CUNY Students Protesting Tuition Increase Clash With Police
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A daylong rally by City University of New York students against a proposed tuition increase turned turbulent Monday when marchers pushed through campus police barricades at Baruch College and about a dozen were arrested.
The students were pushed to the ground and taken away in handcuffs from the lobby of the college, in Manhattan, while protesting against the proposal for tuition increases, which CUNY's Board of Trustees is scheduled to vote on next Monday.Â
Carlos Pazmino, 21, a City College student who helped organize the protest, said that after students began opening doors to the auditorium where the CUNY trustees were to hold a public hearing at 5 p.m., CUNY police officers surrounded the entrances and pushed back, using their batons, and that when students formed a line to push past, the officers began hitting the students with the batons.
"I saw two people knocked down by cops," Mr. Pazmino said. "They were arrested and one guy's head was bleeding."
During the fighting, students on higher floors dropped books down on the police, and captured the scuffle on video. A crowd of 200 to 300 protesters outside beat on the lobby's windows, also shouting, "Shame."
The police did not immediately say how many people were arrested.
The meeting went on as scheduled on the 14th floor of the building, where people who had made it into the hearing started receiving text messages about the events in the lobby.Â
The protest had begun with a handful of organizers from Students United for a Free CUNY, who marched through the school cafeteria at City College at lunchtime. The group is demanding the repeal of the tuition increase approved last summer by the city and the state: $300 a year for each of the next five years.
Later in the afternoon, the protest moved to Madison Square Park, where CUNY students from other colleges had agreed to meet. The growing crowd then marched on to Baruch College, at Lexington Avenue and 24th Street.
At Baruch, the campus police restricted access to the hearing to those who had registered, and set up barricades around the building, the William and Anita Newman Vertical Campus Conference Center.
First Published November 22, 2011 12:01 am
