Last Tuesday, 10,000 people gathered at Victoria Square in downtown Montreal for the most recent chapter of Quebec’s historic student movement. Their presence was a protest of the long-awaited education summit, which ended with the disappointing, but expected decision to increase tuition 3 percent annually, starting next fall.

Premier Pauline Marois of the Parti Québécois had promised the summit during her campaign last summer as a way to appease the more than 100,000 students who had taken part in the Maple Spring — a historic six-month strike against then-Premier Jean Charest’s 75 percent tuition hike. While Marois rode this wave of opposition into office — quickly repealing Charest’s steep hikes in September — her official stance all along was to index tuition fees to inflation.

Even before her election, many students accused Marois of opportunism. She famously sported a red square — the symbol of the student movement based on the slogan “squarely in the red,” referring to debt — and joined in pot-banging casserole protests. Then she abruptly dropped the acts of solidarity when they were no longer politically profitable.

While Education Minister Pierre Duchesne called the indexation plan a “compromise,” few students saw it that way. Martine Desjardins — the president of Quebec’s largest university student association, La Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, or FEUQ — called the decision “disappointing.” She said that the university community is clearly asking for a tuition freeze, but that this option was given little attention at the summit.

Since the late 1960s, the policy has been to keep tuition frozen (with only occasional increases). So a per-year increase, albeit a relatively small one of about $70, is a symbolically significant reversal for the already debt-laden students. Yet, according to Desjardins, it is too early to know if the federation would be prepared to strike over it.

There are, however, some associations preparing to get back into strike mode. On Feb. 26, the final day of the summit, a number of student associations — representing a total of 50,000 students — went on strike for the day. While some of the most active colleges of the Maple Spring did not strike that Tuesday, citing “strike fatigue,” a number of associations have motions to hold assemblies in the next couple of weeks to vote on a general strike. This would mean resuming the indefinite walkout from classes of last year — presumably if Marois tried to officially codify her indexation policy as law.

Controversially, L’Association Pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante, or ASSÉ — Quebec’s most radical student union — boycotted the summit when the government refused to discuss free education there. ASSÉ was also the group behind last week’s massive demonstration.

While such protests have become a hallmark of the student movement, the same calls for austerity still hang in the air. The Parti Québécois has told schools they will have to cut their budgets by $250 million, which McGill University’s president describedas an “unprecedented attack” on higher education.

Various student federations and independent activist groups have conducted their own research and crafted alternative policies that would address Quebec’s fiscal woes without overburdening students. Québec Solidaire, the socialist-leaning party that scored just 6 percent of the vote in the September election, has sought increased corporate taxes to pay for higher learning.

Meanwhile, others are calling out the baselessness of the indexation. As Tim McSorley has argued on the Montreal Media Coop blog, the term “indexation” is misleading because it doesn’t seem to be tied to household revenue, as alleged by the Parti Québécois. Furthermore, because it increases indefinitely, it might actually be worse for students than Charest’s original 75-percent hike.

Activist groups like Free Education Montreal point out that Quebec has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in North America, which, if increased, would go a lot farther toward addressing provincial debt than a small bump in tuition at the expense of higher education. But as policy wonks scramble for the perfect fiscal plan in the austerity era, the Maple Spring poses a bigger question: Who gets to decide educational policy?

Quebec’s students — organized through national student unions that operate on a model of participatory democracy — are challenging the notion that the answer is simply that the government should. And they will continue to make that argument over the coming weeks, as assemblies come together and decide on the next steps.

As Frank Lévesque-Nicol, a committee member of ASSÉ, said, “The momentum is there, and we mustn’t let the anger go away by doing nothing.”

I walked through the shockingly quiet crowd, a mumbling sea that occasionally coalesced around a pat protest cheer. Babies perched on parents’ shoulders. Grandmas hoisted signs that said so. Activists snuck literature behind SUV windshields. Marchers joshed around with police officers. Dr. Jill Stein danced a number. Eve sang about something.

It was a family friendly affair and it was altogether boring.

The typical actors showed up and played their part.

There were representatives of the “Light Brigade” (from the for-profit “think tank” Center for Industrial Progress founded by former Ayn Rand fellow Alex Epstein) who detonated some informational dynamite like “climate-related deaths went down 90 percent in the last century.”

Occupy also had a presence. The community’s signature banner stretched taut next to one scrawled in the same block font in a bizarre continuous phrase “Occupy Wall Street Stop Keystone.”

On the brighter side, indigenous leaders from Canada spoke at the rally. Also, critiquing the President directly was in vogue. As we strolled by his residence, the protesters zinged the commander-in-chief with, “Obama, we don’t won’t your pipeline drama.”

Undoubtedly, I was grumpy and impatient. Yes, Bill McKibben had pitched this as the “largest climate rally in U.S. history” (how many have their been?), but everyone recognized that this was the just the start of the climate movement (again), a goal line stand in preparation for four years of a tedious offensive coordination.

Still, I felt emphatically uninspired.

The resounding fissures of 2011 still reverberate down my legs and out my throat when I march in a mob of sign-laden folks. But I fear that the seductive taste of sincerity, perhaps even novel genuine rupture, will be a memory I savor rather than the flavor of the forthcoming wave of post-election “But Obama, you promised” progressivism.

But what was I expecting? It’s not like I wanted police clashes, but somehow this just didn’t feel like protest was serious. It felt happy in a way that bordered on silly—like people couldn’t really be that convinced that climate change could kill many of the world’s poorest humans (among other living things). Of course, folks were dedicated, and had trekked from far and wide to march around Obama’s manor. And when Sierra Club E.D. Michael Brune got taken away in cuffs last week, the environmental interwebs buzzed with the significance of the act—the first time that the Sierra Club has supported civil disobedience.

