As the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street approaches, hundreds of scholars have signed a letter pledging to re-energize the movement and refocus attention on economic injustice.
Signatories of the letter, which has been circulating on listservs and through e-mails, say it’s important for them to stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement, which has struggled in recent months to keep mass dissent going.
The movement, whose anniversary on Monday is also expected to be marked in lower Manhattan with several days of protests and other activities, began to see dwindling numbers of protesters after mass arrests, police expulsions from makeshift encampments, and the arrival of winter.
Many people have written the Occupy movement’s obituary, but academic supporters are not ready to declare its death.
Some of the key scholars who have signed the solidarity letter include Todd Gitlin, chair of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; Bertell Ollman, a professor of politics at New York University; Donald Pease, an English professor at Dartmouth College; Frances Fox Piven, a political-science professor at the City University of New York; and the philosopher Cornel West.
“The movement is dying in the public’s eye, but the goals are still very relevant,” says Elizabeth B. Goetz, a third-year Ph.D. student in the English department at CUNY’s Graduate Center and an adjunct instructor at Hunter College, which is part of CUNY.
Conor Tomás Reed, her classmate, adds: “It feels perverse to mourn the death of a moment that’s just begun.”
“Occupy is far from dead,” says Mr. Reed, who is also a Ph.D. student in English at CUNY and an adjunct instructor at CUNY’s Baruch College. “As we’ve seen with the labor movements of the 1930s, the Civil Rights Movement, and other social movements of the 1960s, there’s never an upward trajectory of struggle.”
Just before Thanksgiving of last year, Mr. Reed was arrested when he and a large contingent of CUNY instructors and students protested tuition increases at the CUNY board’s meeting at Baruch. When they tried to disrupt the meeting, they were arrested in the lobby. Mr. Reed continues to be active in the movement, focusing much of his attention on issues of student debt as well as the adjunctification and corporatization of higher education.
“Education debt and faculty labor issues have been two of the salient protests of Occupy,” he says. “We have been showing people how student debt is a family and a community issue.”
Chad M. Kautzer, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Denver, says that if Occupy Wall Street was dead, “I’d have much more time on my hands.”
Mr. Kautzer has been collaborating with the Occupy and Educate Denver Committee, which holds teach-ins twice a week in Civic Center Park where diverse groups of people facilitate discussions on topics including immigration, the foreclosure crisis, feminism, civil disobedience, and critiques of capitalism.
In New York City, Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, says that the numbers of protesters have decreased, “but the core has been pretty solid and consistent.” Over the summer he and other academics participated in “debtors assemblies” in New York City parks, where they discussed strategies to fight back against all kinds of debt.
“It’s important for intellectuals to re-engage for the first anniversary as one way to demonstrate to the public that there is support for the Occupy principles and that a movement like this mutates and matures,” Mr. Ross says.
Alex Vitali, an associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, which is part of CUNY, teaches about social movements. As a faculty member at a public university he says he feels something has to be done “to push back on the politics of austerity.” Professors, he adds, have been keeping close tabs on the Chicago teachers’ strike and they see it as an example of how frustrated educators are “feeling like they’ve been put on the chopping block as sacrificial lambs on the altar of budget cuts and tax cuts for the rich.”
‘A Disconnect’
One reason people might think the Occupy movement is dead is the lack of media attention, scholars say.
“There’s a disconnect between the organizing that’s on the ground and the public visibility because the movement has gone more into organizing than the spectacles of marching and rallying,” says Mr. Kautzer, of Colorado.
He and others say that the news media don’t always highlight the local grassroots campaigns that emerged out of Occupy Wall Street but now operate with independent infrastructures and specific goals like fighting evictions and foreclosures.
Some professors who may not have time to attend public campaigns are bringing lessons from Occupy to their classrooms.
Chiara Bottici, an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research, teaches her students about the importance of anger to democracy. “If you don’t get angry, how can there be change?” she asks.
Ms. Bottici, who is Italian, says that in Europe education is considered a right, not a privilege like in the United States. She has pledged her support for the Occupy movement because of her students.
“Our students here work four or five jobs and they are falling into debt,” she says. “I really admire their courage. I feel that as a teacher I should do whatever I can to voice my opinion against student debt.”
Scholars say that as Occupy Wall Street enters into its second year they can’t predict its future. Those who support it say they hope it gathers momentum and grows. What they fear most is that impatience will derail the movement’s progress.
“I’ve met new activists who thought things would change one year later,” says Mr. Kautzer. “Impatience is the greatest threat to social movements. We can’t let the lack of immediate results demoralize activists. This is a long haul.”
Correction (9/14/2012, 11:28 a.m.): The original version of this article incorrectly referred to Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University.
