Aristophanes raises a good point. i would also like to add that i would have preferred to see the students at the very least throw a barrel or two and something. Anything! that said, we mustn't berate them as it wasn't their fault they were not born irate gorillas.

sincerely,

D. Kong

p.s. Aristophanes: You left the barrel you sleep in at my apartment. please retrieve it. Also, your dad keeps calling me. He seems to be pissed that you demolished some currency in his bank. should i blame it on those misguided insurrectionists?

Once again I must devote precious time from pursuing genuine changing of the world to comment on the infantile pseudo-revolutionary activities of my 'brothers and sisters' of the 'New School' in New York City. Here in Athens Greece our struggle has never ended. We brave concussion grenades, tear gas, bullets, beatings, incarceration - as we struggle against the neoglobalimperialistic capitalistic forces of darkness. Behind the scenes, our agents work to obliterate the Euro, the modern symbol and tool of fascistic international bondage. But lo! when I turn to my 'fellow fighters' at the New School, what do I find? Last year's great revolutionary uprising: juveniles who barricade themselves in a room without a toilet! Brave freedom-fighters chasing a one-legged man down a street! And now pseudoshocktroops breaking class and beating turnstiles! You are all a disgrace. You are the laughingstock of world revolution. Babies, return to your mothers!

Artistophanes Polytripas, Athens

As a new school student who was present at Hunter during the events I am disgusted by this shoddy excuse for journalism. New York City has the largest regional economy in the United States yet social stratification is staggering. It is unfair to make assumptions about the economic status of students simply for going to private school and also illogical to assume that they are not allowed to have stake in the public sphere for going to private school if they are. According to the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda the NUMBER 1 reason for college dropouts is the inability to afford to maintain being a full-time student, even when working full time. This is true for both public and private universities, and in New York City substantially more true. In NYC the myth of the college student taking classes full time and living in a dorm on their parents dime, without a job, partying is just that, a myth, especially when referring to students who obviously give a shit about the state of their city. If they didn't they wouldn't have gone to the event at Hunter in the first place. Secondly, institutions like CUNY become cash-strapped because of unfair allocation of funds, not because there aren't any. Duh. I am a New School student. I take 19 credit hours a week; I work 30 hours a week. Most of my friends who were in attendance yesterday have similar schedules just to be able to maintain living here; some of them are also homeless or sleeping on couches. The staggering unemployment rate of young people is not the fault of young people but the fault of a economy that has no interest in the self-determination of the majority of its people; we realize this. The reposting of the Hunter Word's rhetoric about "varmints" is appalling, and I question what your intention is here. Class is not a series of points whereby you can say because someone smokes cigarettes, wears a black hoodie, and goes to private school they must be of privilege and therefore should quit whining. It's not like I assumed anything about your class status by pandering to disaffected 30-somethings who have "nothing better to do than read Gothamist". Please.

All the Liberals in the city should get a free Luxury cruise out the the Mid-Atlantic Trench....Where it then mysteriously sinks.....hehehehehe

I'll guess they aren't studying economics.

Tuition in CUNY is cheap, and extra $300 won't put any of these students on the streets. I guess they can cut back 30 packs a smokes or 20 black hoodies a year to get by.

That's ridiculous. So many Hunter students come from low-income or immigrant families. $300 might not matter to you, or a NYU or New School kid, but it matters to the majority of Hunter students.

It's les than a dollar a day.

Please! With the commie nonsense.

The comments to this story are really repulsive, cynical, and at bottom incredibly ignorant. I don't really expect anything else from anonymous comments on a story by the Gothamist, but come on people; we can do better than this. This article, with its focus on a few harmless troublemakers, misses the point of the protest entirely—in fact it almost willfully ignores the point. The fact is that education is and has been becoming slowly and incrementally unaffordable to greater and greater numbers of working and middle class New Yorkers for several decades now. The recent tuition increase and budget cuts are just a dramatic instance of this. Tuition was increased by $600 at CUNY last year and in all likelihood there will be further increases this coming academic year (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another $600). Should this happen this would mean that your average Hunter student would be paying up to $4,800 more for a degree than a student who graduated before the increases. And what are the students getting in return for their money? Longer lines to register, fewer classes offered, overcrowded classrooms, failing physical plants, leaking roofs, teachers who disappear after only a semester or two of work, adjuncts who are, by the standards of their own professional organizations, literally unqualified to teach at the college level, more corporate and administrative decision making that replaces student and faculty decision making processes, more police, less community, more alienation, etc. These tuition hikes and budget cuts are nothing less than a tax on the poorest and most vulnerable citizens of the city. It’s bad enough to have to read the Gothamist’s sh—ty entirely speculative reporting, but then to have to wade through these thoughtless and cynical “I got mine, what’s wrong with you” responses makes me sick to my stomach. You idiots identify so much with the bottom line ethics of the corporate culture that controls you that you can’t see how your ideology makes you your own worst enemy. Wake up guys, cheap affordable education benefits us all, and has historically done exactly that. That historical legacy is being undermined by corporate politicians. Simple as that.