Maybe this is the tradeoff? When a movement becomes big enough to be mainstream, where even the clunky old Sierra Club gets in on the action, it’s necessarily lame. Is there a way to make a movement mass rather than mainstream?

I just hope this chapter of the environmental movement feels honest. There may be no such thing as original. Even with Occupy. But this felt performative: a copy copying a copy of a what a protest is supposed to look like, with very little expressive demonstration of what this catastrophic issue really meant to those who marched.

If “activism” has become assimilated into the political process as a type of embodied vote—a sort of, “well if you really care about this issue then you’ll stand outside in the cold with signs” that supposedly compel politicians to act,  then wouldn’t it be more efficient to just stay home and collect online signatures? We can just tell the media there was a big march. I’ve got plenty of stock protest photos.

In Quebec, a common term for protest is “manifestation.” A protest is a collective physical manifestation of the passion, rage, and love that is swirling throughout the bodies of the marchers; an expressive act. It can be unpredictable and artistic and naked and messy—and it can build a movement by showing fellow citizens that people are truly passionate and inspired for a cause.

Maybe the passion was there on Sunday, just a bit chilled. And maybe I was just being grouchy. But maybe we should be be sure to be expressive as well as strategic in our demonstrations that manifest our rage.

This article originally appeared on WagingNonviolence on February 6, 2013: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2013/02/is-the-international-student-movement-the-future-of-global-organizing/

On Nov. 10, 2012, tens of thousands of students flooded the streets of Montreal to express opposition to the proposed tuition hikes. Iain Brannigan, one of approximately 30,000 participants, often took part in the city’s frequent, massive student protests — but this day was uniquely exciting for him. As the University of Ottawa international-development student marched to the tune of “À qui la rue?” (Whose streets? ) “À nous la rue!” (Our streets!), he knew that the words were being chanted simultaneously — in a dozen different languages — by students around the globe.

It was the beginning of the week-long Global Education Strike, during which thousands of students refused to attend school in Quebec, France and Belgium, while thousands more participated in solidarity demonstrations in Thailand, England, Indonesia, Italy and California. Only some of Brannigan’s comrades knew about the synchronicity, but he was well aware of it. For four years he had been a user of the little-known, unglamorous website where the global demonstration had been coordinated: ism-global.net, better known as the International Student Movement.

For all students, everywhere

The website has served as a communication platform since 2008, where activists have coordinated eight international actions. The International Student Movement has active members in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Balkans, and functions as a rich reservoir of multimedia news on the ever-expanding global student movement. Although the International Student Movement is explicitly a platform for autonomous coordination and not an organization itself, most of its users have united around a joint statement that lays out the community’s shared values.

“[We] have been protesting against the increasing commercialization and privatization of public education, and fighting for free and emancipatory education,” it explains. “We strive for structures based on direct participation and nonhierarchical organization through collective discussion and action.”

If the International Student Movement as a collective has an agenda of its own, it is to help students in many different places realize that they are part of the same struggle. It’s an idea that is already in the minds of many student leaders: that their protest is not only to reclaim their own education from profit-seeking institutions, but also to reshape the community of students that they are fighting for — all students, everywhere.

A history of tech-roots organizing

The International Student Movement is riding a wave of global education protests. In 2010, British students struck back against austerity measures. In 2011, Chilean students frightened university administrators around the world by sparring with security forces in protest of neoliberal education policies. In 2012, Quebec universities organized the largest student strike in the country’s history: a successful six-month protest, including a 300,000-person demonstration, which halted proposed tuition hikes. Over the last few years, less-recognized student movements in Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Croatia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Italy and Swaziland have helped fill in a now finely-pixelated picture of an emerging anti-austerity global student movement. And while the website wasn’t central in the organization of all of these actions, its developers hope that the site will increasingly help connect these national efforts, allowing more people to see how social ills from New York City to Athens share conspicuously similar symptoms.

The International Student Movement is also part of a technological shift in the way protest movements are organized and quantified. Since the late 2000s, tech-savvy activists have recognized that such methods of coordination like convergences could be updated to keep decision-making local but make the impact global: pairing technology and grassroots organizing to construct a (rather buggy) global tech-roots machine. For example, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is fusing the local-global connection, while groups like Take the Square and the trending #GlobalNoise movement are flexing global power — the latter turning local pot-banging protests into an international symphony. Of course, part of the impetus for this shift comes from the increasing globalization of the corporate-political world itself and the growing recognition that, to disable this global machine, activists are going to have to update their toolkits.

One architect of the tech-roots machine was Mo Schmidt, the International Student Movement’s founder and one of its administrators. He was a graduate student in Sociology and Economics at the University of Marburg in Germany in 2008 before so-called global grassroots activism really entered public consciousness. (This happened around 2009 when Bill McKibben’s 350.org orchestrated the “world’s most widespread day of political action” in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.)

Schmidt was fed up with what he described as the “commercialization of education.” So he put out a call, focusing exclusively on “groups that work on an autonomous level, not attached to any political parties or labor unions.” With the help of a large, global, education-related mailing list that he gained access to, Schmidt found other students and educators who wanted an independent voice, including a web-savvy Irish elementary school teacher. The energy snowballed, and the dispersed group held its first action on Nov. 5, 2008, with participation around Europe and the United States, as well as in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

A site for and by activists

For such a potentially powerful tool, ism-global.net is not as dazzling as one might expect. In mid-September, when I logged onto one of the International Student Movement’s weekly “global chats,” I was underwhelmed. The site was designed with a rudimentary dichromatic frame populated by links to organizations (the many “friends of ISM”) on one side and a Twitter feed on the other, followed by a long list of multimedia blog posts by someone named Mo. It struck me as a typical site for and by activists: functional and requiring some patience. But after a while, I did learn to navigate (and appreciate) this sprawling resource.

