Corporate U and student dissent
By Dan Freeman-Maloy
As the influence of York University’s corporate constituency increases, the campus is incrementally being geared towards production of raw material for the knowledge economy. The meaningful relationships that could develop into serious, progressive social organization are being stifled. Instead, students are expected to focus on personalized ambitions, to see themselves in isolation, and to pursue individual solutions to collective problems. This political culture is being nourished by York’s officials.
The administration is working to erode students’ collective power, and to weaken student relationships with organized workers, Third World liberation movements, and other dissident social forces. It is simultaneously revealing its crude connections with the very centres of corporate and military power that are the most obvious targets of dissent. The present challenge is to preserve York as a free organizing space, while deepening the student movement’s solidarity with the dynamic off-campus forces that are clashing with these oppressive institutions.
My expulsion from York University at the end of the academic year 2003/4 highlighted some of the obstacles and opportunities we face in pursuing these objectives. I should first point out that York has witnessed an intense backlash to progressive organizing this past year. In spring 2003, York students mobilized en masse, contributing importantly to resistance against Canadian participation in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. These mobilizations included a student strike on March 5, and stressed solidarity with the ongoing Palestinian uprising. For the academic year 2003/4, York’s right wing organized to retaliate.
On September 15, 2003, an on-campus speaking event featured an acting state criminal, Israeli Minister Natan Sharansky. York University President Lorna Marsden introduced him as “a symbol for the struggle for human rights wherever people are oppressed.” Ten days later, an event titled “Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Appreciation Day” was hosted on campus by a right-wing student group (this group took over student government some months later).
Parallel (and connected) to these developments, the expansion of corporate power on campus was continuing apace. Shortly after Natan Sharansky was greeted by York’s President, the University released its 2003 “Report to Donors”. The Report described a party that had been thrown some months before, honouring York’s wealthy constituents - Miles S. Nadal, the Imperial Oil Foundation, Claridge Israel (owned by Charles Bronfman of Canada), Shell Canada Ltd, the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, the Canadian Bankers Association and so forth. The guests at the party “enjoyed a sumptuous sushi bar compliments of Henry Wu, president of Metropolitan Hotels and a member of the York University Foundation Board of Directors.” Henry Wu, meanwhile, was in the process of seeking to repress an organized upsurge of workers at this very hotel.
In April 2004, President Marsden sent me a letter, barring me from the school and threatening to charge me with trespassing if I set foot on campus at any point in the next three years. With neither legal nor political legs to stand on in justifying this repression, she has since been forced to back down, and I have returned to campus. But the specific allegations made in justifying her attempt merit attention.
Firstly, I was charged with using a megaphone at two on-campus Palestine solidarity demonstrations (one of these in response to “IDF Appreciation Day,” cited above). Across North America, campus crackdowns on Palestine solidarity are, of course, common fare. More surprisingly, I was to be punished for my participation in a demonstration in February 2004, organized by the Metropolitan Hotel Workers Committee at their downtown Toronto workplace. Student-worker solidarity, in particular the sort that takes place off campus, is seldom targeted so crudely by University administrations; that it was in this case contains some central lessons.
Higher-ups in the Metropolitan Hotel are evidently worried by the dynamic model of rank-and-file organizing exemplified by the Workers Committee, and the threat posed by its potential growth; University administrators, for their part, are eager to stamp out the Palestine solidarity work that has been galvanizing campuses. The elite networks between these institutions are putting increasing priority on blocking the grassroots alliances that could strengthen both movements. It is now up to us to capitalize on the arrogance with which elites are making their aims public, and to work to make their worst fears a reality.