Hunter College Students, Faculty Demand: “NYPD, Out of CUNY Now!”

Speak-Out Against Repression of
CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment

On May 1, the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York held a speak-out outside Hunter College, bringing out approximately 200 students and 20 members of the CUNY faculty/staff union, to protest the New York Police Department’s violent dispersal of Gaza solidarity encampments at City College and Columbia University the previous night and early that morning. The NYPD attacks were part of the nationwide wave of repression launched by university administrations, as well as state and local politicians, who unleashed the cops to brutalize and disperse campus protests against the joint U.S./Israel genocidal war on the Palestinian people. Taking its cue from the Democratic administration of “Genocide Joe” Biden and far-right Republican witch-hunters in Congress, this repression is part of the “home front” of this war.

The repressive onslaught reached CUNY on the night of April 30, when the NYPD raided City College, site of an encampment established five days earlier. The cops’ occupation of the historic CCNY campus began hours after units from the NYPD’s Special Operations Bureau stormed onto Columbia University, about a mile downtown, to dismantle the Gaza encampment there. Just before midnight, riot-clad cops from the notorious Strategic Response Group entered CCNY and proceeded to destroy the encampment and brutalize student and faculty demonstrators. Some protesters were pepper-sprayed, others ruthlessly pummeled; a 73-year-old adjunct professor had a rib broken and her knee injured. A number of Muslim women students reportedly had their hijabs ripped off by the cops.

In the face of the capitalist rulers’ attempt to use state repression and slander to silence students into conformity with U.S. imperialism’s war aims, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs say: Drop all charges against pro-Palestinian demonstrators! Cops and security guards off campus – NYPD out of CUNY now! We demand the ouster or resignation of CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and City College president Vincent Boudreau for calling the NYPD onto the CCNY campus to carry out this attack on CUNY students’ right to protest this U.S.-backed, armed and funded war. Defense of the basic rights of those who work and study at the largest urban public university in the U.S. requires massive protest action by students, faculty, and staff at CUNY and beyond, linked to the power of NYC’s multiracial working class.

The role of the Democratic Party in the current campaign of repression is underscored by the fact that the police invasion of the Columbia campus, right before their invasion of CCNY, was instigated by a group of 21 congressional Democrats who in a letter on April 29 warned the Columbia administration: “It is past time for the University to act decisively [and] disband the encampment…. The time for negotiation is over; the time for action is now.” Called in by the Columbia administration, the NYPD arrived to assault demonstrators on the night of April 30, anniversary of the violent police attack on Columbia’s 1968 student strike against racism and U.S. imperialism’s war on Vietnam.

With students now protesting yet another U.S. war, as U.S.-supplied bombs and planes rain death on the people of Gaza, on April 30 the cops violently cleared the Columbia encampment and the student occupation of Hamilton Hall, renamed “Hind’s Hall” by protesters to memorialize the six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, shot dead, together with two paramedics who tried to save her, by Israeli troops in Gaza. Police wielding high-powered saws forced their way into Hamilton Hall through the main entrance, while militarized cops used a ramp on an armored tactical truck to enter through a window. Within the building, cops employed “flashbang” stun grenades against protesters before beating them – and one police officer fired his gun (allegedly by accident).

By 8 p.m. that night, large deployments were gathering outside the gates of City College on Convent Avenue in Harlem. Soon they had virtually sealed off the campus. Inside, CUNY Internationalists who were part of the encampment were among those holding up signs facing onto the street and chanting in defiance of the impending police incursion. Other Internationalist activists arrived rapidly and other students and faculty from Columbia, CUNY and elsewhere joined crowds outside the gates to protest the police crackdown. After launching repeated attacks on these protesters, the NYPD burst into CCNY, “swept” the encampment on the quad, deployed its riot gear, clubs and fists, and shortly after midnight seized about 170 of the total of approximately 300 arrested at Columbia and CCNY that night.