In the chat room, “moMarburg” (who I later learned was Mo Schmidt), laid out the agenda:

<moMarburg> so far we have the following agenda proposal: TOP1: round of introduction TOP2: local/regional news and updates TOP3: Q&As on the Global Education Strike TOP4: video project TOP5: communication TOP6 : global noise (Oct.13) TOP7: open space

Next, the international introductions began:

<snowhat-qc> Elias from quebec, student at laval university

<uecse[MOR]> we’re nabil belkabir, basma bakri, kenza benmoussa and anas hmam, Rabat (Morocco)

<Mexico> Teacher and student, Mexican global link

<Peter_Vienna> Hi, i’m Peter, studying in Vienna, soon Berlin.

<SM> I am from West Bengal (India) and I have been long connected with you vis gmail

<flort> Hi i am Flor and i am a student in Albania

<timus3> kk – Tim, UK student (Bristol). Anything else?

Although it was a small group using a relatively bare-bones structure, the content was powerful. I heard stories not reported elsewhere about the resurgent Moroccan education movement and Mexico’s #YoSoy132 — for which opposing censorship is central to the struggle — from students on the ground.

At one point, a user asked for further instructions on how to participate in the Global Education Strike, but Schmidt explained that there was no central authority for the action. This point — that the ISM has a decentralized and non-hierarchical structure — is paramount for him.

“A certain vision and political ideology are reflected in the structure itself,” he explained. “There are no mechanisms on the ISM that would justify one person having a different status than another person.”

The emphasis on decentralized control, autonomy and horizontality resembles the prefigurative anarchic ethos of movements like Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s 15M movement, and Schmidt noted similar challenges.

“To many activists, the concept of actually being a platform and not an organization is rather new,” he said. “They are used to having to work in organizations with hierarchical structures.”

So far, consensus-based decision-making over the platform has been tricky — yet ultimately effective. In 2009, for example, when users decided that a joint statement was useful, it was circulated for a full 10 months for feedback. Finally, it was accepted by 100 groups in 40 countries with no rejections. With the anonymity of the Internet, accountability is also complicated, and the International Student Movement has had some difficulty finding administrative volunteers to keep the site running. The open-access platform also leaves campaigns vulnerable to disruption, but, at least so far, divisive voices have been drowned out naturally when they are too one-sided.

Coordinating victories

Despite the need for troubleshooting, the International Student Movement has had some real wins.

In Croatia in 2009, assemblies and occupations that were coordinated locally as part of an International Student Movement week of action kicked off a student movement that included the occupation of 20 universities in eight cities. Activists in Croatia used the slogan “one world, one struggle,” which was christened over the International Student Movement site (and now student activists frequently send news and photos to #1world1struggle).

The International Student Movement has also made global student solidarity more feasible. In Swaziland in April of 2011, Maxwell Dlamini and others in the Swaziland National Union of Students were imprisoned and tortured because of their involvement in protests inspired by the Egyptian uprising. This prompted a solidarity campaign, which made international headlines, coordinated through the platform. 

The International Student Movement has also provided a network, information and sometimes even an inspirational boost for individual users. Brannigan, the University of Ottawa activist, met students around Canada at an ISM-North America convergence in November of 2011 just before the first mass mobilization in Montreal for the Maple Spring.

“Thanks to these links,” he wrote in an email, “our student union was able to play a big role … in support and solidarity throughout the Maple Spring,” which included sending an Ottawa contingent to Quebec’s mass November 22 demonstration.

When Brannigan went to Germany as part of an international research program, he met with Mo Schmidt and other activists.

The platform provided a similar pathway into the student movement for Lindsay Curtis, a master’s student at Sacramento State University who is currently serving in the Peace Corps. She went from feeling apathetic to being an activist in 2010 while witnessing the attack on public education at UC Riverside during her undergraduate studies.

“I discovered ISM later that year,” she said. “That’s when I realized there were other people, worldwide, who cared about change just as much as I did. That’s when I swung into high gear and knew being an activist would always be my main job.”

Later, when Curtis visited Greece during the Syntagma Square occupation in 2011, she used ism-global.net to get minute-by-minute updates and to contact student activists in Greece to meet and discuss the occupation.

Questions for a new era

The International Student Movement may be rather basic and inaccessible to those who aren’t already active student leaders, but this four-year-old experiment is forcing users to think critically about the forthcoming era of tech-roots activism. It raises questions about the role of corporate-owned social media in grassroots activism, the challenges of horizontal structures and the strategies necessary for building power in the face of globalized, market-based educational institutions.

For active members of the International Student Movement, part of the answer to the question of building power lies in fostering local-global synchronicity. Over the course of November 23, Schmidt counted 150 University of Marburg students who were occupying the university senate’s monthly meeting and hosting a “strike-café” on the state of education in Germany. That same night, Schmidt scrolled through the 124 photos of Global Education Strike activities from around the globe that he had compiled into a Facebook album.

Which was the more important achievement? To Schmidt, it was the relationship between the two.

“People focus a lot on governments as the root of the problem: parties and individual politicians. But by connecting and creating an identity with a struggle on a global and not just a local level, you get away from that,” he explained. “You focus on the structures on a global level that are causing the problems on the local level. To me, it’s directly connected to the economic system, and by connecting globally we make those structures visible in some way.”

