From an email sent by LaGuardia Corner Gardens members:
On Sept. 1, in Washington Square Park, please join our coalition of students, faculty and staff at NYU, the New School, and Cooper Union, people of the Village, and labor unions at a rally/march against the ruinous fiscal policies of those three famous downtown schools, to protest the elite financial schemes now threatening not only the schools’ survival, but also their historic neighborhoods.
The groups in this unprecedented coalition include: NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (NYUFASP); NYU's Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM); the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU); NYU's Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC); NYU Divest; Law Students for Economic Justice (LawSEJ), Whose NYU?; Coalition for Fair Labor, Roosevelt Institute; Student Employees at the New School (SENS); Free Cooper Union; Union of Clerical, Administrative and Technical Staff at NYU (UCATS); NYU Adjuncts and The New School Part-Time Faculty Union (ACT - UAW Local 7902); Office & Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU Local 153); Washington Square Village Tenants’ Association; Washington Square Village South Citizen Action Committee; Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031 (CAAN 2031); SoHo Alliance; and more.
The rally will begin at 4:00 p.m., on Tuesday, Sept. 1st, in Washington Square Park’s Garibaldi Plaza and will climax in a march to Coles Sports Center (181 Mercer St., New York, NY 10012) — now slated to be closed this fall, and torn down soon thereafter. Varied speakers, including students, professors, union leaders - from NYU, Cooper Union, and the New School, and members of the Greenwich Village community will address a range of issues, from of Wall Street's stranglehold on US higher education to the destruction of our city's open spaces (4 Greenwich Village parks will be crushed to make way for NYU’s massive, unwanted, multi-billion dollar expansion) to student debt, and the overall corruption of these and countless other universities.
Members of the internationally acclaimed East Village-based group STOMP will lend their support by performing at the rally.
Both Cooper Union and the New School are participating in the protest because they, too, are downtown Manhattan institutions of higher learning that have been hurt by mammoth real estate developments and other wild investments.
This rally will protest the soaring price of higher education, and its consequence of student debt that has reached crisis levels coast to coast. We will also address the two main causes of that nationwide disaster: mammoth building booms on campus after campus, and vast bureaucracies whose top executives make six- and seven-figure salaries.
These excesses are in direct and drastic contrast with these same schools’ partnerships with foreign regimes that routinely violate essential human rights, including academic freedom; their increasing exploitation of faculty who are paid ever less to do more work, and without any voice in governance; and their deliberate neglect of cash-strapped students who go hungry, sleep on benches, and/or even have to sell their bodies to fund their tuition and expenses (a problem more widespread at NYU than any other US university).
Please join us! Send emails! Invite your friends and colleagues.
Here is the event’s Facebook page: facebook.com/whosenyu
Help us on Twitter by tweeting about the event using one or all of these hashtags:
Here is the event’s Facebook page: facebook.com/whosenyu
Help us on Twitter by tweeting about the event using one or all of these hashtags:
#SavetheVillage #WhoseNYU #HamiltonGetReady
