To outside critics it was a symbol of campus politics gone berserk, its unofficial name a glorification of City College alumni who had joined revolutionary organizations and gone on the lam.
But officials at City College, part of the City University of New York, insisted that charged history was not a factor when they decided that the room would be better used as an annex for the school’s career services office, two floors below. Without notice, security officers entered the room this past weekend, boxed up and removed its contents — and just to be on the safe side, locked down the entire building, including the library.
With just a day to go before midterm exams, the library was reopened after a few hours. But Room 3/201 was not, resulting at least for a brief while in the incongruous sight of closed doors emblazoned with a bold, black fist, below a crisp white sign that read Careers and Professional Development. (The door had been repainted, without the fist, as of Monday afternoon.)
Given the center’s history, it could not have come entirely as a surprise when its former occupants let their dissatisfaction be known. They organized protest rallies, distributed fliers, posted videos and demanded that City College be shut down. A protester was arrested. And just in time for an outdoor demonstration on Monday, someone set off a fire alarm, sending hundreds of people out onto the plaza.
“I think that the CUNY administration is really scared of a lot of the organizing and community-building coming out of the building,” said Alyssia Osorio, director of the Morales/Shakur Center. “We provide so many services for the community — know-your-rights training, a farm share that provides healthy food, we’ve run a soup kitchen, we have provided baby-sitting services for people in the community.”
Deidra Hill, vice president of communications at City College, called the administration’s takeover of the room a matter of space. She said the career services office needed a quiet area where students can “meet with outside employers, with alumni, to seek advice on careers.”
City College said the unusually swift action was necessary. “We were concerned that we might have to move people, and that would not have been safe,” Ms. Hill said. As for the protests, “Students were exercising their free speech rights, which the college supports,” she said.
The City College students whom the center’s name honors have never visited. Guillermo Morales, a leader of the F.A.L.N., a Puerto Rican independence group that claimed responsibility for a deadly bombing in New York, fled to Cuba. So did Ms. Shakur, who as a member of the Black Liberation Army was convicted in the 1973 killing of a New Jersey State trooper. In 2006, a student objected to the name of the center. In the ensuing controversy, CUNY’s chancellor ordered that it be changed. But it stuck.
Taf Sourov, 19, a member of the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee, a group that regularly met there, said he believed the closing was retaliation for student protests against David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director and military commander, who is teaching a course at the Macaulay Honors College.
“I practically lived out of the room,” Mr. Sourov said. “I would do my homework in there. I did my political work in there. I would socialize in there. I feel like part of me is ripped out.”
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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