De-Occupation at CUNY’s City College of New York (CCNY)
Students, faculty, staff, and alumni from all across CUNY have gathered and set up tents at CCNY (City College of New York) in solidarity with Gaza and are joining college communities across the nation and beyond to demand that their universities divest from Israel and protest their students’ speech. Below is the press statement sent by their team.
“Manhattan, New York—At 10 A.M. on April 25, 2024, over 120 CUNY students and workers established an encampment at City College of New York’s Harlem campus. Harkening back to the 1969 City College student protests, students released a ‘New Five Demands’: divestment, boycott, demilitarization of the campus, and solidarity with Palestinian liberation. The students linked these demands to a vision of a tuition-free, open admissions people’s CUNY, as well as an end to retaliation against CUNY students and workers speaking out about the genocide of the Palestinian people. They will remain encamped until the CUNY administration meets these demands. The CUNY encampment is the fourth in New York City, joining Columbia, NYU, and The New School, as part of a wave of encampments at close to 30 other campuses across the globe.
Over the past six and a half months, the settler colonial state has killed over 35,000 Palestinians; injured and traumatized millions; and destroyed schools, hospitals, homes and agriculture. CUNY is directly complicit in this genocide. As Sara Abdulaziz,a CUNY student organizer, explained, ‘We cannot attend classes as normal when students just like us in Gaza have lost their universities, peers, professors, and families. We refuse to let our tuition rob other students of not just their education but their lives.’
In response to the zionist state’s “scholasticide”––which includes the assassination of 94 professors and the destruction of every university in Gaza––National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) has called for U.S. students in the U.S. to join the ‘Popular University for Gaza’ movement. ‘By establishing spaces for popular education on campus, we will disrupt the university’s operations, usurp its existing structures, and undermine its elite reputation to force university administrators to either cut ties with the Zionist entity or allow their universities to shatter,’ NSJP said.
Police repression at CUNY is not new. Administration regularly deploys NYPD to surveil and harass students. Several colleges even have NYPD offices on campus, including CCNY. Organizers at CUNY draw on the legacy of the 1969 CUNY student protest movement, when more than 200 Black and Puerto Rican students de-occupied campus buildings at CCNY, shutting down the campus for 17 days. As Nerdeen Kiswani CUNY Law ‘22, CUNY BA ‘16, Within Our Lifetime, explains: ‘As the largest public Black and brown working-class university system in the country, CUNY has faced Zionist attacks for decades because of the important role it has played in the Palestinian liberation struggle and fighting against the oppression of all people.’
The students’ demands build on existing calls for CUNY to divest. As of Fiscal Year 2021, CUNY had at least 13 contracts exceeding $8.5 million USD with companies that aid in, or profit from, zionist colonization, and war crimes, including Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo, Cisco, and BMC Software. Students are prepared to begin negotiations with the CUNY administration and will not leave until their demands for divestment, boycotting, solidarity, demilitarization, and a People’s CUNY are met. Read a full list of their demands here.”
This is one of many encampments that have emerged at NYC universities last week including Columbia, NYU, the New School, and FIT; since their initial statement organizers at CCNY have begun negotiating with administration for their demands, safety of their students, and against further escalation by the NYPD and public safety. In addition they have started asking for the Chancellor of CUNY, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez to speak with them directly. We will see where this leads in the coming days.
