After over five months of disciplinary proceedings, we Columbia University students, who in October protested a speech by then Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist, have been advised that Columbia University has issued discipline against us. These arbitrary and ridiculous punishments are the culmination of an arbitrary and ridiculous process, in which students were denied due process, presentation of any evidence or witnesses to substantiate specific charges, any legal representation, or any explanation of the basis for the disciplinary findings. Most atrocious is the fact that of the seven students, the three Latino students received the harshest punishments. In contrast, the non-Latino student protesters who were punished received "disciplinary warnings," the lightest punishment available. The administration did not give a reason for the different punishments.
We received "censures," which was the maximum penalty given the "simple" charges-as opposed to "serious" charges-against us. The censure means that any subsequent disciplinary infraction, regardless of the severity, will automatically result in our suspension. This is a carefully crafted punishment which appears designed to put an end to the growing political activism of Latino students on Columbia's campus. It will be our intensifying activism in this struggle for justice that will prove how mistaken and short-sighted this decision by the administration was.
The impropriety and racism undergirding Columbia's discipline is particularly laid bare in the case of Martín López. He was one of the three students who received a censure. Video coverage provided by Univision shows that López, CC '09, and the son of immigrant parents, was kicked violently in the face by a Minuteman supporter while on the floor of the auditorium. He never set one foot on stage.
The power of the immigrant rights movement and the student activism is directly reflected in the selected punishments. Censuring the Latino students is a racist decision which sends a message to the Latino students who are politically active that if they continue their activism, they are at risk. Columbia appears to be trying to shut down what has become a vibrant and powerful movement on campus in opposition to racism, which affected the University itself and has spread to other campuses. The students will not back down and will fight this punishment as part of the struggle to defend immigrant rights and anti-racist activism.
Columbia University has brought shame to itself. It bowed to right-wing pressure, and its selective censuring of Latino students must be characterized as a racist double standard. But this does not obscure an obvious truth: we won. We won when we stood up and confronted the leading border vigilante in the country. We won because we sent a signal to immigrants everywhere that we don't have to accept violence and harassment as a legitimate part of the immigration debate.
What the right-wing establishment, the corporate media, and the Columbia administration fear is our protest becoming a trend of revived student radicalism. Recently, we've seen Michigan State students confront arch-xenophobe Tom Tancredo, Santa Barbara students occupy a highway to protest the war, and dozens of high schools and campuses walk out to protest the beginning of the war's fifth year. Here at Columbia, the Latino students who took to the stage on Oct. 4 formed a new organization, Lucha, which as its name implies, is dedicated to political struggle.
As its first campaign, Lucha organized a bus to the anti-war March on the Pentagon, and working with the ANSWER Coalition, raised money to bring high school students and low-income people to the march. For weeks we gave speeches in subway cars and made presentations in high school classrooms on why we should stand up for immigrant rights, and against the war, and how these struggles are related. This is what they fear: the fighting spirit of groups like Lucha spreading across the country.
We condemn the administration for apologizing to an organization whose very presence represents terror and violence in immigrant communities. We condemn them for punishing students who stood up for those communities. We condemn them for arbitrarily imposing heavier sentences on the Latino students, and in particular López, who was standing on the auditorium floor when he was kicked in the face by an outside Minuteman thug.
This hypocrisy, and these attempts to stifle and silence our widening movement, have only strengthened our resolve. We are prouder than ever. We'll continue to struggle for immigrant rights, to denounce racist organizations like the Minutemen wherever they go, and to defend our communities.