By Jack Mirkinson
At 9:30 this morning, a Brooklyn College student, who would only identify himself as Dave Solidarity, was handing out fliers and telling people walking past him to skip class and join him in a student strike. The aim was to protest Gov. David Paterson’s proposed cuts to the higher education budget. Paterson is proposing an $84.3 million cut from the CUNY budget for the 2011-2012 academic year, as well as a $5.3 million midyear cut in 2010.
“No class today!” Solidarity called out. This drew the ire of Milga Morales, the dean of student affairs at the college. After a few minutes, she walked up to Solidarity. She had a problem, she told him, with the way he was talking to students.
“You’re misinforming students,” she said. “You can tell them to walk out, that’s fine, but you can’t tell them that there’s no classes.” Asked by a reporter if she supported the strike, Morales said, “We’re aware of it.”
The walkout, which was organized by a number of students, seemed to have a good deal of institutional support. The teachers’ union was backing it, and the organizers had been given access to several rooms in the student center for gathering. Passing by Solidarity, Barbara Barnes, a professor in the School of Education, said she had told all of her students to skip her class and strike instead. “We’re immediately affected,” she said. “The cuts are devastating.”
The strike today was a far cry from the acrimonious scene Wednesday night when four people were arrested at a public hearing about MTA cuts at the Brooklyn Museum. Yet both highlight the rising public clamor against the budget cuts. In addition, today’s strike was one of a series of similar protests from students across the country.
After all the fliers had been handed out, Solidarity and two other organizers went into Boylan Hall to try to get more students to leave class and come to the student center for a series of talks, workshops and film screenings. They walked into an English class, where the professor greeted them excitedly. She had just been talking about the budget cuts and the strike with her students, a group of mostly freshman girls. It turned out that half the class had heard about the strike beforehand. Joined by the class, the two started debating whether the strike was necessary and what could be done to close the budget gaps. Solidarity said that money could be spent on education instead of prisons or bank bailouts, a notion the professor seemed to greet with skepticism.
The students appeared supportive enough. After all, they — or their parents — potentially face looming tuition increases and cuts to financial aid. One girl said she was worried about the MTA cuts, as well. “It doesn’t just affect students,” she said. “It’s parents, it’s workers, too.”
After 15 minutes or so, the debate petered out, and the entire class immediately got up and headed for the student center, seemingly without permission from their teacher. “What was she talking about unions for?” a girl said to her friend as they walked down the hall. “We tried to get out but she just kept going on!”
They all walked to the student center, where multiple workshops on such topics as “Institutional Racism” and “People, Power and Politics” were being held. Many professors had joined Barbara Barnes in sending their students to the workshops instead of to their classes. Every workshop was filled with people, debating whether or not it is possible to ignore someone’s race, or the gap between the salary of the college’s president — $580,000, according to a professor in one workshop — and the budget crisis. People talked about creating student-led classes and making the workshops into a more permanent occurrence. Then it was time for lunch, to be followed by more workshops, a rally on campus and a trek into Manhattan. There, the Brooklyn contingent was slated to join students from all over the city to continue protesting the cuts in front of the governor’s New York City office on 41st Street.
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