While it’s tempting to get excited about the potential of global connectivity — tech-enabled pan-studentism! Millennials of the world unite! — it’s important to remember the barriers to a universal identity. The Internet diminishes the importance of geographic proximity and increases the importance of affinity, but the global student identity still raises big questions about community; should students from Marburg identify first as Germans, students or something else?

This newfound freedom to choose one’s associations may both haunt and liberate millennials as the generation stumbles its way forward into the tech-roots era.

If this year’s election is anything like 2008′s, by the time the polls close on Tuesday night more than 120 million Americans will have cast a ballot this cycle. But not all of those votes will count. Between two and three million will never even be counted, mostly because they’ve been “spoiled.” Another two and a half million would-be voters will have had their registrations rejected; another half million registered voters will have been purged — wrongly — from the rolls; and close to that number will have been turned away from the polls when they tried to vote, in most cases because they lacked an acceptable form of ID. Add it all up, and between five and six million American citizens will have been denied the right to vote.

The disenfranchised millions won’t be a random sample of Americans — they’ll overwhelmingly be poor and minority voters. And as investigative reporter Greg Palast explains in his latest book, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps,” they will have been taken out of the game thanks to a coordinated campaign devised by the likes of Karl Rove and funded by America’s super rich — people like the Koch brothers, hedge fund titan Paul Singer, and Texan corporate raider Harold Simmons, among others — to keep voters, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, from the polls.

Drawing on Palast’s reporting for Rolling Stone and the BBC, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” lays out the nine main tricks these guys use to keep down the vote, including “purging” (removing citizens from voter rolls by, say, identifying them, wrongly, as undocumented, legally insane, or felons), to “spoiling” (not counting cast ballots because the intent of the voter could not be determined; the chances that your ballot will be spoiled are many times higher if you are black or Native American), improperly rejecting mail-in ballots, and what Palast calls “prestidigitizing” (“vanishing” votes via electronic voting machines; again, much more common in minority precincts).

Greg Palast is a journalistic anachronism. The former corporate fraud investigator pours over raw data with his assistant, “Ms. Badpenny,” and a scrappy team spanning five continents. He goes undercover and stakes out the dwellings of ne’er-do-wells. He sports a grey Fedora — a muckraking gonzo journalist trying to fit in to the 24-hour news cycle. Palast’s main gig is reporting for BBC Television’s Newsnight. He’s best known in the States for exposing Florida’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s purge of tens of thousands of legal voters back in 2000. Last week, he broke a story exposing how Mitt Romney made some $15 million on the General Motors bailout. He recently chatted with Salon at his office in New York’s East Village.

As student debt soars, adjuncts get bullied, and the value of a diploma plummets, a group of students that have formed the Free University of New York are standing up for students by sitting down and learning, in public.

The “Free U” kicked off it’s public seminars on May Day, when students at City University of New York wanted to participate in Occupy’s general strike, and their professors wanted to support them, leading to a compromise — holding the classes outside. While the Free U regularly holds organizing meetings, it held its first “Free University Week” from September 18-23 with over one hundred free classes in Madison Square Park each afternoon as a follow-up to Occupy’s one-year anniversary demonstrations on September 17.

* * *

Clusters of scholars — mostly grad-school types with a smattering of the elderly — dotted the park on a cloudless Wednesday afternoon, with small signs propped up against trees to identify classes.

Rob Robinson, a homelessness activist and co-founder of Take Back the Land, beckoned wandering scholars to the flagpole for his seminar on “Transforming Land Relationships.” He began with a quote from Peter Marcuse, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and offspring of the New Left’s venerated Herbert Marcuse: “Occupy to de-commodify.”

The esoteric phrase turned out to be symbolic of the afternoon, for two reasons. First, the Free U Week was intimately connected to Occupy. Most of the organizers — mainly graduate students from CUNY, NYU, Columbia, and The New School — were self-identified Occupiers. Most attendees had been referred by an Occupier. And the Free U was advertised as a (perhaps slightly back-handed) compliment to the “S17” anniversary protests, with the aim to “get out of one-day actions…and multiply with larger sections of the city than may come out to OWS gatherings,” according to an email by Zoltán Gluck, a Free U organizer.

Second, the phrase needed explaining. While some Lefties commit themselves to throwing their body at the machine, these academic activists consider education a form of direct action, and that the problems created by global financial capitalism demand some hunkering down in the library before any corporal propelling is useful.

Robinson, a middle-aged African-American man who had spent several years sleeping on cardboard, tempered the volume of his voice as he elaborated, “Housing and land as commodities doesn’t work for poor people.” Which is why, according to Robinson, Take Back the Land “occupies” the homes of residents like Catherine Lennon of Rochester, New York, to provide defense against evictions by big banks. In Lennon’s case, the activists moved Lennon back into her home after the initial eviction, and resolved to do so ad infinitum. This presented a real challenge to institutional power, and according to Robinson, threatened to bankrupt the city police departments if the government and bank did not negotiate.

As Robinson continued to “teach,” it became easier to understand how the Free U was attempting to transform education itself (not just the university structure) by dissolving the bifurcation of theory and practice. “You don’t fight single issues, you fight structures,” Robinson said. As Occupy begins to pull at stringy weeds like housing and the prison system, this focus on praxis (theory and practice informing one another) may allow the movement to grab closer to the roots.

* * *

The growing sense among Occupiers that issues need to be untangled before hacked at is perhaps felt the strongest in campaigns against debt.

