1997: The Facts about CUNYCard

The following pamphlet was produced by the CCNY Coalition in the Fall 1997.  It explains the real deal on why CUNY Card is a scam and why we should organize against it.

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The Facts about CUNYCard

What is CUNYCard?

CUNYCard is a new ID card administrators are attempting to implement at campuses across CUNY, including City College. The proposed card may act as a library card, and, if students choose, as a Citibank debit card and MCI calling card. The card also has the potential to be programmed as a xerox card, a vending machine card and an access card for restricted parts of campus.

Though the proposed card sounds neat, CUNY-Card is actually an attempt by administrators, Citibank and MCI to violate students’ pocketbooks and privacy. That’s why CUNY administrators, working on it three years behind closed doors, have said almost nothing publically about CUNYCard. They don’t want public debate about it. This pamphlet, made by students and faculty, will attempt to update the CUNY community on the proposed card and explain why administrators don’t want you to know about it until it’s too late.

1996 SLAM factsheet on Workfare and CUNY students

[This is a SLAM! informational flier that was produced in Spring 1996.  Some of the data and information may be dated.]

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Workfare and CUNY Students

What would you rather do with your time–go to college, or pick up trash in parks for no pay?  If you’re on Public Assistance, the city has decided that you no longer have a choice.  7,000 CUNY students have already been forced to leave school to “work off” their monthly check of less than $500, which already leaves students and their children way below the poverty line.  The Work Experience Program does not give people real jobs. It just prevents people from getting the education that they need to get a decent one in the future.

• 10% of the students at CUNY — 20,000 people — receive Public Assistance.
• There are now about 35,000 to 40,000 New Yorkers in the Work Experience Program (WEP). Mayor Giuliani wants to put 100,000 more people into the program this year.
• WEP workers are supposed to be assigned jobs based on their skills and interests, but almost all are placed in Parks and Sanitation, where they get no training, no skills, and are not given basic information about the unsafe conditions they are often working under.
• There are no job openings for WEP workers to move into. In fact, the city is laying off union workers.
• Student mothers are hit especially hard. WEP workers are supposed to get childcare or money to cover it, but usually neither is provided. Childcare facilities at CUNY have long waiting lists and often have no evening hours.
• 40% of CUNY students are immigrants, many of whom will be losing eligibility for Public Assistance under the Federal Personal Responsibility Act, which President Clinton signed last year.
• Governor Pataki has proposed deep cuts to welfare, as well as a $400 tuition increase for CUNY schools.  More poor students than ever will be forced to leave.
• This is not about helping people to get off welfare. 87% of welfare recipients who get a 4-year college degree never need welfare again.

If you are at risk of being forced to leave school because of a workfare assignment, call the Welfare Rights Initiative: 212-772-4091. CUNY Law School students and attorneys may be able to assist you with your case.

a SLAM! flier
Student Liberation Action Movement

LeftSpot.com: Some Thoughts on the History of CUNY SLAM

Some Thoughts on the History of CUNY SLAM

by LS, March 2006

http://leftspot.com/blog/?q=cunyarticle

In Spring 2006, two important commemorations will occur to celebrate the history of militant student and community struggle at the City University of New York (CUNY), one of the largest and most important public university systems in the U.S., made up of 17 separate campuses and over 200,000 students spread throughout New York City’s five boroughs.

On March 25 there will be a 30-year anniversary celebration of building takeovers by South Bronx community members and Hostos students to save Hostos Community College in 1976. Hostos is a CUNY campus with a largely Latino and immigrant student body located in the South Bronx.

On April 1 there will be an event commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the founding of the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!) in 1996. SLAM! is a multinational radical student organization. It grew out of a mass movement to stop tuition increases and cuts to Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) at CUNY in 1995. That movement included sit-ins that led to mass arrests at City College and Hunter College, and culminated in a (non-permitted) massive march of 20,000 students on City Hall not long after Rudolph Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York. SLAM! continues as an active radical CUNY student organization.

The Struggle Over Who CUNY Serves

CUNY is not like most university systems in the U.S. CUNY was founded in 1847 as the “Free Academy” to educate the working class and had free tuition from 1847 until 1976. The large majority of students are from working class and poor families, and the majority of students are oppressed nationalities.