Oh I'm sorry, $1.64 a day more. Again: Please!

"We all struggle" yes, so why should we all have to pay for very few to go to CUNY?

If you don't think CUNY is worth it, don't go. Cost/benefit analysis 101.

There is no free lunch.

5Borough,

We all struggle, but don't assume just because you're OK that everyone else is. CUNY students come from diverse backgrounds and experience these things in diverse ways. Some will be hurt a lot more than others. But that's not really the point; the point is that tuition is going up dramatically even as services are being cut, and this has been going on for along time, arguably for decades. At this rate, your children, by the time they reach college age, will not be able to afford to attend a school like CUNY, or any school at all quite likely. Tuition went up $600 last year and will probably go up another $600 next academic year because of these additional cuts. On top of this, the Governor has proposed legislation that will allow the Chancellor and the BOT to raise tuition at will up to 2.5X the rate of inflation, or close to 10% a year. CUNY used to be free, now students pay close to $5,000 per year to get the same education. In fact, thanks to the university's reliance upon adjunct labor, it is probably a worse education. This impacts every person who lives in NYC and you should care about this as much as the students who are putting their a--es on the line on the street.

Teabaggers!

I'm a full-time graduate student at Hunter who also works two jobs. Most Hunter students are incredibly hard-working as well. We have students from 140 different nations, who've escaped situations anywhere from living near Chernobyl to being at risk of being a victim of genocide. Don't insult us. It wasn't us. It was the NYU and New Schoolers.

Both of my jobs are at Hunter, one of which is adjunct teaching a course. I'm underpaid enough as it is. Good job breaking public school property, private school trust-funders! Now even less funding will go toward education at CUNY, as if the city and state weren't screwing us over enough.

STAY CLASSY.

was anyone forced to go to these schools? or forced to stay there? if you don't like the policy of a school, don;t go there. if the policy changes to not your liking, go somewhere else.

Protests just make me sad these days. there is no real heart. its just spoiled kids playing activist and desperately trying to fill the shoes vacated by Eugine Debbs and Abbie Hoffman, ect. half-hearted street theater.

Unless RMO is there, then its a good time.

seriously, go mess up your own school. hunter buildings are crap as it is.

I was a New School student who participated in the rally. I did not see the damage being done but I am very skeptical it was done by New School students for a couple of reasons. First: most New School students left the building with the walkout at 1 pm, and 2, many of us were escorted out of the building when ISO organizer Owen Hill (THE SAME "SOURCE" WHO WROTE THIS EMBARRASSING ATTEMPT AT "JOURNALISM" http://hunterword.com/articles/885) pointed out some of our group to the police. It was no surprise for me, then, to see Owen Hill blaming all damage on New School students. It is against his interest to believe Hunter students would want to damage the sites of oppression at their own school or protest in a way inconsistent with how he seems fit (corralling everyone into a well-policed pen so an approved list of trotskyist speakers can whine at them until they are bored to death)

In summary: New School students, by and large, came to show their support, any vandalism on our side is unknown to me, and don't be fooled by this one lame kid's poorly-conceived fairytale.

catsinvasion, points well taken, but you're assuming that gothamist has a purpose beyond focusing on predictable stories and details that are very likely to garner page counts and comments, which is all that matters when, you know, american apparel is paying your salary.

Best line ever: "We don't have time to think."

Second best line:

"first hand account of a friend of one of the arrestees..."

So, this is the new face of student activism in America? You go and make trouble at other people's schools? It's just a different version of 'slumming'.