I wiggled into the ring of students huddled near the Civil War statue to get into earshot of Nick Mirzoeff, the NYU professor of Culture and Media and quotidian Occupy blogger, who was delivering the “Five Theses on Debt” as part of a workshop series from the Occupy-spawned group Strike Debt. Mirzoeff facilitated the discussion that explored the connections between the justice department, the government, and Wall Street that results in the “debt prison system.”

Sonya Kilgo, an African-American church activist and nonprofit laborer, leaned over to discharge her exasperation into my ear, “People are talking, but nothing’s being done! What is the actual plan?” Kilgo had dropped in on the debt debate as a passerby, but the sedentary nature of the seminar got her steaming. She burst out, “We knew what had to be done to get what we needed,” referring to her involvement in the civil rights movement as a young girl. “We fought for our rights. We didn’t sit down. Are you just going to sit around?”

The students responded to Kilgo’s abrasive enthusiasm with several action items. One suggested bringing back the concept of “Jubilee,” debt forgiveness every twenty-five years, “since everything in the Bible is true” (to which Kilgo chanted, “That’s right!”). Others brought up debt refusal campaigns, and even buying student debt at pennies on the dollar and forgiving it as a way to disgrace hounding debt collectors.  A young woman who had shared her personal student debt story of an accumulated $200,000 stood up, “One of the most powerful things we can do is what we did today, which is helping people get over the shame of debt.”

Sonya hummed a vehement “mmm hmm” in support of the young debtor, and after class prophesized, “If they continue having small meetings like this…they’ll start generating the passion of the people.”

The pow wow on debt, particularly the redefinition of debt responsibility, revealed some of the Free U’s less academic goals — like creating an educational space that is safe for everyone, intentionally “anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and anti-authoritarian” as it’s written in the Free University’s principles. This tenet has been central to many of Occupy’s offshoot initiatives, and it may help the Free U survive where its earlier iteration had failed in the late 1960s, due to the New Left’s characteristic splits between sexes and races.

The transition from debtor-guilt to debtor-indignation highlights another of the Free U’s prefigurative goals: to break from the valuations of society’s big institutions, and ultimately build student power. In this vein, Free U organizers took notes last week from CLASSE’s Philippe Lapointe, who negotiated with Quebec’s government during the province’s longest-ever student strike (that ended five weeks ago).

The tension in the CUNY system over the Pathways program, which alters the way curricula are delivered to undergraduates, makes the Free U’s power-building aims particularly poignant. In mid-September, administrators at Queensborough Community College responded harshly to the English Department’s rejection of a Pathways proposal to cut English composition course hours. The administration cancelled all composition courses, questioned all full-time faculty reappointments, and sent non-reappointment letters to all adjuncts.

When debt class let out, the Free U held a “general assembly” where it discussed organizing strategy. The Queensborough case was one of many reasons that “Student Unionism” was a popular topic.

* * *

In its very concept, the Free U exposes the fantasy of the traditional university in the modern day — a financial sinkhole for students and a precarious employer for faculty.

It’s an oddity in modern politics. A multitude of mainstream initiatives belie a sentiment that the traditional university is kaput, including programs like the UN-affiliated tuition-free University of the People and the Gates Foundation-funded video-based Kahn Academy. For-profits have even found space for arbitrage. I graduated from college in the spring, but am currently enrolled in “Modern American Poetry” thanks to Coursera, one of these for-profit educational enterprises that provide online classrooms for partnering schools.

With the blaring signals from the for-profit and non-profit sectors that lecture-hall learning is obsolete, experiments like the Free University of New York are helping students define the new education paradigm. Even if the manifestation is as low-tech as cross-legged chats on the grass, students are voicing what principles they want in their education, and are declaring that, if need be, they can learn on their own.

This article was re-posted on Alternet.org here: http://www.alternet.org/if-you-wont-teach-us-well-do-it-ourselves-free-university-new-york?fb_action_ids=1714552018811&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

The stink of faux-empowerment politics was pungent at the Democratic National Convention. Following the signs for the “Youth Caucus” through the bowels of the Charlotte Convention Center, I found my way to the cavernous “Ballroom C.” For the un-credentialed convention-goers like me, the Democrats had provided daily caucuses for key constituencies, like LGBT, veterans, and youth.

Originally posted at The Nation’s “Extra Credit” Student blog: http://www.thenation.com/blog/170207/being-young-dnc#

As my eyes adjusted, I noted a paucity of available seating, and of youth. I scurried up front to fill an empty seat next to some suited thirty-somethings. “These are reserved,” a bloated face scrunched in my direction.  Meanwhile, a middle-aged statesman provoked a resounding “awwww” by describing how counselors told kids in his community, “Maybe college isn’t for you.” A middle-aged woman scolded the crowd, “As a college student…you have to stand before them [haters, presumably] and say Barack Obama will be re-elected!” And a middle-aged Organizing For America director elucidated just how much David Axelrod cares about his children.

Finally, the kids got to speak. Rod Snyder, the early-thirties President of Young Democrats for America and Rob Abraham, a mid-twenties Youth Vote director for OFA, delivered related messages: it’s awfully important for youth to vote. At that point, Dr. Jill Biden — teacher, mother, and grandmother — unexpectedly entered to speak to the children, derailing the meeting for nearly half an hour, and displacing the subsequent youth speakers scheduled.

As I exited the hall, I spotted a dozen or so youth delegates, of the “644 under 36” that the convention commonly boasted. Martin Cliff, a high school senior from Minnesota, shared his DNC experience. “I think at the high levels, there’s a lot of talk about youth, which is excellent. But once you get down to the community level, I hear from lot of other youth delegates say there’s not much respect for youth in the party.” Calling it “ageism” he described how “adults use us more as a tool, for a picture with a politician…not because I have good ideas.”

