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CUNY No RNC Organizes Large CUNY Contingent at UFPJ March

James Trimarco

If one follows Matt Taibbi’s argument, recently published in The New York Press, that protesters should show their solidarity by dressing in uniform, then CUNY No RNC appears to be ahead of the game. The GC-based group CUNY No RNC culminated several months of organizing on Sunday, April 29 when it mobilized over 100 students and faculty from the Graduate Center to march together in the permitted United for Peace and Justice march in midtown Manhattan. The group had printed 75 t-shirts, which organizers handed out to contingent members for free. The cost of printing the shirts was covered by a cultural affairs grant from the Doctoral Students Council.

The group met sporadically throughout last spring to discuss strategies for bringing a strong CUNY contingent to the RNC protests. Those meetings were covered in this paper, and interested readers can check the March 2004 archive online to see that article. After discarding ideas that proved simply impossible—the use of the GC building as a childcare or downtime space for protesters, for instance—the group settled on bringing a large and visible GC contingent to the RNC protests as well as a few smaller direct actions.

The group relied on nearly a week of tabling as well as a party in order to assemble a list of email addresses of students interested in marching with the GC contingent. While organizers don’t know the precise number of students and faculty who marched together, all 75 t-shirts were handed out – a number that proved to be far to low to suit up the entire contingent. Other activities taken by the group included hanging two large banners from the windows of the GC on the August 31 “day of action.”

During the organizing process most members of the GC community were friendly to the message of the CUNY No RNC group, which did not draft any mission statement besides its opposition to the policies of the Bush Administration and the Republicans. The only attacks on the group came from Professor Patricia (?) Bonaparte, who objected to the use of the name CUNY in the group’s name because, she argued, some members of the CUNY community might support the RNC. The group responded that a majority seemed to be against it and that those who were for it were free to start their own pro-Republican group.

Members of CUNY No RNC enjoyed the group’s enthusiasm, especially since the Graduate Center’s more established activist group, Free CUNY, has become less active recently. Plans are in discussion to convert the group into a more permanent form and to apply for status as an official DSC-sponsored student organization.