On the Unrest at NYU’s Kimmel Center or What Gives You the Right, Anyway?
What gives you the right, anyway?
Can students with trust funds protest? The question could make almost anyone, and pretty much any student, angry regardless their take on the matter. It is poignant, and it gets to the point. Milling about the protest pen outside Kimmel, it was the first discussion I heard:
“They just said, ‘give us pizza and we’ll leave’!”
“No, that was the College Republicans, but they left.”
However legitimate these claims may have been, the disavowal of wealth and elaborations of parental financial support so prevalent among those around me seemed to cast privilege and activism as ingredients for hypocrisy and ironically bourgeois politics.
There were thirteen demands, but what gives these students the right to make them? How can NYU students ask for social justice when too many of our peers in this city perceive anyone studying at NYU as temporary, fashionable leftists or outright pawns for the patriarchy? The question of whether or not middle or upper class people can protest is probably as unfair as it is relevant and important.
Getting an education at NYU does not inherently make anyone rich, but matriculating here as opposed to Brooklyn College or CUNY carries with it its own special implications and associations. Sextant may not talk to us, and NYU’s endowment might mean more than our tuitions to him. Maybe students didn’t ask for Washington Square Park to be torn up or for the ridiculous architecture of the Kimmel Center to mar the West Village. So far as I know, students were not asked about building a Green Zone style campus in Abu Dhabi. Personally, I have never met a fellow student so enthralled with Sextant’s intellect that they would agree that he is crucial enough to academia to ferry across the globe on a weekly basis.
James Dobson, the force behind the evangelical media outlet Focus on the Family, warned his donors that they would need at least three Christian men to replace him when he dies. Sextant displays the same self-aggrandizement. He brushes past student protesters at NYU in the way that Karl Rove ignores Code Pink. Sextant diminishes his role as university president in the same way that political strategists like Karl denigrate democracy. Sextant, implicitly perhaps, says, “the students are stupid!” Rove says, “the voters don’t know what they really want!”
Of course, Sextant works, undoubtedly hard, to increase the value of the NYU brand. The exotic campus in the Middle East and the posh campus improvements are all meant to preserve our very expensive degrees as intelligent investments. The dynamic is similar to that which lets the war machine claim that it is ultimately protecting our right to speak out against it. It’s patriarchal, and, in plain terms, it equates to something like this:
“They say, ‘No!’, but they really mean, ‘Yes, Yes!’”
Gawker, a Manhattan gossip blog, openly mocks the NYU protesters as inept refugees from cultural death zones (e.g., suburbs, the Midwest), but it admits that the barricaded students have some valid points in their list of demands. However, the Gawkers stop short of granting them the right to make these points. Their argument is old and effective:
“You were begging for it, so you can’t just turn around and say you really didn’t.”
Here, Gawker, and like-minded commentators, are saying, in other terms, “She was wearing a short skirt, so she wanted it,” just like any other cinema-stereotyped frat boy. Why?
We want our rape victims to all be virgins and our protesters to be poor and disenfranchised. Perhaps this helps us out because both groups are powerfully prevented from ever making their charges public. Let’s face it, a prostitute who cries, “rape!” is as easy to dismiss as, though hopefully not, a middle class American kid at NYU ranting about scholarships for Palestinian kids.
Interestingly, when Warren Buffet and Angelina Jolie go about with their philanthropy, we are expected to respect them. We are also asked, especially at such an excellent private university, to respect those who speak from poverty and oppression. We, hopefully, learn to value the subaltern. We do not want to, or cannot, be poor and abused, so we cannot hope to be actual rebels. We can only hope to be rich and powerful so that we can do real good. This is a polarizing political discourse, and it grants almost no ground to those of us who don’t want to pretend we weren’t privileged and do not really want to ever get rich. NYU students, and many others, end up in political purgatory before they ever get started.
I was afraid, as I approached Kimmel, that the cops would outnumber the kids, but I’m not sure of the ultimate ratio. NYU had its best boot forward. The security in front of the student center was not NYPD; it was NYU and all white, female, or otherwise non-threatening for the parents and students. There was no riot gear. There were no flash grenades. Inside the building, I saw at least one well-fed, middle-aged white guy in a suit directing security. People in suits didn’t stand in front of the doors. Sextant did not seem to be around.
Protesters were pitted against the very same NYU workers whose wages the protesters hoped to secure. The security guard at the NYU building where I work had to stay around for an extra hour because of the protests. I feel bad about that. No one at the Kimmel Center was protesting campus security, and NYU security personnel were not antagonizing the students so far as I could assess. Maybe I didn’t see everything, but the conflict appeared to come from only one side. The students fought and tried to take power, but their enemies never came around and fought back. There wasn’t much power to take.
People like Sextant give us symbols to fight, like protesters were given cops at the D & R NCs, but they never come out themselves. For an honest person, this presents a problem. If we rush the police and call them names, we, in psychoanalytic terms, only displace our aggression onto a target that is available because our real antagonists are too scary and strong. A protester cursing a cop is not much different than me getting secretly mad at my roommate and then cursing my cat; it misses the point. This dynamic works for the actual perpetrator because the guilt of ruining the security guards’ night or kicking the cat gets displaced right back to the real threat.
That this gathering did not amount to a massive disruption of the Washington Square Park area and tantalizing videos of police brutality and window-smashing can be interpreted not as NYU students’ political complacency but as their general understanding that Sexton wouldn’t be there. Many people who agreed with several of those thirteen demands likely never showed up because they knew the fight could not be there. Occupying the Kimmel Center is a powerful statement, but it likely means very little to the people the protesters hope to influence.
Dave, in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man, finally gets a hold of a pistol. Dave is overworked with nowhere to get to, and he ends up shooting trusting Jenny, a labor animal. It’s a power thing, but the only living thing for Dave to kill is Jenny. Dave destroys the only creature less powerful than him, and he doesn’t even know he means to do it. It’s a horrifying situation, and we should all want to avoid it.
As of this writing, there have been no confirmed arrests. More importantly, there have been no validated reports of direct attacks on police or security guards. Whether or not any of these things occur as the situation progresses, we should respect the protesters and NYU security personnel for recognizing that they are not real enemies. A violent conflict between students and security guards would bring media attention, but it would also obscure the purpose of the protest and widely diminish the credibility of its claims. It is awkward when privileged people protest, but privileged anarchists annoy pretty much everyone.
This protest highlights the inaccessibility of radical discourse to us lucky students. We are not oppressed or ravaged. We are the people between Carnegie and the violated virgin. We can gag ourselves with our symbolic insignificance, or we can challenge Sexton and his cronies like, though hopefully not again, a prostitute cries, “rape!”
However easy it may have been, or is, for those of us who weren’t protesting to read the thirteen demands/e-mail updates and subsequently caricaturize those students who were protesting as immature and stupid, we cannot honestly call them cowardly or malicious. In the same way, we cannot ignore that Sextant and his buddies handled the situation smartly, but we cannot deny that they have been disingenuous and patronizing the whole long time.