Some junior delegates were far more ticked off than Cliff.

“I have left the party today, for Occupy!” Through the darkness at Marshall Park, I made out the crisp gray suit and wavy blonde hair of Daniel McKenzie, a certified youth delegate from Minnesota who had stumbled upon the Occupy DNC encampment after storming out of the convention.
Despite, well, many things, the Occupiers generally welcomed McKenzie as he explained the cause of his defection. According to McKenzie, the President had flouted procedure to insert God back into the party’s platform, ignoring “obvious dissent” in the voice vote. After attempting to find a parliamentarian and exact recourse, he realized “it was impossible,” and departed.

The next morning, I sloughed off my backpack and took a seat at the “Youth Panel,” which was not technically part of the convention but organized by the Young Democrats for America. The panel included Anne Johnson, Director of Campus Progress, former Congressman Patrick Murphy (who, at 38, conceded that he was more of an “advisor” to youth), and Lee Storrow, a twenty-three year old UNC graduate who serves on the Chapel Hill City Council.

To my great refreshment, the panel spoke with substance. Murphy explained that he got into politics as a young veteran in order to speak out against the Iraq War, “I felt like my generation needed a voice.” Storrow, who represents the large but transient student population in his district, echoed the sentiment. Storrow went on to describe the arduous process of convincing fellow councilmen to be future-oriented, fondly relating a refrain of a colleague during a decision to construct an expensive light-rail transit system for Chapel Hill: “We’re not building this for me. We’re building this for Lee.”

Storrow also pondered what differentiates Millennials politically. He discussed a controversial incident when Occupiers claimed a vacant building in Chapel Hill, and were forced out by police bearing assault rifles. “We have to have a different standard for people who are engaging with civil disobedience,” said Storrow of our generation, who compelled the council to send a formal apology for the inappropriate use of force.

Finally, Johnson refuted the claim made by older folks that youth don’t care about politics. “Maybe young people don’t care about what you’re talking about,” she said, emphasizing the need to demonstrate to young people that electoral participation is a useful way to contend for power. In contrast with the lectures at the “caucus,” Johnson’s claims were grounded in the actual experience of young people. In fact, the youth delegate Cliff had told me that his “passion lies in community-based change” since politics “is too influenced by money.” And don’t forget, we did grow up with the 2000 debacle as a model of an American election.

No doubt, the Democrats have policies that help us out, from capping student loans at 10 percent of income to extending healthcare coverage under our parents’ plans until we’re 26.  But it’s still shameful to exploit youth participation without sharing power. And it’s bad for policy. This is true for education policy when politicians ask teachers for feedback on proposals and then disregard them in due course. It’s true for labor, immigration, religious communities, and any group that has the irreplaceable knowledge of living their lives. If the Democrats are serious about helping youth, then they can’t just listen because it’s a nice thing to do and it looks good, but because young people can contribute in invaluable ways.

“Occupy the Democratic National Convention” was marked by frustration — an understandable feeling from the small and wearied band, protesting under conditions in which dissent was highly susceptible to ridicule.

There were less than a hundred Occupiers at the Marshall Park encampment, and sometimes night marches had as few as fifty activists. While Hurricane Isaac had prevented many from coming, a “miscommunication” about transportation had further thinned the numbers.

Activists who took buses from New York to the Republican National Convention in Tampa were under the impression that they would go to Charlotte afterwards. However, the transportation organizer, a polarizing Wall Street Occupier named Aaron Black, had apparently arranged for the buses to only go to the RNC (and had said on CNN that a lot of people in Occupy were not interested in protesting Obama). A group of about fifty Occupiers convinced the bus driver to drop them off in Charlotte, with no ride home.

At Marshall Park, I helped set up a tarp for a clumsy half-hour using using wobbly plastic poles, in order to shield the donated food from a mid-day downpour.

A New York Occupier who was helping to organize the ad-hoc tent burst out, “Wasn’t anyone here at Zuccotti?” Another Occupier was upset that a march they had planned was cancelled, and cried, “This is bullshit, Occupy is dead,” and stormed off.

Further emphasizing how much the DNC encampment was not the romanticized Occupy Wall Street encampment, Marshall Park was quite far from the heart of the city, and was separated from it by barricades.

For me, circumventing the labyrinth of metal gates set up by police meant an inconvenient fifteen-minute walk from the Charlotte Convention Center. But some Occupiers claimed that the police prevented their escape from their metal parameters altogether — saying I only got through because I didn’t “look like a protester.”

Despite some gloomy circumstances, the protesters united around protests.

The demonstrations mostly varied on “money out of politics” themes, with some well-researched speeches and creative banners against targets like Duke Energy’s CEO, Jim Rogers, who allegedly funds the Democratic Party ­for political gain. Occupiers also held creative night marches, like a burning of the presidential oath to highlight Obama’s broken promises.

However, the city’s preparation, and the Right’s missionaries, made the whole thing feel a bit staged.

When two activists in Bank of America hazmat suits stopped to give a speech about Duke Energy, the police surrounded them, convention-goers and Charlotteans ogled at them, and one very angry right-winger shouted at them through a megaphone. “You ­know what your problem is? You smoke too much dope!­­”

The police performance was astounding. Both Charlotte and Tampa had received $50 million from the federal government to secure the conventions. Charlotte’s finest certainly controlled the protests (searching bags and funneling activists with bicycles) and monitored the encampment (with at least one poorly disguised undercover officer). But the city seemed determine to spend the whole grant, and protected areas that were completely un-Occupied.

