Columbia Strikers Voice Their Demands

(Following is the text of the Columbia Strikers' Press Release, issued at noon on April 28, several hours before the Columbia faculty voted against granting amnesty for the strikers.)

WE, the striking students of Columbia University, believe in the right of all people to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. An institution is legitimate only if it is a structure for the exercise of this collective right. The people who are affected by illegitimate institutions have the right to change it.

Columbia University has been governed undemocratically. An administration responsible only to the trustees has made decisions that deeply affect students, faculty and the community. It has expropriated a neighborhood park to build a gym. It has participated through I.D.A. in the suppression of self-determination throughout the world. It has formulated rules and disciplined students arbitrarily and for the purpose of suppressing justified protest. The actions of the administration in the present crisis have exposed it to students and faculty as the anti-democratic and irresponsible body it has always been.

Our goal is to create a functioning participatory democracy to replace the repressive rule of the administration and trustees of the University. The acceptance of amnesty by the administration is a fundamental part of this transition because it establishes the illegitimacy of the existing structures. The granting of amnesty is the formal establishment of a new order--the right and power of all people affected by the University not to be judged by illegitimate authority.

Amnesty

In addition, amnesty is a vital precondition for negotiations on other issues. We cannot negotiate with a sword over our heads. Without amnesty, we run the risk that any formal concessions we win will be short-lived, politically empty and easily betrayed.

To build real people's control on that base requires the involvement and politicization of the entire community--a process which has already occurred to an unprecedented extend and which we now see as our major task for achieving the political goals of our actions. Our collective struggle is both the only way we could defeat the existing structure, and achieve our alternative to it. Control by an irresponsible elite implies the exercise of institutional power in its interest. The trustees support Columbia's participation in I.D.A. because they are part of an elite which benefits from American domination of the oppressed peoples of the wrold. Implicit in our I.D.A. demand is the right of these peoples, like us, to determine their own lives. We do not want students to take over the university's function of slumlord and expropriator of park lands in Harlem and Morningside Heights. Our demands around the gym were not intended only or even primarily to stop a particular injustice, but to support the right of the people of these communities to exercise control over the use of their neighborhoods.

WE have been very anxious to continue the discussions we had with the faculty Ad Hoc Committee. The faculty will clearly be affected by any settlement that is ultimately reached; as the major part of the University community their participation in any new forms and structures that are created at Columbia when the present crisis is over is imperative. Moreover, many members of the faculty, at great personal risk, played a key role on Thursday night in preventing a police invasion of student held buildings. We have been presenting the political position outlined above to the Faculty Ad Hoc Committee on the assumption that they had some power to mediate. It has been the opinion of their negotiators that resolving the substantive issues of the gym and I.D.A. would present no problem, if we could find some way to "get around" the question of amnesty.

But the statement of the Trustees shows us that this Ad Hoc Committee is talking in a vacuum. The Trustees called for a temporary halt in gym construction as a favor to the mayor, not in response to the needs of the community. I.D.A. is not mentioned at all. The faculty has made no attempt to demand the power to negotiate, or the power to control the police. This indicates that they fail to recognize what is clear to everyone else: the Administration has been thoroughly discredited. At the same time that the Faculty has been claiming they were "mediating" in good faith, they have made arrangements with the Administration to control "ingress and egress" from Low, supposedly in an attempt to limit the possibility of confrontation with the police. They have used the existence of the barricades they unilaterally set up as evidence of an implicit "agreement" between them and the Low demonstrators, an "agreement" they accuse Low demonstrators of violating whenever "nonrepresentative" persons enter or leave Low. The demonstrators in Low never entered into such an agreement with the Faculty. The Faculty has also acted as inquisi- tors at the gates, implying agreement with the Trustees that "outsiders...have injected themselves into the situation," disregarding the fact that community people are not outsiders as far as the gym is concerned.

Disregard of concerned groups is even more acute at today's Faculty meeting. In the first place, the meeting was called and will probably be presided over by President Kirk or Vice President Truman. The striking students have requested admission and a chance to present their position to the Faculty. Their request has been denied. (As this is written, Junior Faculty members have also been denied a voice.) The situation will be discussed without representation by all concerned groups and therefore undemocratically. The Faculty Ad Hoc Committee, with whose representatives we have been meeting, is a split body. They have been trying to negotiate with us over matters on which their group has no consensus, and which will subsequently have to be brought to the Administration anyway. Under these circumstances, it is pointless to continue negotiating with a committee that does not have the authority to put forth a solution that recognizes that discipline is inappropriate for actions that are right and necessary.

WE thus ask the Faculty Ad Hoc Committee to stop trying to perform a mediating function they cannot carry out. Instead, we think they should constitute themselves as the political body that in fact they are--and take a political position in favor of our six demands, including amnesty. The Faculty Ad Hoc Committee has recognized, as we have recognized, the fruitlessness of negotiations under the present circumstances. They independently broke off negotiations with us after last night's session. Professor Westin, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee, told us that the committee would now attempt to put forth an independent proposal for the solution of the crisis, rather than continue in its mediating capacity. We welcome this move on the part of the Ad Hoc Committee as recognition of the fact that they are a political entity; we welcome those members of the committee who support us to put forth a position saying so.

It is now necessary to take some rational steps toward resolving the crisis. We believe that it is still possible for positive and constructive action to be taken. We must extend meaningful discussion beyond the bounds of limited, semi-secret mediation between faculty and students. To this end, we will ourselves initiate open hearings on all questions. Such hearings should have begun long ago to involve students who are actively concerned, whether partisans of the demonstrators or not. Many facts on the gym, I.D.A., University expansion, unionization of employees, the role in society must be brought clearly and meaningfully into the open