The Politics of Race and Class at CUNY – by Chris Day, 1997

By Christopher Day
Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Newspaper
June/July 1997, Volume 8 Number 3

On Thursday, March 27 about 600 students gathered in City Hall Park to protest proposed budget cuts to the City University of New York (CUNY). Students came from at least a dozen schools. This demonstration was not going to turn into a battle with the cops like the 1995 demonstration of 25,000 students. But nonetheless, it demonstrated the existence of several hundred radical students at CUNY who will turn out for a rally even when the movement is at a low point. Reflecting the composition of CUNY better than previous demonstrations, Black and Latino students were a solid majority of the crowd and the speakers. After the rally much of the crowd marched to the nearest train station and took the subway to Harlem where they joined students at City College in their campus-based “Day of Outrage” against the budget cuts.

The fight against the budget cuts at CUNY has involved complex questions of race and class. The Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!), which organized the demonstration, is a broad-based, open and democratic organization rooted primarily at CUNY and dedicated to fighting the cuts. March 27 was the product of SLAM!’s efforts to develop a principled politics around these problems. Its efforts to navigate the difficult questions of class and race offer valuable lessons for activists facing similar questions elsewhere.

“The Struggle at CUNY” by Ron McGuire

The Struggle at CUNY: Open

Admissions and Civil Rights – by Ron

McGuire, 1992

From LeftSpot.com at http://leftspot.com/blog/?q=cunystruggle

The following article provides an excellent background and framework from which to understand the importance of the struggle at the City University of New York. It squarely puts the struggle at CUNY in the framework of a struggle against racism and national oppression. Though it was written in 1992 and therefore some of the data is outdated, it is still an accurate analysis of the struggle at CUNY. This article was printed as a mass newspaper by the CUNY Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!) in 1997. It is reprinted here from an old SLAM website. –LS

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The Struggle at CUNY: Open Admissions and Civil Rights

By Ronald B. McGuire, 1992

The movement of the students of the City University of New York (“CUNY”) and their communities against the proposed budget cuts which would result in tuition increases, financial aid cuts and program cutbacks, is a civil rights struggle, not an argument over economics or fiscal policy. CUNY contains the largest number of Black and Latino scholars ever to attend a single university in the history of the United States. The importance of CUNY as a source of opportunity for non-white students and their communities is highlighted by the fact that CUNY traditionally awards the largest number of Master’s degrees to Black and Latino students of any institution in America. Last year CUNY conferred 1,011 Master’s degrees to Black and Latino students while the State University of New York (“SUNY”) awarded only 233. The integration of CUNY has been the most significant civil rights victory in higher education in the history of the United States.

CUNY’s unique policy of open admissions transformed the university from a virtually all-white enclave in the mid-1960’s, to an institution with over 200,000 students, the majority of whom are now Black and Latino. CUNY’s predecessor, the Free Academy, was founded in 1847 for the purpose of providing opportunity for higher education to the poor and disadvantaged of New York City. Ironically, despite the fact that successive generations of immigrants had availed themselves of the opportunity provided by CUNY, it was not until 1969 that the University undertook a commitment to open its doors to students from the Black and Latino communities who had until then been virtually excluded from the CUNY schools.1 In Spring 1969 a strike led by Black and Latino students at City College engendered tremendous community support in favor of the students’ main demand that the ethnic composition of CCNY reflect the ethnic composition of New York City’s high schools.

1997 article: Hostos Students Under Attack in NYC

Hostos Students Under Attack in NYC

By Brad, Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Newspaper, August/Sept. 1997

On May 27, five days before graduation, the Board of Trustees of the
City University of New York (CUNY) passed a resolution prohibiting
students at Hostos Community College from graduating unless they passed
a university-wide English proficiency test (the CUNY Writing Assessment
Test-CWAT).  A year earlier, Hostos stopped requiring the test as the
sole criterion of English proficiency.  Instead, they developed their
own writing test, and used that in combination with a number of other
criteria to determine whether students had learned enough English to
graduate.  The students who were scheduled to graduate on June 1 had
completed all the requirements that they were told they needed in order
to graduate.  The Trustees’ decision singles out for attack the largely
Latino student body at Hostos, and CUNY students who speak English as a
second language in general.  It is only the latest episode of a
longer-term effort to drive large numbers of students of color out of
CUNY.

From the original SLAM website, 1997: Building a New National Progressive Student Activist Organization

The following paper was written by Eric O’Dell for distribution at the student conference in Chicago on the first weekend of November, 1997.  It is written by him as an individual, and represents his views, not necessarily the views of SLAM! or of any other organization.  We are publishing it here in an effort to contribute to the rebuilding of a powerful national student movement.  Rebuild!

