This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Read the first part here.
Activism is used by Wesleyan as a means of advertisement, made into a commodity
Police reports from April 11th
According to Middletown Police reports, Public Safety called the police on April 11th not once, but twice, once at 9:17 AM, and again at 2:16 PM, with no actual presence from the police occurring for the first call.
Protesters march by Usdan (photo by Nita Rome)
If you were among the hundreds (thousands?) of people who were at the Wesleyan v. Williams game on Saturday, then you probably saw protesters marching around the outside of the field starting at halftime.
Many students, myself included, feel that Roth’s advocacy and authority on free speech and campus protest do not line up in reality given his record of activity concerning these topics at Wesleyan, using his perceived advocacy to both profit himself (such as the release of a book that addresses his advocacy for his brand of free speech), as well as Wesleyan itself. Let’s take a look at his and Wesleyan’s record in recent times.
Wesleying stands in solidarity with our custodial workers in their fight to be treated with dignity and respect as they clean and care for our campus. We affirm their demand for Wesleyan to hire five more workers, and offer our platform and support to the workers and students who are organizing to achieve this.
Tomorrow (Friday, April 26), at noon, students, campus workers, and community members will join together at North College to rally for Five More Workers: Support Good Jobs at Wes. Students, other Wesleyan workers, community organizations, labor unions, artists, and even two sitting Congresspeople (Rep. Pramila Jayapal WA-07 and Rep. Andy Levin MI-09) have expressed their support for Wesleyan’s custodial workers, and Friday’s rally is anticipated to be the largest action yet.
This comes just two weeks after United Student/Labor Action Committee (USLAC) organized a series of protests and disruptions during WesFest to call attention to the unreasonable workloads of our school’s custodians and to demand that Wesleyan hire five more workers. (If you want to know more about the WesFest actions, the Argus did a great job covering them.)
Since WesFest, the administration has failed to take action on (or take seriously) the protesters’ demands and workers’ testimonies, citing data shared in an all-campus email from Chief Administrative Officer, and Treasurer Andy Tanaka on Wednesday, April 24 as justification. USLAC responded by sharing a point-by-point rebuttal of the “facts” presented in Tanaka’s email.
A graph compiled by USLAC to explain perceived flaws in the administration’s data analysis
As mentioned in these documents, there have been new developments with regard to the legality of Wesleyan and SMG’s employment practices. On Friday, April 19, Wesleyan students and custodians worked together to file a National Labor Relations Board charge against Service Management Group (SMG), a custodial services subcontractor, and Wesleyan University as joint employers. This occurred after custodians and students reviewed SMG’s corporate handbook and identified several violations of federal labor law.
Read on to learn more about the violations, their significance, and to view the full redacted complaint.
Looking to get organized? To help make this easier, Wesleying has compiled another roundup of events in NYC and Connecticut between now and the end of the year with help from other awesome calendars on the ENGAGE blog and Women’s March CT’s Twitter. Also many thanks to my woke Facebook friends who I cyber-stalked to find some of these events. Enjoy!
We want to keep this list up to date, so if you hear about any new event or know about one we missed send us the info by e-mail at staff[at]wesleying[dot]org or through Twitter/Facebook.
On Sunday afternoon, Wesleyan students joined over 1,000 protesters at Bradley International Airport in The Council on American-Islamic Relations – Connecticut‘s protest against President Trump‘s Executive Order banning Muslim immigrants from 7 countries and halting immigration from Syria.
The President signed the order at 4:42 PM on Saturday, January 28th, to the dismay of millions of people worldwide. Just before 9 PM on Saturday, a federal judge ruled to block parts of the Executive Order preventing some of those detained from being immediately deported. However, the ruling failed to free those detained as a result of the ban, leaving many travellers unable to leave the airport or government custody despite having proper green cards and visas.
Photo Credit: Kirill Lebedev for Liberation News
On Friday afternoon, a cohort of Wesleyan activists drove down to New Haven’s financial district to protest three major banks’ investments in the Dakota Access Pipeline. Students from Wesleyan Democratic Socialists and Fossil Fuel Divest joined other protestors on the march, which began at Wells Fargo, moved to Bank of America and the Federal Courthouse, and ended at TD Bank. At each stop, organizers and indigenous activists made speeches and led chants demanding a halt to pipeline construction and that the banks divest from the project. Read past the jump for more information about the march and specific calls to action from the protest’s organizers.
“Burning and defacing the flag is a critique of what American patriotism and the American flag represent.”
On Friday, hundreds of Wesleyan students took part in a multi-stage demonstration that featured testimonies and chants from perspectives ranging from staunchly anti-State to “final stands” of full blown Trump supporters.
The second stage of the demonstration saw students gathered outside of Olin library and several among the crowd ascending the steps to communicate their response to the election results. During this part of the demonstration, we posted a live Facebook video of Yael Horowitz ’17 and Abby Cunniff ’17 spray painting “Amerikkka” on an upside down American flag. The video now has over 22,000 views and 142 shares. Many comments on the video declare their hatred for Wesleyan students, and several have been explicitly threatening and violent. We are posting the following guest submission so that they protesters can explain their motivations. The following views are the writers’ own.
Hundreds of Wesleyan students gathered on Friday for a rally and demonstration against the presidential election of Donald Trump. Like many similar college protests across the country, the goal of the “Students Against Trump” rally was to express discontent with the American electoral system, as well as the systematic racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia that led to Trump’s rise to power.
The day saw many students vocalizing their response to the election results, a march throughout campus and down to Main Street, 2 students being detained by Middletown Police, and several students spray-painting “Amerikkka” on an American flag in front of Olin. Read on for photos and videos from the day’s actions, as well as more on what transpired:
“Our politicians are turning a blind eye to the protesters and to the native peoples as a new tyranny of oil is taking over our government” – Josh Nodiff ’19
On Friday, September 9, Dragonfly Climate Collective, a local anti-capitalist environmental justice group, organized an action outside of TD Bank on Washington Street to protest the bank’s investment in the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Over 125 people from Wesleyan, Middletown, and greater Connecticut area turned out in response to a call for solidarity actions from the Camp of the Sacred Stones and the Red Warrior Camp, the two camps that have been leading the resistance against the DAPL. The Dragonfly Climate Collective report on the action can be found here.