At a night march on Thursday of the convention, I walked four city blocks away from the protesters — actually around the corner and out of view of the 50-person demonstration — and still found cops lining the streets.

The gross number imbalance caused some Occupiers to respond poorly. When blocked from going down a particular street (although we were allowed in another direction), one young white male Occupier distracted the march for twenty minutes yelling at a baton-bearing cop, “Be a man! Put down your stick! C’mon, be a man!” Especially since Occupy tends to view masculine aggression as a form of domination and oppression, this showdown — which attracted some fifteen cameras — felt silly, if not appalling.

Later that night, the movement that so earnestly hopes to affect the masses, reverted to high school-style taunting when confronted with some Charlottean jocks. After a thoughtful speech about America’s foreign policy, a spectator called out “How about them Cowboys?” In response, Occupiers droned, “All I think about is sports,” and walked away as sidelined meatheads called after them “You guys are losers!”

As Occupy celebrates its one-year, this last episode was not too inspiring.

It’s one thing to be disappointed that the projected thousands didn’t turn out, like Occupier John Murdoch said, as it appeared in The New York Times, “Are we effective at this point? No, we’re outnumbered and easily mocked.”

But Occupy has dealt with ridicule, and it’s the internal disintegration in Charlotte was a bit troubling.

Asking if anyone had been at Zuccotti — isn’t that establishing a steep hierarchy in a horizontal movement? A young white guy challenging a cop on manliness, demanding all of the attention in the protest — doesn’t that fail on many levels of Occupy’s analysis of identity-based oppression and prefigurative politics?

Occupy has never had an easy environment, but at the DNC it eroded the activists’ camp to near crumbling. For Occupy to be effective in its second year, no matter what form it takes, it will need to show more internal fortitude than at the DNC. And if protest is going to be theater, then Occupiers need to figure out how they can direct the play.

While the red square was still pinned to shirts in near ubiquity, the protesters varied widely on other apparel choices. Many donned “votez” pins, and held signs saying “Je Vote Pour___” with political parties like QS (Québec Solidaire) and PQ (Parti Quebecois) or phrases like “I vote with my heart,” scribbled in the blank with marker — in anticipation of the upcoming September 4^th election.

Others donned all black and tore off any sign of a politician the march passed. If the sign was of the hated incumbent Liberal premier Jean Charest, it would likely be splattered with red paint and stomped on as well. The CLASSE march leaders would sometimes stop to let the black bloc conduct their political sacrilege. The marching congregation were likely to cheer during these ceremonies in support.

As for the passersby, a few Montrealers waved red flags from windows, and a bus driver honked and smiled. Others were capitalizing on the gathering, selling red t-shirts with Law 78 (the anti-assembly law condemned by the UN) circled and crossed out.

The march ended with several speakers who emphasized the continuing struggle, taking organizing into workplaces (amplified by a common protest refrain of the student-borne social movement,“Workers, students, same struggle!”). They also stressed an action on October 4 against neoliberalism. But without the movement’s charismatic spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Debois (who resigned last week), people’s attentions tended to wander to the many creative props used to protest. The crowd trickled out as the presentations ended.

It was a great march by most standards, but the settling realization that these monthly marches may be the (overt) remnants of Quebec’s longest running student-strike, at least for the coming fall semester, made the demonstration glumly mundane. Mundane, at least, for Montreal.

UQAM is often a trendsetter, because, as UQAM Law student and CLASSE (student union) committee member Emilie Joly describes it, the school is “not too radical or too wimpish.” Six of the seven faculties at UQAM have been on strike (all but Business), and the Law and Political Science met on Monday evening to vote on whether to continue the strike. With the election looming like a watchful parent, UQAM Law and Political Science students chose the neatness of the ballot box over the mess of the streets.

Students at UQAM wait in line for the General Assembly.

Just under six hundred students assembled to represent the nearly 2200 students in the faculty. The meeting lasted two and half hours, mostly spent hearing comments in the “plenary” period, during which participants shared opinions not necessarily connected to a specific proposal. With a whole summer of action and reflection, students had much to say.

Students shouted about personal hardships: You told us you would try to save the semester and we would have access to bar (law) school. When is your strike ending, because I want to go back to school! (many schools have cut financial aid to students for the shortened fall semester).

Others discussed strategy: It’s going to be way harder to go back on strike! Once we start the semester, we’re not going to have time to mobilize! While candidates are campaigning, we can put pressure on all parties at once.

Many stressed the symbolic importance of the moment: Remember that this student movement is the biggest in Quebecois history. I put two years of my life into this movement, and we’ve had a quarter of a million people at a demo! If we fold now, it will look like we’re scared of Law 12 (threatens arrest for blocking access to public institutions). If we go back to school, we cannot use the strike again in the future to win political victories.

But the debate was grounded in worldview as much as strategy, and for some, returning to class meant shutting the curtains on a world they hoped to live in, and turning back to the four dark walls of this one. One female law student said, “We’ve seen what happens with the elections. Charest [Quebec’s current Liberal Party Premier], with the help of money, gets elected every time. We’ve created this space of direct democracy that’s so different than their representative democracy, and if we end the strike than we lose that space.”*

While the comments in plenary and on proposals seemed to flow with inspiration, the “call to question” for the vote came abruptly. “I don’t think it’s going to pass.” Joly repeated anxiously as students held up pink slips of paper.

Vote for continuing the strike: 240 pro, 331 against, 22 abstain.