Sitting beside top NYPD officials at his press conference the following morning, held at One Police Plaza, Democratic mayor Eric Adams bragged that a total of nearly 300 people had been arrested in this coordinated police operation at the two campuses. Deploying a timeworn reactionary smear, he grotesquely and ludicrously claimed that the protests were the work of “outside agitators” and “professionals.” He went on to call the flying of a Palestinian flag at the encampment “despicable,” launching a jingoistic tirade in which he praised the NYPD for tearing it down and raising the star-spangled banner of U.S. imperialism there. “That’s our flag, folks,” declaimed the mayor, himself a former captain in the NYPD, ranting: “We are not surrendering our way of life to anyone.”

Four members of the Hunter Internationalist Club were among those arrested in the NYPD’s forcible eviction of the CCNY encampment. From the beginning of the encampment, CUNY Internationalists were present day and night to put forward a revolutionary program for workers action to defeat the U.S./Israel war and for a binational Palestinian Arab-Hebrew workers state as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East. Comrades remained there until the very end, chanting alongside other protesters as they were shoved and forced into handcuffs by the cops, “This is for Gaza!”

Hunter Students and Faculty Speak Out

Early on the morning of May 1, CUNY Internationalist Clubs activists protested outside the CCNY campus demanding “Cops Off Campus” and the dropping of all charges against those arrested. A little before 10 that morning, we issued a call to hold a speak-out rally under the slogan “Protest NYPD/CUNY Repression Against Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators,” to be held at noon at CUNY’s Hunter College.

After intensive fliering by Club activists, a crowd of students together with members of the Professional Staff Congress faculty/staff union, several of whom are part of the Hunter PSC chapter’s executive committee, gathered outside the main campus building. Our ability to bring out Hunter students and unionists on short notice reflects the Internationalists’ years of work there mobilizing students against racist oppression and imperialist war, and on many other issues. This includes our speak-out the previous semester against McCarthyite witch-hunts and role in the campaign against the administration’s cancellation of the faculty-sponsored screening of Israelism, a film critical of Israel, which made headlines and drew nationwide interest.¹

At the Hunter protest, students chanted “Defend Gaza Against Israeli Terror!” and “NYPD out of CUNY Now!” Occurring as it did on International Workers Day, the speak-out featured several speeches that connected the fight against police repression and the war on Gaza to the struggle of workers around the world. An important aspect was helping inform students and unionists about the appeal by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions for international labor action against the U.S./Israel war.

The protest was emceed by Kaitlan from the Internationalist Club, who kicked it off by denouncing the repression of the CCNY and Columbia encampments by servants of the capitalist ruling class, from its politicians and university administrations to one of the most infamous police forces in the country. She linked present-day protests today to the events of 1968 at Columbia, and the following year’s CCNY student strike, launched by black and Puerto Rican students, which led to a crucial gain (later reversed by the racist city rulers): open admissions at CUNY.²

“Demonstrators were thrown down. They were beaten. They were pepper-sprayed. They were dragged out…. [Yet] yesterday was a very special day: anyone know what happened on April 30th, 1968? Students at Columbia University were outraged at the Vietnam War, and they were taken down by the NYPD. Columbia likes to reminisce about its ‘mistake’ of 1968, but yesterday they did the same thing.

“Similarly, CUNY likes to reminisce about the 1969 struggle to open admissions and for no tuition. Yet they repress student demonstrators exercising their right to oppose this war! Are we opposed to this war, to the slaughter, the bombing of Palestinians that is funded and supported by the United States? [Crowd yells “Yes.”] We’re here because we’re opposed to this war; to repression by the CCNY administration, by the CUNY administration and the NYPD, of our brothers and sisters here at CUNY, at Columbia, and at UCLA.”

Izzy, another Club member, described the scene of police violence outside City College the previous night as well as efforts in defense of the arrested students:

“I saw police kettle us, riot cops gather around, hundreds of them, slowly pushing us in, detaining us. I wasn’t able to see much of what was happening inside the gates of CCNY; my comrades and friends from the Internationalist Club at Hunter were inside there. We on the outside remained there as long as we could until the police split us up and we were made to disperse.

“When the SRG [Strategic Response Group] rushed in to beat people, they were grabbing people by the hair, beating people with nightsticks and making arrests. I went to One Police Plaza at 3 a.m. and later at 6 when [arrestees] were released.

“What happened was a brutal display of violence towards protesters, towards students demonstrating against a blatant genocidal war, against the bombs that level Palestinian neighborhoods in Gaza.”

