The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Olivia Wood, City College of New York

 

At 9:00 in the morning on April 25, 2024, we gathered in the park across the street from my workplace, City College of New York. When the lead organizers gave the word, we crossed the street and passed under the archways and through the gates, heading toward the quad. The mission for everyone with a tent was to set it up as quickly as possible, to claim the ground. I sat on a stone bench and continued coloring in the sign I’d failed to finish the night before.

City College is just one of the City University of New York (CUNY)’s 25 campuses. Students, faculty, and staff from all over the university came together at my campus to form a collective Gaza Solidarity Encampment, twenty blocks up along Amsterdam Avenue from our comrades at Columbia. We were nearly seven months into the genocide, seven months into mobilizing to stop the bombings in Gaza and stop the U.S. military from funding it. While it had become very difficult for community allies to enter the Columbia campus, due to the security checkpoints at every open entrance, our campus, and our encampment, remained open to members of the public until its final day. Students from other schools visited, members of other labor unions and tenant unions visited, family members and friends visited, and so did neighbors from the surrounding area.

Just as the encampment organizers at Columbia had painted a banner in homage to the banners of the Columbia occupiers of 1968, organizers at CUNY recreated a banner from the City College occupation of 1969. The original version read “Support the Five Demands – Viva Harlem U,” referring to the five demands for racial equity at City College and the college’s rechristening as “Harlem University” by the student organizers on the grounds that a university in Harlem should serve the people of Harlem. The 2024 version read “Support the Five Demands — Viva Palestina.” The new five demands were: Divest, Boycott, Solidarity, Demilitarize, and a People’s CUNY (CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment Core Organizing Team, 2024).

As soon as the tents were up, they raised the banner and took some photos for the newly-launched Instagram account. I cried.

It’s difficult to describe what the encampment felt like. I think to do it justice, I’ll have to do it twice.

One true version: It was a miracle, a paradise of community, where the austerity we are all so familiar with at CUNY was replaced with abundance. I met more colleagues in those six days than I have in two years working at City College. I met fellow English professors from other CUNY schools that I’d only known through email. I chatted with my own former students, and with students from other CUNY colleges. Everyone ate for free, three meals per day. All of my union friends were suddenly coming uptown, instead of me having to travel downtown or to Brooklyn to see them. One of my comrades from Left Voice, the socialist group I am a part of, temporarily moved into my apartment, to reduce her own commute to and from camp. We had a medical tent and a community library. People read poetry. Two of my comrades and I gave a teach-in about the labor movement. The weather was almost uniformly beautiful. Part of my heart may live there forever.

Another, equally true version: It was an incredibly precarious political bubble, and every moment of peace and serenity was overshadowed by the knowledge that this would come to an end, and that it was unlikely to end well. The federal government was against us, the state government was against us, the city government was against us, and so was the university. Each one is resolutely committed to support for the state of Israel — both its existence and its destruction of Gaza. CUNY was on spring break, and most of us predicted the university would allow us to remain up until classes were due to begin again, and then the repression would start. While the college didn’t threaten suspensions, and campus security officers kept their distance after the first day, the college was tightening its grasp around us in other ways, like restricting bathroom access, locking some of the gates, and erecting temporary fencing around the other entrances to campus. In times of low political activity, political and strategic disagreements are less urgent, more theoretical; but this was a time of acute class struggle, and disagreements both big and small were being discussed — with stakes that everyone knew could impact the whole outcome of our encampment. Over the course of those days, probably at least ten of my friends and comrades referenced the quote commonly attributed to Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” One comrade remarked that Lenin never mentioned how those weeks include decades of meetings. Meetings with rank-and-file groups within your union; meetings with your writing program coworkers; meetings with your political organization; planning meetings for the other meetings; debrief meetings; meetings to talk about how actually there should be more, bigger meetings (mass assemblies), because really all of these decisions should be made by everyone and not a small group of unelected organizers; meetings, meetings, meetings. All while still having to do my responsibilities for my actual job.

