition. The faculty speaker mentioned that the PSC — the faculty and staff union — recently passed a resolution calling for ROTC to be removed from CUNY.
A former member of the Black Panther Party then told of his experiences in the Marines, where boot camp shamed recruits into thinking they were stupid and worthless, in order to make them ready to blindly follow orders. His message to the students was: you’re intelligent and valuable people, capable of fighting for a society not dominated by the “fascist 1percent.”
We agree, but to make that a reality we need to build a mass revolutionary communist party, which is what we in the Progressive Labor Party are doing. We invite CCNY students and other activists to come to the PLP College Conference on November 8 and discuss how we’re going to fight for this new world.
CUNY Reds