When time passes, and the detainees are free of charge, and there are no shadows of the aggression, and they have attended their graduations and thrown their caps into the sky of the United States, the events of the end of April will remain in memory as the day the University failed the student.
On the afternoon of Thursday, May 2, the office of Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez sent an email to all students of the City University of New York (CUNY). I was finishing my credits in the master’s program at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism. The email arrived after five in the morning after police officers entered the camp on the City College campus, which students planted in solidarity with the Palestinian people and amid the avalanche of protests in the country. As if he knew in advance what he was attacking, the rector made it clear in his message that the university community “has the constitutional right to freedom of expression and the right to protest,” and that the eviction of the demonstrations was not due in any way to less to an outrage on these freedoms, but “to specific and repeated acts of violence and vandalism.” Neither more nor less, the New York police, at the request of Matos and Vincent Boudreau, the president of City College, defused the CUNY student protests just in time to return to the classrooms after a well-deserved spring break, which Some took the opportunity to go to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, or to the intricate towns of Upstate, and others to camp near Convent Street, in the Harlem neighborhood.
A few days before they deactivated it, I visited the camp where a few students from my class improvised a small newsroom, probably the first of their lives, from where they sent all kinds of proposals to local media, interviews to international networks, and documented with the awareness of being part of something historic. The camp was full of tents, quilts, barrels of water, people offering sweaters with signs calling for the end of the war, tattoo artists of semi-permanent figures who printed the peace symbol on the shoulder or cheek, and people who I grabbed the speaker and screamed Free, free Palestine! (Free Palestine), while a young choir repeated in the background Free, free, free Palestine!
That day I met Danny Shaw who was failed by his University, his school and his colleagues. Shaw, a former teacher, almost two meters tall, bald, very white, who spoke Spanish, let’s say with handsomeness (with a Cuban accent), he greeted me as if he had known me for years. It was a short meeting. We shared contacts and did nothing with it. Shaw commented, as had already been in the news, about his expulsion from the position of adjunct professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the CUNY public school system. The decision came after being branded an anti-Semitic for talking about genocide. That afternoon I met Shaw at the camp he told me, calmly but not without obvious pain, that he had lost his job and that this was something typical of dictatorships. I had introduced myself as Cuban. A few years earlier, between his travels through Latin America, he was working in the Arroyo Naranjo neighborhood in Havana. He knew where I came from. We shook hands to say goodbye. I later learned that in the May 2 raid, where police sprayed pepper spray like perfume, hit several students with their tonfas, broke the ankle of one, and two more lost their teeth, Shaw was among those. almost 200 detainees at night.
Shaw’s consciousness ignited mine. He had witnessed, through videos on social networks, the violent arrests of those gathered in Gould Plaza, right in front of the New York University (NYU) Business School. Also, on the night of April 30, I watched from my bed as the police flocked in and cleaned the green grass of Columbia and occupied the facilities of Hamilton Hall. I thought about how Columbia invited Motaz Azaiza, the photojournalist who reported on the war in Gaza for months, and who lost at least 15 family members to an Israeli airstrike, to a talk in its classrooms days before the demonstrations. What Columbia does, what the universities do, what the country does, is capitalize on people like Azaiza, take them to their properties, and then not lend them to exercise solidarity. Behind the students’ backs, and in complicity with the silence of many deans and professors, the rectors and presidents picked up the phone to hand over theirs. Universities have used violence to defuse protests that bother those in power the most. To Biden and Trump, who agree on this, and to the parents who pay their children’s tuition so that no one disturbs their peace of mind, now that the end-of-year exams are approaching.
The students’ demands are, above all, a demand to the system, a direct claim to the West. When my colleagues at CUNY demand that the university divest itself of all financial ties to Israel, or issue a statement in solidarity with the Palestinian people, what they are really asking for is an end to the double standards that schools so subtly They are in charge of teaching. The demands are not just specific or temporary demands. And if the war ended tomorrow, the demands will continue. That is why CUNY students ask for free studies and a fair salary for workers, because the demands, the protests, the anger, are against the heart of their country’s system.
In two years of studying journalism in New York, it never seemed necessary to mention the phrase “freedom of expression”, now that it is talked about, as we talk about academic freedom, and freedom in general. In a country that boasts of these licenses all the time, it is not anti-Semitism that they are fighting, it is freedom. In these days of protest, I have seen everything. The job offer that asks the student to please never speak out about the conflict between Israel and Gaza. The teacher who waits for three emails to be sent beforehand so he can write his own, because the fear of expressing himself eats away at him. The official message that aims to be supportive, but that does not kneel with the student. The graduate student detained, and a professor saying that “it was no longer his responsibility.” People who are afraid to give like on a social network. The one who shares solidarity on his Instagram stories, because he knows they are going to disappear. The teacher who never extends his hand. Those who have good positions in professorships at the best universities in the country, and who fear losing their comforts of tenure (by seniority). There was also the teacher who supported him from the first day, who defended his student with teeth, who organized chat groups to guide them in covering the demonstrations, and who offered a care protocol. Those, without a doubt, have been the least.
To those professors at journalism universities in the United States, who will now not only have students but protesters in their classrooms, they will not only have journalist apprentices but also correspondents of the most important conflict in recent months, the chroniclers of the confrontation with the police : What plan do you have for the next class? The journalism schools of this country, specialized more than anything in the art of training in good journalism practices, networking, how to sell yourself in a cover letter and how to deceive in a resume: how are they going to position the issue of freedom of expression on their agendas? Reality always shows that only a few are in charge of it. I come from Cuba, a country where I was told to remain silent, and I arrive in another where it is convenient to remain silent. Keep quiet so you don’t lose your job, keep quiet so they hire you, keep quiet so they publish you, and so that it doesn’t happen to you like Shaw. I cannot come from a dictatorship to fall into the dictatorship of fear of power, money, status and the institution. The best thing students do is remain students as long as they can, a way to extend their freedom. Then, when they take their professors’ positions and are journalists for the country’s renowned media, they may begin to mortgage it.
No new messages have arrived in my mailbox. No school authorities have mentioned the protests again, nor have they condemned the violent arrests, nor have they reported what charges were or were not brought against their students or graduates, and what the course of events will be. The university failed its students, and we know this is not the first time it has done so. Much has been said in these days of April 1968, when the campuses opened their doors for the police to parade to extinguish the concentrations against the war in Vietnam, or the protests of April 1985 in Columbia, against apartheid. in South Africa. The University has always deactivated the complaints and looked the other way. Now, some schools have begun to suspend graduations and teach the remaining classes remotely. The University has spanked us and sent us home. What happens is that this is a stuck fight, the next course, or the course of the future, when they become complicit in other wars again, a handful of students will explode again, until something finishes transforming.
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