Within my union group, CUNY On Strike, and in personal conversations throughout the encampment, we were constantly engaged in debates: What was the best way to organize decision-making at camp? How should we engage in the various political disagreements within the space? How could we grow the movement, so we could be at maximum strength for the inevitable repression, whenever it came? How could we get PSC-CUNY, the union representing faculty, graduate assistants, and many staff titles at CUNY, to support the encampment? Our union is famously and bitterly divided on issues relating to Palestine, and the executive council strongly prefers that the union not take an official position — in part out of fear of how Democratic Party “allies” in city council and the state legislature might react.

My union’s contract expired in February 2023; in November 2023, galvanized by pro-Palestine organizing against the genocide and by frustration at the lack of progress in contract negotiations, the CUNY On Strike campaign was formed, founded on the entwined ideas that a strike is necessary to win the kind of contract we deserve and that we need a radical new form of unionism at CUNY, of collective decision-making and rank-and-file power, in order to make that happen (CUNY On Strike Campaign, 2024).

Within CUNY On Strike, we’d been discussing for months the idea of community assemblies as spaces for political discussion and collective decision-making on our campuses, including hosting a teach-in with a participant in the months-long student strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 (Vergara and Left Voice, 2024). Some people were more persuaded of the tactic than others, with the main hesitation being that assemblies felt abstract and opaque and that it would be difficult to get people to actually come, which would defeat the purpose of having them. But the encampment changed all of that. There’s no framework for how university workers should respond when the biggest student movement in decades is on your doorstep. What do we do? was the question everyone was asking. And so we had to answer it — and for maximum participation, buy-in, and effectiveness, we needed to decide ourselves, collectively, through group discussion.

On Saturday, the third day of the encampment, CUNY workers and students met on the steps leading away from the encampment in a mini-assembly to discuss what to do. We discussed at length and then ultimately voted to call for a union-wide assembly Monday evening, invite the union officials specifically, and use that opportunity to both make the case for why the union leadership should officially support the encampment, and to discuss with a wider group what to do on Tuesday (the last day before classes were due to resume) and on Wednesday (May 1, International Workers Day, and our first day back from spring break).

Monday evening. Someone had arranged for dozens of folding chairs to be delivered to camp for the assembly. CUNY On Strike members had sent so many emails promoting the assembly that our email account was prohibited from sending more, but we didn’t know how many people would turn up. The answer turned out to be several hundred PSC members, students, and community allies. Our designated facilitator asked the PSC members to sit or stand on one side of him so that distinguishing the votes of union members would be easier, and then we began.

 

[Please use landscape mode if viewing on your phone. Click the link to watch video.]

 

First, student organizers of the encampment spoke. Then, as my comrade and I reported in Left Voice (Hoff and Wood, 2024) at the time:

“Over the next hour, dozens of PSC members stood up to express their support for the five demands, the importance of bringing labor unions into the struggle, building for May Day, and heeding the call of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions to build a national strike for Palestine. Several speakers also called upon the union leadership to endorse the encampment and to mobilize the entire 30,000 members of the union to organize pickets to defend the students. 

Afterwards, PSC members voted unanimously to support the five demands and to call on the PSC to do the same. As hand after hand was raised in support of this first and important vote the crowd erupted into cheers and chants of “disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!” echoed through the campus.”

 

[Please use landscape mode if viewing on your phone. Click the link to watch video.]

 

We voted on a number of other measures as well, including to organize “pickets to protect” the encampment on the following day, Tuesday, when we anticipated the university would attempt to end the encampment, and to call on the PSC as an organization to officially endorse the five demands and hold assemblies in each union chapter to discuss them.

The final proposal, which generated the most debate, was to organize a sick-out for Wednesday, the first day that most of us were due to return to work after spring break. After dozens of interventions, we voted that we would begin sick-out organizing immediately, and that the sick-out would happen if and only if at least 250 people who had job responsibilities scheduled for Wednesday pledged to participate. Speakers were directly inspired by our colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, who had organized a sick-out the week before after police and state troopers brutalized and arrested their own community members (Wood, 2024).

It’s important to understand that public sector strikes are illegal in New York State, as are other job actions like sick-outs and work-to-rule actions. Technically, it’s even illegal to advocate for one, although that provision is usually only applied to unions and not individuals. We had just voted to break the law, if the signature threshold was reached. If the state chose to prosecute, individuals who were found to be participating could be fined two days’ pay, with no legal protections against workplace discipline, potentially including being fired.

