Wife Tries To Abort And Poison Husband's Lovechild
Man Injured By Tree Limb Files Suit Against City
Charles Barron Will Run For Council Speaker
Alleged Tiger Mistress Is Unrecognizable To Dead Fiancee's Dad
New Jersey State Senate To Vote On Gay Marriage
As you've probably heard, for several days a group of students at The New School University occupied a dining hall in the Graduate Faculty building at 65 Fifth Avenue, which is scheduled for demolition. Among their demands were the resignations of university President Bob Kerrey and other officials, and voting representation on the search committee for the interim-Provost and the Provost.
Yesterday a scuffle with security led to the arrest of one student, and last night police were stationed outside the room and preventing students from leaving to use the bathroom or receive any supplies. According to the New School Free Press, around 3 a.m., "after roughly an hour of discussion and comment on a seemingly endless torrent of tangents," students voted to vacate the building without getting the desired resignations, but with some concessions from the administration. Yesterday afternoon one of the dissidents, Chris Crews, a first year MA student in the Department of Politic in the New School for Social Research, responded to our questions via email from the "New School in Exile."
So what happened with the "excessive force” mentioned on the New School in Exile blog? The students attempted and successfully took over a side entrance out of the building that had street access to 13th Avenue. This was done so we could let supporters inside who had been turned away by security at the main (Fifth Avenue) entrance, as well as to bring in more supplies. During that time security attempted to force students out of the doorway and re-close the door.
Students attempted to use crates, boxes and miscellaneous items to prevent this. This led to the primary security officer on premise assaulting several students in the process, and two heated confrontations with what we deemed to be excessive and unreasonable force. We also have video documenting the chief security officer attacking the students, as well as other confrontations with the police.
How many students are in there now? At this time, I would estimate we have somewhere between 80 and 100 people. There was a huge influx of new people that came in after noon today. So we have die-hards from last weekend when the occupation really got started, and people who just joined in the last hour or two.
Are police immediately outside the room to arrest anyone who steps out alone? Not yet. The only person who was arrested so far was arrested outside of the side door during the earlier scuffle I mentioned. The NYPD showed up and then left, but returned again about half an hour ago. It’s not clear what the police might do, or if the university would seriously bring in the police to arrest the large group here now.
Have any faculty members joined you or voiced their support? There have been faculty memberswho have come in throughout the day, and others whom students talked with while they were out flyering and canvassing on campus. The overall sentiment has been extremely positive, although we have not seen any formal faculty statement yet on the occupation.
Why are you occupying this particular building? It is being held for two major reasons. First, this is the only student space on campus where we can gather and study, access the library, or otherwise work as groups, study sessions, etc. Additionally, this building is closing at the end of the semester (next week) and will not be re-opened, further signifying the loss of student resources without any real alternatives being provided.
What do you hope to change by occupying the building? We hope to have our demands met, in particular the resignation of university president Bob Kerrey, executive vice president James Murtha, and board of trustee member Robert Millard. Additionally, we hope to raise the larger issues of student empowerment, institutional transparency and a focus on academics.
How long do you think students will continue the sit-in? We are committed to occupying the building until our demands are met, or the police drag the last one of us out.
Do you have enough supplies? Yes, but more are always welcome!
One student, Marcus Michelson, told the Times the occupation was intended to “start a dialogue.” But when Kerrey came to speak with you today, the students refused to meet with him. Why? Because our demands are simple, we want his resignation. There isn’t really any need to negotiate that point, and since he wasn’t willing to make that statement, there wasn’t anything else to hear from him. I think the “dialogue” issue is a bit of a canard coming from some of those who just want to improve things, not actually change the structure of how this university operates.
So what’s so bad about Kerrey? Besides his involvement in the massacre of Vietnamese villagers in Thang Phong as part of Operation Pheonix? Or his involvement with appointing people like L-3 Communications who are involved with interrogation and torture of detainees in Iraq? Or his support of pro-war, conservative politics as the head of an institution devoted to critical academic research and scholarship?