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Building a New National Progressive Student Activist Organization

A Proposal Submitted for the Consideration of the U.S. Student Movement

By Eric O’Dell, November 1997

Intro

The student movement has long been a vital part of the people’s movements—both as an ally of other sections of the people and in the struggle against students’ own particular forms of oppression. A fair number of attempts at building and sustaining national-level, multi-issue student activist organizations have been made over the years. This paper proposes that the time may be ripe for another effort, particularly if we learn well our lessons of the past. It also suggests how we might now proceed to make such an effort.

Background

Why build organization?

This may be an obvious question to many, but it’s worth reviewing.

Progressive social change is made by sections of the masses of people acting within movements to create qualitative social change through struggle-oriented activism. The mainstream media often mystify such movements, portraying them as spontaneous and arising out of nowhere. There’s a kernel of truth to this idea, but we know that there’s more to it. Movements are made by thousands of people acting to build and sustain organizations which carry out the often invisible day-to-day work.

1998: “What’s New” on SLAM original website

For all you internet geeks out there, our old geocities site is getting taken down oct. 26, 2009, so we’re copying all the stuff over here. This is the “what’s new” page from the last time it was updated, in 1998. After that, we mostly used the Hunter SLAM student government site as SLAM’s website.

What’s New on the SLAM! Webpage

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March 25, 1998
Home Page: Redone design with a new picture!
Current Activities: Updated, with links to media coverage of our demonstrations so far this semester.

March 9, 1998
Current Activities: Updated to include citywide demonstrations agreed to at March 8th meeting. Check it out!

Links page from original SLAM website

Some Useful Student Activism Links

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CUNY Info & Links

• CUNY’s Homepage
• CUNY Map
• Eyes on CUNY A great independent activist resource focused on CUNY.  Check it out!
• Hunter College SLAM!/USG

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Lenina Nadal, interviewed December 27, 2008

Lenina Nadal, December 27, 2008

Lenina Nadal was a founding member of the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts and SLAM. Having graduated in 1997, she returned in 2000 to help create SLAM’s organizer training institute. She is a filmmaker, playwright, and poet, and works for the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. Visit http://www.performingprofound.com

interviewed by Suzy Subways

Suzy: I was thinking about how SLAM started at Hunter and how the different clubs kind of created SLAM together, right? What’s the story of that? There was the Palestinian Club, the Black Student Union and, from the beginning, how did they come together and work in the CUNY Coalition and start SLAM?

Lenina: To be honest, I remember a couple of individuals, Chris Day being one of them, who did what Chris Day does, which is put something provocative on a flier and start stapling it around the entire campus. It was only a couple of individuals that said, “there’s something going on here.” At the time, I was working with the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), so we had our own campaign where we had began to tell students that tuition was going to be raised $1,000. So there was already publicity around campus saying that this is what’s going to happen. And then students started talking about this in classes. So even really before any particular clubs got involved, there was a lot of anxiety among the masses of students on campus, because $1,000 just seemed like a tremendous amount of money. However, I would say that there was one group, which was the Black Student Union, where you had members like Takala, a poet and activist, and Asha Bandele. So Asha Bandele and Takala at the time were in the leadership of the BSU, along with Kim Wade and a few other activists. And they were responsible for some of the major takeovers of the Hunter campus and other CUNY campuses in like 1990, 91. By the time 1995 rolled around, they were still in leadership, and while they didn’t play the central role anymore, they were continuing to raise consciousness among Black students on campus on these issues, and continuing to help the movement grow in their own way. And the other clubs that had a sort of political consciousness included the Palestinian Club and the Arab Club, which were very strongly affiliated, and right across the hall was the Puerto Rican Club, and that had some progressive membership that was kind of in and out. And I’d say those were the three that kind of solidified a people of color Left in terms of organizations on campus that were doing work.

But I would say that when it began, it was really a few students that said, “We’re going to do something about this. This is crazy.” And the only alternative that we were being offered was from NYPIRG, which was like, “Let’s go to our congresspeople, let’s go to our senators, let’s lobby, let’s see if we can change it from within.” But the frustration was already building up. And a lot of it was because working class students were feeling like their financial aid was going to be cut, their tuition was going to be increased, and this might be the last chance they had at a CUNY education. So the stakes were very. very high for all students. It was really a mass movement. It’s like most movements – the leadership can claim it, but they have to claim it after the masses have already said, “This is what we want.” Those of us who had been part of organizations or who grew up with leftist parents, we started to get to know each other and kind of see that we had something to offer to sustain a movement. In that sense, that’s how some of that leadership started to come together.