And so the next 24 hours were to be spent trying to reach the threshold. One problem was that while City College faculty and staff had received vague emails about the encampment, many people at other campuses had no idea it was even happening — or knew very little about it. Others knew, but were hesitant about breaking the no-strike law. The executive council of our union released a statement (Davis, 2024) denouncing the sick-out and discouraging union members from participating, in an attempt to contain and demobilize the action — two techniques that are common union leadership responses to rank-and-file organizing (Wright, 2023).

On Tuesday, April 30 — as expected — everything changed. But it changed in ways we did not expect.

When I think back to Tuesday, April 30, the thing I remember most vividly is the sinking feeling in my chest as a union comrade rapidly texted his legal name and birth date to our group chat.

And then the same feeling again, some time later — from someone else: Shutting off phone. See you soon comrades.

These are the texts you receive when the police are advancing and your friends expect that they’re about to be arrested.

Earlier in the day, encampment organizers were told that they must dismantle the encampment and vacate the quad before the start of classes on Wednesday morning. We anticipated an early morning raid, like what had just happened at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at around 6:00 am that same day. Many members of our CUNY community who had not previously been sleeping at camp went home to get overnight supplies, ready to fortify the encampment for the morning. Others, who had made a different personal risk assessment, stayed for the afternoon, intending to leave before the deadline.

But that’s not what happened. Campus security began closing off the entrances to campus in the early evening, allegedly allowing people out but not in. Calls for help went out through social media and networks of group chats. Students, faculty, staff, loved ones, and community supporters flocked to campus.

I wasn’t on campus that day — exhausted from the previous five days of intensive organizing, I took the day off from being at camp, to rest and catch up on computer-based tasks. I planned to return to camp early Wednesday morning, bring coffee to the graveyard security shift, and be present for the anticipated raid.

The early stages of the campus security and NYPD intervention against our encampment happened concurrently with the police invasion of Columbia and the eviction and arrest of the occupiers at Hind’s Hall. It was hard to process. It was hard to believe what I was seeing on social media. Hundreds of cops outside my work, at the very gates I used to enter campus, just yards away from where I eat my lunch whenever the weather’s nice.

In our bedroom, my partner was listening to WKCR, the Columbia student radio station. In our living room, I was watching the Instagram livestream of the City College student newspaper, The Campus, and coordinating with other CUNY On Strike members. Most of us were on our way to campus. Some of us, like me, were staying at home and online, as we attempted to prepare for what was clearly about to happen.

From afar, it was difficult to know what was going on. Most of the various group chats that had sprung up around encampment support were filled with confused people, trying to coordinate with one another. Some people were trying to find ways to access campus, while others were on campus trying to find ways to escape without being harassed or arrested. At some point, campus security started pepper spraying people. At some point, the NYPD outside of campus began arresting supporters who had gathered on the street. Some journalists in the area were posting photos and videos to Twitter when they could. As more cops arrived, the streets and sidewalks became more crowded, and arrests and police brutality began, we received fewer and fewer chat updates as our friends were focused on keeping themselves and others safe.

Reported injuries included burns from pepper spray, broken bones, concussions, bruises, and swelling (CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment, 2024). I heard rumors that people were trampled, lost shoes, lost hearing aids.

All in all, about 175 arrests (Niarchos, 2024).

Right as the NYPD was brutalizing our students and colleagues, the pledge passed the threshold. The sick-out was on (CUNY On Strike Campaign, 2024).

In my memory, the arrests were over by maybe 1am or so, and I went to bed at maybe 2:30.

Three hours later, I was awake again.

Soon after, a text from one of our arrested comrades: he was out, thrilled to learn the sick-out was happening, and feeling good. “I don’t even give a fuck about being arrested,” he said, “I care about the first ever PSC job action and that it’s for Palestine!”

But some people were not released that morning (Pinto, 2024). Some were held for another 48 hours awaiting arraignment, where they were met with felony charges, only some of which have been dropped at the time of this writing. In contrast, those arrested in relation to the Columbia building occupation were charged only with misdemeanors. As of June 22, when I’m writing this, some of those people have had their charges dropped, others have been offered ACDs (a deal in which the charges will be dropped as long as you stay out of legal trouble for six months), and others are still facing charges.