Mateo, one of the four Hunter Internationalist Club members arrested at the City College encampment, expressed outrage at the brutality of the NYPD repression ordered by the CUNY administration, and urged students to join the fight against the war on the Palestinians. “This fight does not end here,” he said. “Students must continue to mobilize against this repression and call on NYC workers all over the city to mobilize and not only defend the students, but to defend Gaza.”

The following speaker was Lydia, a member of United Auto Workers Local 2179 who was active in the successful unionization drive at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema. She spoke of the role of Democratic politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams in instigating and ordering the repression of pro-Palestinian students. After highlighting the need to mobilize workers’ power to stop the shipment of arms to Israel, she highlighted the call by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions for international labor action: “For the workers and trade unionists of Palestine, this is their demand for all of us as international workers. And we are here to answer their call, as you are all here today to answer the call of those who were arrested last night.”

Internationalist Club speakers linked the CUNY/NYPD repression to the previous semester’s months-long struggle to defeat interim Hunter College president Ann Kirschner’s cancellation of the screening of the Israelism documentary organized by Hunter’s Film and Media Department and Arabic Program. Among faculty speakers at the rally were several who had been active in that struggle and members of the executive committee of the Hunter PSC including chapter chair Jen Gaboury. Professor Chris Stone of the Arabic Program described the “unacceptable and horrifying” police assaults on student demonstrators he had witnessed the previous night. Renowned Hunter filmmaker Tami Gold connected the war on Gaza to the long history of U.S.-backed military coups in Latin America as well as attacks on immigrant rights. She also spoke about New York State’s notorious Taylor Law, which bans public sector workers – including CUNY faculty and staff – from going on strike.

Referring to the denunciations of the protests by Mayor Adams and the CUNY administration, Gold said: “In the media today, newscasters were saying most of the organizing is done by ‘outside agitators.’ So I’m going to ask: Are you ‘outside agitators?’” The crowd corresponded with an emphatic, “No!” Several shouted: “We’re students!”

A member of Class Struggle Education Workers linked the fight against the genocidal war and police repression to the broader struggle of the working class, speaking to the significance of May Day, international workers day, and the bravery of immigrant workers who have played a crucial role in the history of the labor movement. Addressing comparisons between protests against the Vietnam war and today’s protests against the barbarous war on Gaza, he emphasized that it was not peace marches, let alone votes for “lesser-evil” candidates, but the victorious revolution of Vietnamese workers and peasants that inflicted a major defeat on U.S. imperialism.

He then spoke of the lessons of the 1999 strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Workers action in solidarity with students was decisive – in the face of threats by the army to invade Latin America’s largest university – to winning the strike’s central objective of preventing the establishment of tuition.

“When the World Bank tried to force the Mexican government to impose tuition and the Mexican government said, ‘Yes sir, Uncle Sam!’ the students went on strike and they took over the university. And when the Mexican army with U.S. weapons threatened to invade the campus, some students [from the Grupo Internacionalista] went to the electrical workers and asked them to form a workers defense guard, 24-hours a day, to surround the campus. And if the army invaded, those workers could turn off the switch – they could turn off the electricity for all of Mexico City. As a result, UNAM is still free.

“I want to say something about the Taylor Law. Those of us who work at CUNY, we need to smash, rip up, tear up and bury forever that law administered by the Democratic and Republican parties of U.S. imperialism and capitalism. To do that, we need to reach out to and connect with the power of the working class of this city, and with the thousands and hundreds of thousands of undergraduate students….

“If we talk about capitalism, we need to talk about what to do about it. What needs to be done is to break with all of the capitalist politicians – Democrat, Republican, Green or whatever – and build a revolutionary workers party, to carry out a socialist revolution.”

Our call on students to join with the struggle of the working class here in New York and around the world echoed inspiringly later that afternoon, when many Hunter students joined the Internationalist contingent of 75 people at the citywide May Day rally and march in downtown Manhattan. As chants reverberated through the streets, we connected our International Workers Day call for labor action in defense of the Palestinian people to our slogan, “Asian, Latin, Black and White: Workers of the World, Unite!”■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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