I’m told you changed your list of demands. What are the demands now? The list of demands has not fundamentally “changed.” We are still calling for the resignation of Kerrey, Murtha and Millard. We are still calling for an institutional role for students, and not simply lip service about how student input is important and matters a lot to them. We are still calling for more resources to go to students. We are still calling for institutional transparency in decision making.
Kerrey’s blog has been experiencing technical difficulties. Have you occupied that, as well? Perhaps…
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
kids
Gothamist (and all ist) interviews typically don't have comments enabled. But I guess that would cut down on the page views in this instance...
I never post on this blog, but i feel like I can shed a little light on what's going on here. First, people should know that New School is an aggregate of several schools. The reason they've chosen to occupy that building and not the others is because these protesters use that building. They're Lang students. The Lang student body is composed of the dumbest of the rich.
The reason it's so hard to figure out what the rationale behind this protest is because a Lang student is by nature incapable of forming coherent thoughts. I'll boil it down for you- 'Uhh, like, fire the principle, and the cafeteria food sux!'
I feel very sorry for the poster from the previous thread, whose extremely stressful finals are being made worse by these nitwits. Lang siphons off money from the rest of the New School divisions, and I sincerely hope this pisses Kerry off enough to finally excise that font of ignorance.
EXPEL THEM
man i bet that kid has the biggest boner right now.
What's wrong with enabing comments on interviews? This is one where the interviewee desperately need a verbal lashing from the usual suspect of rational Gothamist contributors. If I were Kerrey I would have called the NYPD to haul his ass to jail in the first hour.
I second #3.
I'm a veteran of both Lang and Parsons, and I have to say the entitlement and ignorance of most Lang students is criminal. Any Parsons student has more claim to the demands being made as the poor design students pay more and get less... the problem is those same students tend to be a thousand times more eloquent, busy, and gainfully employed upon graduation.
These comrades would do better to crack a book during their finals than stroke their socialist boners.
Dude69: Nothing's really wrong with it. But I would rather see comments enabled for all interviews, not just the ones where it helps the bottom line.
This is funny. You kids must be comedians, right?
Yes you can! (make fools of yourselves)
You've gotta better chance taking over Poland/France than saving that building. That's nothing to scoff at.
What will you do when you run out of Tofurky?
#3 you are brilliant.
I'm still holed up in my bedroom. Why aren't all of you?
they protest usa for not speaking to iran, but then refuse to speak to the dean of students. ironinc, but not surprising. people like this are always flip floppers with politics—they preach on one topic and then flip when it's their personal politics on the line.
good luck.
nice scarf, yassir.
I hope the cops beat up all the entitled kids holed up there. So you're saying that the cops used excessive force on a student?
You know what's excessive? Forcibly taking over a school building because you don't like Bob Kerrey. If you don't like him, go somewhere else.
I went to Columbia and a lot of the students talk about 1968 like it was the greatest thing that ever happened there. If I was there in 1968, I would of kicked the s*** out of those kids occupying the buildings.
As a Lang Alumnus, a current Graduate Faculty student, and a friend to some on the "inside", I'd like to clarify a couple points. First of all, 65 5th has housed Fogelman library, which ALL New School students use for many years, and the building is used by ALL New School students. I see just as many Parsons students working in the cafeteria on any given day as Lang and NSSR students.
Secondly, most of the organizers of this are graduate students, not Lang students--though there are Lang students involved. Lang is an important part of the New School, and I don't mean to diminish their importance, both to the school and to this movement, but the New School IS a research institution, which is why it makes sense that these actions are being organized and acted on largely by graduate students.
Keep up the good work, Occupiers! I wish I could be there with you.
in sum: I admire their determination but hoo boy do they look like enormous twats.
In that this isn't 1969 again, this is all sort of falling flat. It's hard to hear about entitled kids complaining about hardship.