Yips and yells exploded in the back of the room (the more radical students were sitting front and center), silenced quickly by the facilitator. “I’m going out for a depressing smoke,” the student to my right said. The student next to him burst into tears.

Does it happen so easily? UQAM, One of the beasts of Montreal, emboldening students across the Americas to join its pack, put to sleep by a wave of pink papers? To me, the meeting displayed far more than the movement’s carcass.

Voting slips tossed on a table after the General Assembly.

“We.” Several speakers emphasized that “we need to talk about what we believe,” saying that it’s not through an election that they are going to resolve their issues. Whether the divide is generational, ideological, or identification-based (“students” of the world unite!), there was a feeling that the students were demonstrably different than those in power, and they did not need their institutions to make decisions.

One important way students showed their independence from status quo political power was the savvy with which students conducted themselves in the GA. Students called for amendment, made proposals, called out points of order, and unanimously condemned anyone who broke with the rules of conduct (which are similar to Robert’s Rules of Order used in many unions). In one instance, Emilie Joly sat down after a rousing speech and said “I spoke too early,” explaining the strategy of setting the tone at the beginning of a session or waiting until the end to leave a lasting impression.

The students were self conscious of their prefigurative politics, which came out in the discussion around the value of returning to school. Since the winter semester was suspended for twenty-five schools, the administrations have proposed finishing the winter semester in five weeks, and then condensing the fall semester to thirteen weeks. A pro-strike Law student argued against a consumer attitude towards education. “We shouldn’t go back to school in this context. You’re just going to be paying for your diploma.”

In denying the value of a crash course semester, students also acknowledged what they had gained in the experience of the strike. Joly rebuffed a students complaint about his personal losses from the movement, “It’s not a loss. Whether we save the semester or not we’ve learned incredibly during this time in ways we can’t quantify.” If the goal of Political Science and Law education is to prepare future political leaders that understand a legal code, then the strike, especially these General Assemblies, is a hell of a field trip.

While other universities will vote this week, and perhaps if the Parti Quebecois wins the election (currently leading) then the promised summit on education will be fruitful. But regardless of the election, students have learned to redefine and create value outside of the given institutions, both university and parliament.

Not only are the students capable of self-governance, but they like it. After Joly when she voted for a time extension proposal, a student teased her that she just missed everyone and wanted to stay all night. Joly smiled, “I brought my sleeping bag!”

*All quotes translated from Quebecois.

Students cast votes at the CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal on Friday

Early in the week, the CÉGEPs were coming out split, initially with two CÉGEPs —de Saint-Laurent and du Vieux-Montréal — voting to continue strike, and two opting to end the strike. But by Thursday, a half dozen other junior colleges decided to return to school and it was clear the tide had changed. CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal had voted on Monday to continue the strike by a narrow vote of 879 to 861, and after the loss of other CÉGEPs’ support, students petitioned for a re-vote on Friday, a process that also occurred at CÉGEP de Saint-Laurent.

On Friday, I visited both campuses. At CÉGEP de Saint-Laurent, a small cluster of students who had traveled from Ontario for what they expected to be an enforcement of a strike (to block students from returning to classes) agitated meekly on the school’s lawn.

Students protest outside of CÉGEP de Saint-Laurent on Friday

At CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal, I witnessed the General Assembly in the school’s gymnasium from the stands, where young people gathered as spectators for the pivotal meeting. While I was kicked out (they voted no media, and while it’s not my primary identification, one has to respect the GA) long before the near six hours of deliberation would yield the decision to end the strike, it was obvious that the mood of the assembly was sullen.

A student with the “carré rouge” pinned to his backpack looks out over the General Assembly at CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal

The junior college du Vieux-Montréal has symbolic significance, known as one of the most radical campuses in North America. In February this year, students barricaded themselves on the front steps of the building and vandalized the inside to protest tuition hikes, leading to thirty-seven arrests. Each room in the CÉGEP is “historic” for radical student movements as one student told me.

The head of Jean Charest sits in the historic student association room at the radical CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal

While students chose to relent, it’s important to understand the pressure they were facing from administrations. At some schools, administrations threatened arrest and failing grades for all students who voted to continue striking, citing Montreal’s latest repressive statute, Law 12, which imposes heavy punishment for hindering access to any public institution. Schools also sent emails to students telling them to return to class without informing student associations. At CÉGEP de Lionel-Groulx, eleven teachers were threatened with firings for publishing an open letter condemning violence against students at the college.

It’s a discouraging week, but many remain hopeful and turn their attention towards the action on the 22^nd (the anniversary demonstration), the increasing support from students outside the province and country, and holding parties accountable (or preparing for resuming the strike later in the semester).

But more than anything, students discussed the upcoming election. Of the five parties running, only two — Option Nationale and Québec Solidaire — are clearly against rising tuitions. For now, Parti Quebecois is leading, which would oust the hated Jean Charest and his Liberal Party, but only promises a temporary tuition freeze and a vague renegotiation process with students. Furthermore, many students resent the PQ for its opportunism, particularly the party’s leader Pauline Marois’ “shrinking” red square (the party originally endorsed the student strike and its symbol of the red square, but as it changed its position, Marois ditched the pinned red patch). Others are disconcerted by the rise of Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a strongly right wing party. Because of Quebec’s parliamentary system, the projected election results would mean a PQ minority government, which has very limited power.

American students continue to look towards Quebec, now particularly for how it will deal with an election where votes can be viewed as strategic, ideological, or irrelevant. The rise of students emphatically professing positions like not voting to delegitimate the electoral system may change the discourse on American youth voting. But more likely, American students will be looking to see if Montreal students have really built power, so that they can muster up force if the seated party does not uphold its promises.