The days following April 30 were filled with more debates: to what extent should CUNY activists focus on condemning and fighting back against the repression? Some argued that focusing on the arrests took attention away from Palestine and the demands to divest. Another sector of faculty and students hadn’t been very involved in the encampment and/or didn’t want to take a public position on Palestine but were furious about the arrests and police brutality. Others (I am among this group) argued that these fights are part of the same struggle, not an either/or choice, and that we must defend the movement in order for the movement to continue and expand.

It became clear that while “demilitarize” (which includes a demand for cops off campus) and “solidarity” (with both Palestinians and those facing punishment from the university for speaking out about Palestine) were two of the encampment’s Five Demands, some activists felt divestment was the “real” demand that needed to be prioritized. Sometimes, people debated this question with one another openly; other times, the disagreements were visible primarily in the slightly different rhetoric used by different campus and community groups.

It can be difficult to understand the composition of any given Gaza Solidarity Encampment from the outside. News coverage tends to frame the encampments as synonymous with undergraduate students — and it certainly does seem accurate that undergraduates have been the biggest segment of the university community participating in the encampment movement. But it is absolutely inaccurate to say that the encampments consisted only of undergraduates. The degree of involvement from other parts of the campus community surely varied from school to school, as well as how other types of participants saw themselves in relation to the movement. I know I Zoomed with graduate student workers in their union gear who were joining the call from their tents at other encampments. I know that at CUNY, some faculty and staff viewed their role as one of “support” for the encampment and “support” for the “students,” while other faculty viewed the encampment as “ours,” as a collective project drawing from many segments of our university community. I know that in reality, our encampment’s core organizers, from the very beginning, included several graduate students and faculty members in addition to the undergrads. Alumni played a key role at our camp as well. The Chancellor of CUNY, the Mayor of New York City, and the President of City College have all engaged in fearmongering about “outside agitators” on campus; but CUNY stands for the City University of New York, and it was created to serve the working class of New York City; as our union sweatshirts say, “Everybody loves somebody at CUNY.” It is good that our encampment was so diverse, welcoming people with all manner of connections to our university community.

In our case, appeals to the notion of “the students” (as synonymous with the camp, or synonymous with camp leadership) are only accurate insofar as there were indeed many students participating, including among the core organizers; but our movement was not exclusively a student movement. It was a CUNY movement — in some ways, a live experiment in attempting to work out what “A People’s CUNY” might be able to mean: how can we build a CUNY in which students and workers are united together, that stands for the rights and liberation of all people? How can and should different campus groups collaborate with one another? In some ways, it was a continuation of the discussions that CUNY students and workers have been having for over a century, including at other assemblies held next to a different set of locked campus gates during a CUNY building occupation in 1991 (McCaffrey, Kovic, and Menzies, 2020).

But those occupations were about austerity in New York State, and these occupations were about the fact that there are no universities left in Gaza, that public money is being used to fund a genocide, and that our university maintains academic and financial ties to the government doing the genociding and in the U.S. military more generally. The 1969 occupations of City College focused on “a people’s university” in the sense that a college in Harlem should serve the people of Harlem. The 1991 occupations focused on “a people’s university” in the sense that the state government ought not defund a vital public service that serves the working class of New York City. This occupation was international in scope, arguing that a true people’s university ought to operate on the basis of international solidarity with oppressed people everywhere.

Normally, the English department of the CUNY Graduate Center holds an end of semester party. In December 2023, the “party” was replaced with a memorial for Dr. Refaat Alareer, an English professor at the Islamic University of Gaza who had been murdered via airstrike a few days prior, which the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2024) found to be likely a deliberate targeting of him and his family. In lieu of our spring party, the department held a reading of Palestinian poetry, and we voted to name our department lounge after Alareer.

While my official graduation date was in February, all of the Graduate Center’s 2023-2024 graduates were celebrated at June commencement. It was my final chance to participate in a student movement as a student. My partner remarked that “every single part of the ceremony was in conversation with the encampment.”

We wore our keffiyehs over our robes, we dropped roses made from tissue paper on the stage as we walked in honor of the Palestinian students who are unable to graduate this year, and my department chair was one of the faculty members holding a Five Demands banner on stage during the faculty commencement speaker’s speech. The Chancellor made the mind-boggling choice to focus his own speech on his Columbia regalia, emphasizing the connection between himself and the Columbia administration; the student speaker had refused to address Palestine in her speech after being asked; the college president made pointed remarks in his own address against “yelling the loudest and staying the same thing over and over again,” not long after graduates and audience members had just chanted “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop; we will not rest!”