Carla, the New School just serves as a brake to Parsons - the only part of the institution with any contemporary relevance. When your demands involve common space and scholarships, why don't you talk to those kids about being shafted year after year with higher tuition and non-exist work and gallery spaces. If they can settle things and get concessions without living out some fantasy about protest and struggle, why can't you? There is a reason why they aren't in the cafeteria working right now, because you shut them out during their most hectic time of year. You caused the entire school to be locked down so that they can't work anywhere sanctioned by the school outside of business hours. It is great that you can do something with all the empty rhetoric you get to study, but for the majority of students you're just making things more difficult. Start talking and stop throwing tantrums.
Love all the pathetic little authoritarians sucking up to the power of Big Daddy.
Yeah, you can criticize the action all you want except that um, the students won.
http://www.newschoolinexile.com/
you can read the agreement yourselves.
and maybe consider claiming a little power in your lives when faced with abusive power instead of wasting comments dissing the people who do.
What I find amusing is that the New School is using Parsons for it credibility. I remember back when Parsons joined the New School and it was using the New School for credibility.
No, #18, we are sticking up for the many little and poorer students who were involuntarily cut off from accessing the school's common area. Now that these dweebs get their pathetic demands (reading through the agreement, it doesn't justified this action), I hope they have a nice holiday back in the basements of their rich parents' houses.
Chris @ 13: "socialist boners" LOL!
all the affiliated schools are leeching off of parsons and those students suffer the most. pay highest tuition and have highest enrollment to see all the other schools buildings being remodeled when they are brand new. parsons spaces are ancient and tiny compared to the rest. They build up a huge technology building (arnold hall at 55 w 13th st) for the new school programs while the parsons fine art/photo buildings (66 5th ave and 2 w 13th st) do not have enough lab space/classrooms or studios for half the students, besides the fact the buildings are so old who knows what contaminants are inside those walls.
instead of tearing down 65 5th ave for more new school space they should be providing studio spaces to Parsons MFA students whose tuition goes straight to unnecessary new school projects
as far as the fogleman library (carla m).. its a waste of a library.. no one uses that when you have full access to NYU Library.
when they did build up the first floor galleries in the Parsons 66 5th ave building (student exhibition space is nonexistent) they promised student gallery space. what we got was an enormous and beautiful space that is not accessible for student use, instead going to the highest corporate bidder (tribeca film festival, ID Magazine) leaving poorly designed hallway space for MFA Thesis exhibitions. never mind the fact that getting access to the small amount of space provided is nearly impossible through the bureaucratic crap entangling who controls those spaces.
ps. new school's insistance on including "the new school for design" in the Parsons logo is also another case of transparent attempts at capitalizing on parsons credibility
Nice kerchief, douche.
So, No Bathroom breaks and they bail? Wow, After the BS "No Dialog" I thought they would at least chain themselves...
(sigh) What a disappointment...
I *love* how "victory!" is being declared despite that they said:
"we responded by refusing to negotiate with him and repeating our demand that he immediately resign. He left and took his police with him."
But bailing due to No Bathroom Access?
How Hard Core is that!?
what happened to "the customer is always right?"
Thank God that the comments here are showing that it is RIDICULOUS for Gothamist to be covering this garbage.
I love how he complains that the school was created for critical thinking and learning, but then acts twatty when someone he doesnt like refuses to give into HIS close-mindedness and quit.
I said it in the last post. Graduate students should be more mature than this bullshit
Carla @ #14--Your post should read: "As a Lang alumna..."
Also: Chris Crews, please wash your hair.
Hooray, a non-victory was achieved in the most masturbatory media stunt since the last David Blaine bit.
In other words, you got thrown a couple of meaningless bones. Sounds like Kerrey is still president, too. Congrats, my bourgeois comrades.
AND the winner is: rasputinsghost!
As someone afilliated with NS, I'm embarrassed at this impotent circle-jerk of delusional kitsch. The disparaging comments here are precisely correct. This isn't some video game, kids. When Daddy dies, maybe then you'll learn how a business is run and a budget is balanced.
