What We Should Say to Her

The following post is in reference to the President of Montclair State University.

Next week we are going to meet with the school president to discuss our demands. I do not believe that we should form a list of say ten official demands that we want. I am very much opposed to that.

Occupy Wall Street is not about demands. They have never drafted a list of things they want to change. They have never marched to city hall to demand a meeting with the mayor. What happened yesterday was good because of the effect it had on *us*, not on the school's president or the administration. They don't care. Administrations are always increadibly resisntent to responding to protesters demands. She might humor us, she might throw us a bone, but unless we have the whole campus in an uproar, we don't have any real power over her.

Look at what happend at Rutgers. The students there fought for years. They had an occupation, they had lawyers, and they had thousands of supporters. What was their big accomplishment? A lower than usual increase in tuition. Not a decrease, not a freeze, an increase that was lower than it otherwise was. Their other big push, to change the zoning of the town government, failed. Now I'm not trying to diss them, and I'm sure they had a lot of other smaller accomplishments. I'm using them as an example of the resisntance we face.

If we go down their road and turn this organization into the Montclair Student's for Better Parking Club, than we will have isolated ourselves from so many other issues and opportunities, as well as the entire Occupy movement. Hundreds of occupations are springing up around the country, fighting together to change society, and under the banner "we do not have a list of official demands." I dont want to turn away from them.

So what DO I think we should say to the president on wednesday? I think there are two good options:

The first is to give her one thousand demands. Show up with a big stack of paper full of the things we want different. Everyone writes something down. Better parking, lower tuition, her resignation, universal health care, a new government ect... Ask her to go through all of it with us, and give us an answer on each and every point.

The other option is just one demand: End the rule of the one percet, and more specificaly, at Montclair University. Make this school a truely democratic and egalitarian organization.

Da End