The New School In Exile

I am writing all of you today to express my complete outrage over the incidents of the past 24 hours at our school. While I was not a part of the occupation which took place on Friday April 10th, myself and many other students support the calls for immediate and serious changes at this school. However, this is not the place to debate resignations and policy changes. I want to speak to the outrageous use of force and intimidation by the NYPD at the specific request of senior administrators of this school.

I have watched numerous video clips, looked at dozens of photos, read first-hand reports from people outside of the Graduate Faculty building at 65 5th Avenue, as well as read numerous written accounts, both from students and from the administration, concerning the events of Friday. None of what I have read as justification either supports or justifies the massive police mobilization that can be called nothing short of a militarization of the New School campus. I fail to see how another occupation of the Graduate Faculty building, an event which happened just a few months ago, now warrants a mobilization of hundreds of police, tactical response teams, mounted NYPD, police helicopters and the pepper spraying or macing of students who were then assaulted by NYPD.

Furthermore, I was filming the support rally and march which took place on Friday evening at Union Square, and during the course of that event I witnessed more scenes of police violence, and was personally assaulted by an officer while I was filming the arrest of another student for reasons she did not know. This officer walked directly up to me and punched my hand and camera, attempting to break it. I have witnessed and read similar accounts, involving police attacking students who were simply outside as supporters or bystanders watching the event, as the New York Times and others have documented. This is a direct result of the sanctioned use of force by the NYPD which this administration both called for and continues to support.

Furthermore, the Announce Announce message which was sent out on Friday includes blatant lies (student assaults on security guards during the December occupation), as well as character assassination of students organizing under the name of the New School In Exile. The e-mail further blatantly paints as both sanctioning and supporting actions that were never organized or planned by the New School In Exile, including the incident with the Free Press and the graffiti of the President's apartment. To paint the New School In Exile as organizing these is both false and morally indefensible.

Therefore I am calling upon the senior administration to immediately acknowledge this use of force as both unnecessary and unwarranted, and to offer a formal, public apology to the entire New School community for allowing such offensive actions to take place at this school. I also request that the Interim Provost and Faculty Senate begin an immediate independent investigation into the handling and approval of police force by the senior administration.

This past week approximately 1/3 of the Fine Art department faculty at Parsons the New School for Design received email notices that there were no classes for them to teach in the coming academic year. This action was taken just before spring break so that there was no way to mobilize the Parsons community. This was done in an atmosphere of complete secrecy.

The teachers who were fired all have excellent retentions and exceptional student evaluations. Teachers who were vulnerable because their union status was probationary appear to have been targeted by the administration regardless of performance. However, some of those summarily fired have served as a distinguished and devoted faculty who have given their time and energy to Parsons for many, many years (in some cases as much as 20+ years). The adjunct faculty fought hard to unionize in 2005 and the Kerrey administration fought hard to prevent it. We were successful and the UAW now represents the adjunct faculty at Parsons. To varying degrees this protected a good number of the faculty – or so we thought.

You may have heard or read about some of the chaos that surrounds President Bob Kerrey’s stewardship of the New School. The New York Times and The Village Voice (see links) have written about it extensively. There have been multiple firings of Provosts, a vote of no confidence in the president, student occupations of campus sites and overall considerable unhappiness amongst the students and faculty.

Despite all this the Fine Arts Department enrollment has been consistently increasing these past five years. The department has been healthy and the community of students and faculty has been lively and progressive.

We wrote a letter condemning these actions and the vast majority of the Fine Arts faculty signed it. (Some could not be reached precisely because this was all done during the spring break) As the present administration fears more additional negative press it is our hope that you will join our efforts to reverse these actions by writing an email to the addresses listed below. We have included the original text that our Fine Art faculty sent as its petition. Please feel free to cut and paste from it for your email.

Pass the word on to any other concerned academics, artists, union members or –especially– members of the press.

Please identify your email in the subject line, "We stand opposed to the mass firings at Parsons"

*and please BCC to: L555H@aol.com and peter@peterdrakeartist.com

Warmest regards and many thanks,

Peter Drake, Laurence Hegarty
Adjunct Faculty
Fine Arts Department
School of Art, Media and Technology
Parsons the New School for Design