I heard yesterday some students "followed" (of course!) Kerry on his way out of the school right down to 11th street... that's messed up, the man has a prosthetic leg..
Reporedly, Kerrey was under police protection as he was ‘chased down the street by an angry mob of students.’
What do you think this is, the bolshevik revolution?
I eagerly await the forced famines, censorships and bureaucracies. And the eventual orgy of indie docs commemorating this stunt.
"So what’s so bad about Kerrey? Besides his involvement in the massacre of Vietnamese villagers in Thang Phong as part of Operation Pheonix?"
I love when young people today act like they understand what it was like to be a soldier in Vietnam. It's easier to take the moral high ground when you're years removed from the stresses of the incident and not a young man being shot at.
Tell it to veterans I know who have told me terrible and heartbreaking stories about kids the Viet Cong used. There was a Vietnamese kid who used to come into their camp and they'd give him toys and food...then one day the Viet Cong strapped explosives to him and he blew himself up in their camp.
And as far as refusing to have a discussion with Kerrey, are you freaking kidding me? What kind of person studying politics cuts off dialogue?
You can tell he's one of those radical douchebag who hates everything capitalistic, but yet would bitch and shine if his daddy cuts off his weekly checks. I am sure he would believe anything he reads on the internet if it has a picture of Che next to it.
#28 - He probably doesn't wash his hair because he doesn't want to contribute to the bottomlines of giant corporations such as Proctor and Gamble but too lazy to make his own soaps from organic products.
"whine"
#33: ...and the truly disturbing flipside, is that if it's el Ché, Mao, or any one of the many psychopaths who fronted the CCCP, they call them heroes, freedom fighters, &c., ad nauseam.
Really horrific, but hey, the worst evils are perpetrated in willful ignorance. More and more, I come to believe these are the types that fervently supported Hitler until the bitter end. I say this without waxing hyperbolic.
A few comments, since I did this interview.
1. I pay my own school tuition for the Ph.D. I am working on earning here, as I paid for the MA I did before that, so drop the snide comments about rich kids at school. I worked hard to get into this school, and to suggest otherwise is to be ignorant of the reality behind my comments.
2. There are serious and long-standing problems both with President Kerrey, VP James Murtha, and Board of Trustee member Robert Millard. These include their lack of academic background and abilities, which are manifestly clear to anyone actually involved with the school who have to interact with them in any manner. The faculty vote of no confidence and the firing of 5 Provosts in less than 7 years under Kerrey are just the tip of the iceberg.
3. To suggest that this is some attempt to re-live the 60's is to misunderstand completely our motivations, and shows a sad lack of real interest in understanding the reality that led to this occupation. We were, and will continue to address, real and substantive issues of academic resources and decision making that have a direct and daily impact on our ability to conduct research and do quality scholarship. Many of the comments here completely ignore that. It's a bt frustrating listening to people laugh and snipe at us for being rich kids complaining about trivial issues, as if somehow commenters have some moral high ground on which to analyze our goals and motivations.
4. Many of the students involved in this action were actually from NSSR, not Parsons, but collectively we had students from Lang, Parsons, Milano, Mannes, General Studies and NSSR and were both graduate and undergradaute students. The issues we were addressing cut across all of the schools, so I think everyone had a stake in the outcome of these issues.
5. I was willing to put my time and my efforts into this because I want a university that I can feel proud of, and which has a serious committment to being academically engaged in issue of the day. Many schools cannot claim that role, and the New School in particular has been a beacon in this issue, especially during WWII, but in the last few decades has been losing that original vision. Many of those involved in this believe in that original vision and want to revive that spirit of engaged and critical scholarship within the New School. While I was in this occupation I was still working on final papers while doing extensive media outreach, showing that you can be both engaged and focused at the same time. I fail to see why people simply assume we were having a huge party inside and not still working as students?
