Western Massachusetts

Students Seize Building For Mixed Bag Of Demands

On 3 March 180 students seized the financial center of the University of Massachusetts, Goodell Hall. The five-day takeover protested the failure of the administration to honor the 1992 ALANA agreements. Initial protest demands specifically included the agreement not implemented in 1992 that the percentage of oppressed national and minority students be raised to 20%. Other demands specified ways the administration should recruit and retain students to reach this goal. The students also added in more general demands for more financial aid and child care and the abolition of tuition late payment fees.

In 1992 the Black Student Union (BSU) led a series of protests against the administration's weak response to the racist beating of a Haitian Resident Assistant. The administration claimed it committed itself to a series of reforms designed to increase "non-white" enrollment and retention. The U.S. Justice department, having viewed the nearby city of Holyoke as one of the cities most likely to riot, was looking to decrease the number of racial sparks in Holyoke's vicinity and intervened at UMass. Despite the involvement of the Just-us department and a legally binding agreement, the administration did not uphold its side of the bargain.

ALANA stands for "Asian, Latino, African and Native American." While we support oppressed nations and national minorities organizing together to achieve greater access to education, MIM does not lump all oppressed nations and groups of national minorities together as one political unit as the proponents of "people of color" and "ALANA" do. The ALANA formulation does not distinguish between these different groups with separate and sometimes opposing material interests and political objectives.

MIM supports the demands to increase enrollment of oppressed nation and national minority students because more access to higher education for the oppressed is progressive. Using a formulation lumping all these different groups allows the university to pick-and-choose which populations it wants. Because university administrations are notorious for their treachery in implementing agreements that will advance the cause of the oppressed, it is important to be very precise in what we demand. Already some student activists have a glimpse of this based on the administration's number crunching since 1992.

Demands For All Students

Many of the student leaders of the takeover stressed over and over again that "This is not an ALANA issue!", reflecting many of the demands which were not nationalist and were new ground not covered in the 1992 agreements. MIM obviously supports oppressed nation students getting support from whites; but we disagree with watering down your own struggle to the point of feeding white self-interest in order to get that support.

Demands for all students need to be clearly designed to advance oppressed nation issues. These issues can include demands for greater ability to carry out political organizing on campus, increasing numbers of and funding for oppressed nation students, or increasing overall student aid at the expense of funding of prisons or militarism.

MIM views the principal contradiction -- the one struggle that resolving will do the most to resolve all other contradictions -- within the united snakes as that of imperialism: the Black, Latino and First nations against the white Amerikan nations. Struggles for more oppressed nation enrollment, against more cops or against the prison system are struggles against imperialism. Within the white nation, we see youth as the group with the greatest inclination to ditch parasitism and work for revolution. But it is important that struggles that involve calling for more privileges for white youth are linked to anti-imperialist struggles. With this anti-imperialist line in command, advancing the political position of all youth, or under some circumstances even just white youth, can increase the potential for splitting off large sections of the white youth for the revolutionary struggle.

MIM does not help students oink to the system for more gravy at the expense of the oppressed, as the system already trains them well enough to do that. But proletarian leadership can turn the demand for more student aid into something progressive. In many states, the leading competitor to education spending is prison construction and maintenance. If college students and bureaucrats start attacking the police state in order to shift imperialist gravy away from prisons, that's something that objectively aids the anti-imperialist struggle.

Such complicated trades can only be successful under clear proletarian leadership. How imperialism spends its stolen super-profits is not a zero sum game, and much care needs to be taken to keep such a movement from turning into "Fund education AND prisons!" Proletarian leadership of such struggles is vigilant against all attempts to compromise the struggle.

In the past five years less complicated UMass struggles have failed to achieve their goals. Many struggles and victories have been erased by opportunist student leaders or anti-student administrators who take advantage of the high turnover of students to re-write the past.

Continue The Fight For Education For The Oppressed Nations

The administration's reaffirmation of the 20% "ALANA" enrollment target as the most politically important outcome of this protest, and we salute the students who won this victory but warn students to beware of the problem they have created in using the term ALANA and allowing the administration to pick which nationalities from this group of students they want to increase.

MIM encourages students interested in ending oppression once and for all in the most effective way possible to work with MIM and RAIL. For those unwilling to move beyond reformism, there are many ways that we can work together to make a world that's better for the world's majority. We encourage students to get involved in MIM and RAIL's fight against the criminal injustice system. In particular students can help us get educational materials and programs into the prisons, greatly increasing the access to education for oppressed nations. Pushing public universities to set up education programs in the schools is an important way that we can take these struggles for increased access to education outside of the gates of the university.

LEARN YOUR HISTORY, TAKE UP THE REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE, AND GAIN REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE!

This story was written on 18 March 1997.

NOTE: See MIM Notes 71, December 1992 for coverage of the struggle leading up to the 1992 ALANA Agreements. MIM Notes was the only publication to report on the hotel "rewards" given to the assailant's hosts. Available at: http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/MIM.essays/umass.racists

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