After the ceremony, I took my photographer sister over to the Graduate Center for the fourth and final set of graduation photos she will ever take for me. In the photos, I’m wearing my keffiyeh alongside my hood. My mom saved a copy of the official program and a copy of the alternative “People’s Program” that activists distributed at the doors.

Now, it is summer. Campus movements have mostly ebbed, according to the normal rhythms of the academic year, but the genocide is continuing, and will continue regardless of who is elected president in November. Whatever form the movement for a free Palestine takes at universities this fall, students, faculty, and staff must work together — our greatest power lies in collective action, mobilizing as much of our community as possible.

When studying campus movements, I had often wondered about the faculty responses to the CUNY occupations of 1969 and the Columbia occupation of 1968. I had often wondered what it would be like if something like that happened while I was a faculty member, and what I would do. It’s easy to think lofty thoughts about how radical and steadfast you will be when shit hits the fan, but actual class struggle is the real test of what you will do. And now I know.

 

References

CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment. (2024). Statement of Solidarity with the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment & CUNY Community Members Subject to Brutal Police Violence, Arrest and Detention. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSemv96ghNDgRpPnfqGhU8l2e4DOKEvHi9XstiCTcJbFVawNKg/viewform

CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment Core Organizing Team. (2024). Points of unity and community agreements. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cJCnDMs72TJGASxnLvONQm1tjUThJlwQTARMZALq8Jo/edit

CUNY On Strike Campaign. (2023, December 12). About. CUNY On Strike. https://cunyonstrike.com/about/

CUNY On Strike Campaign [@cunyonstrike]. (2024, May 1). We are CUNY workers who are out sick today. Sick of genocide, sick of lies about our students and colleagues posing “threats” to our community after six days of bringing our community together, sick of police brutality, sick of underfunding. Happy International Workers’ Day. [Tweet] [Twitter]. https://x.com/cunyonstrike/status/1785634531787088140

Davis, J. (2024, May 1). Unauthorized sick-out. PSC CUNY. https://psc-cuny.org/news-events/unauthorized-sick-out/

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. (n.d.). Israeli strike on Refaat al-Areer apparently deliberate. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Retrieved June 30, 2024, from https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6014/Israeli-Strike-on-Refaat-al-Areer-Apparently-Deliberate

Hoff, J. D., & Wood, O. (2024, May 1). CUNY rank-and-file workers stand with the student encampment. Left Voice. https://www.leftvoice.org/cuny-rank-and-file-workers-stand-with-the-student-encampment/

McCaffrey, K. T., Kovic, C., & Menzies, C. R. (2020). On strike: Student activism, CUNY and engaged anthropology. Transforming Anthropology, 28(2), 170–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12183

Niarchos, N. (2024, May 1). The police take City College. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nypd-city-college-may-1/

Pinto, N. (2024, May 8). Why are Columbia protesters charged with misdemeanors and City College protesters charged with felonies? - Hell gate. Hell Gate. https://hellgatenyc.com/columbia-protesters-get-misdemeanors-city-college-protesters-get-felonies-why

Vergara, J. & Left Voice. (2024, March 30). Self organization and the Mexican student strike. Left Voice. https://www.leftvoice.org/self-organization-and-the-mexican-student-strike/

Wood, O. (2024, April 25). Faculty at University of Texas Austin strike in solidarity with student protesters. Left Voice. https://www.leftvoice.org/faculty-at-university-of-texas-austin-strike-in-solidarity-with-student-protesters/

Wright, D. (2023). Stamping Out the Sparks: Union Repression of Rank-and-File Activism [Dissertation, University of California Davis]. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59p1s287

 

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Olivia Wood (she/her) is a lecturer in English at the City College of New York, where she teaches courses in language, writing, and rhetoric and serves as the undergraduate advisor for the English department. She is active in the CCCC Labor Caucus and CCCC Queer Caucus, and her work has appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetorics, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, the Journal of Bisexuality, and other places. Olivia is also a proud union member and a writer and editor for Left Voice.