Finally, I can't help but find it a bit amusing to read some of these comments. How many of you who had enough time to make snide remarks or leave short insults are involved in making your workplace, your community or you home a better, more just place to live? If you don't care enough to get involved in making this world a better place, why don't you just zip it. I fail to see where your high-horse moralizing has any real credibility beyond similar people who have nothing better to do than flame blogs like the Gothamist...
chris
Many people also seem to have a misunderstanding about the Kerrey situation.
1. Our concerns include his involvement in the massacre of numerous civilians (mostly women and children) in Thanh Phong as part of covert US activities in 1969, his continued support of what many of us see as a continued illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, and most recently and most immediately, his inability and lack of qualifications to be a President of any university, much less the New School. And more to the point, people defending Kerrey assume:
1. that what he did should not be considered a war crime, and;
2. that US involvement in Vietnam was even legitimate to begin with.
I do not hold either of these views, so yes, that makes me unsympathetic to his defense on both of those accounts. That doesn't change the brutality of war, but neither does it justify it as ok. People seem to be confusing the two in comments here.
2. I wonder how many of the posters here would suggest we deal with Kerrey and senior administration when they have no interest in listening to our voices, or giving us any form of meaningful input. Should we just shut up and be happy? Seems like you offer a critique with no solution, while discounting the point of the protests, leaving us in a no-win situation where all we can do is accept our problems as unchangeable and intractable...
And finally, what's with the personal attacks on me, as opposed to real issues? All I can say is that I do make my own soap, I'm not a communist or socialist and sorry, I just happen to have naturally frizzy hair...guess that makes my some sort of nut job liberal in your limited typography of personalities, huh?
chris
I will be a grad student at the new school paying my own way so I am not offended by the rich kid stereotypes but I am confused as to how a student's so called 'entitlement' disallows them from participating in a protest such as this. To assume that an individual's upbringing determines the validity of their opinions and actions is depressing. Think about your own life. Do you follow in the footsteps of your parents and the particular class you were raised in?
On a separate note, I am sort of admire people like crews for trying to do something in real life (even if it lacked a crystal clear message) instead of sitting in a starbucks and blogging in anonymity on his macbook, like the rest of us.
I understand your gripes with what you believe he's doing to the academic environment of the school, and I applaud you for doing something about an issue that affects you personally, but have absolutely no idea how, as someone studying politics, you don't recognize the importance of dialogue and refused to speak with Kerrey.
And fyi, I don't think wars in Vietnam or Iraq war were/are justified, but nice assumption. I'm just saying that the stuff that goes down during times of war is never as black and white as we'd like it to be...harsh reality. Maybe I'm a little more sympathetic to vets because I actually know a lot of them.
Chris Crews, you wrote:
You wish. It only makes you a liar:
‘Those of us struggling in the United States to oppose an exploitative system grounded in capitalist theories and assumptions are not alone.’
‘We need to stop thinking of ourselves as protestors and begin thinking of ourselves as political revolutionaries waging a systematic and calculated series of assaults against the organs of a fundamentally flawed capitalist system.
We must begin to create alternative systems to capitalism for economic transaction, ones which are structured around a goal of providing necessary goods and services to the people...
Shall I go on? Okay, one more, just for fun:
... as true today as it was 8 years ago, comrade.
Chris Crews wrote:
"...street access to 13th Avenue."
So, it's true! He really is dumb!
If you don't care for the politics of the administration, YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE APPLIED TO OR SHOULD TRANSFER OUT OF THE SCHOOL.
Or better, grow a pair, and start your own CHEniversity.
Unlike the communist and jihadist tyrannies you support, (as evidenced by your inane "class war" comments and your arafat noose/scarf), in America we still have CHOICES on where we can spend our money and get an education.
And here's a hot tip: continue to step up your efforts to deny us our freedoms, and you WILL get (and brutally lose) the uncivil war you are clamoring for.
jpeditor:
You, my friend, are the (gender-neutral) MAN.
contrabalance:
( : >)+
I just find it funny that Crews is a first year student, and already seems to know so much about the university. It's been three months, not a year.