UPDATE: Students' expulsion hearing is Friday, December 2nd.

CALL THE DEAN OF STUDENTS!

Demand that Charges Be Dropped! See below for numbers.

E-mail youth_students-AT-worldcantwait.org to add your name to this statement and forward it broadly, especially to academics.


Drop the Charges and Stop the Harassment Against the Hampton University Students Against the Bush Regime!

Students who act to Drive Out the Bush Regime, especially when they remain firm in the face of police and administrative threats, are heroic. They must be defended. Their example must be followed.

Students at Hampton University participated in nation-wide outpourings in over 70 places and 200 schools on November 2nd to launch of a movement to drive out the Bush regime. In the course of organizing, they were followed by campus police, targeted by video surveillance, and forced to turn over their ID’s for the simple act of distributing literature. That these students were targeted for the content of their activities is demonstrated by the fact that other students routinely post unauthorized flyers (often with scantily clad women advertising parties) without harassment.

On Friday, November 18th, 3 student organizers were issued summons for a hearing on over possible expulsion the following Monday morning, giving them no time during the working week to contact lawyers, parents, or campus administrators. After hundreds of phone-calls from around the country to the Dean’s Office, their hearing was postponed. Days later, 4 more students were issued summons and campus police shut down an interview being filmed by the local media, attempting to prevent their story from getting out.

The attacks on the student organizers at Hampton University, a historically black college with a mostly Republican administration, is an ugly harbinger of the “dissent-free” future the Bush regime is trying to lock into place. These attacks are part of a pattern of repression against high school and college students nation-wide on November 2nd that disproportionately targeted black, Latino and other oppressed students.

A standard cannot be set where the President of the United States can stay on vacation as a major city’s poor and black people are left for five days without food or water, where influential friends of this President are allowed to float out genocidal notions of aborting all black babies to bring crime rates down, and where the President’s policies of “abstinence-only” in the face of an international AIDS pandemic threaten millions of lives, but where students who dare to act to end this are silenced and expelled from school.

As it says in the Call for The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime, “This will not be easy. If we speak the truth, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will to try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so badly fooled by Bush and we are NOT going to stop.”

We, the undersigned, demand that the Hampton University administration to drop all charges against, cease their political harassment of, and to apologize to these students. These students must not be expelled! We also call on students at campuses nation-wide to send statements of support, and to join, strengthen and support the movement to Drive Out the Bush Regime because the World Can’t Wait!

Eleanor J. Bader, adjunct Kingsborough Community College & Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY*
Jennifer Baumgardner, author, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future
Rosalyn Baxandall, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY Old Westbury*
Edget Betru, Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative - Center for Constitutional Rights*
Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara*
Carl Dix, National Spokesperson, Revolutionary Communist Party
Michael Eric Dyson, author, Is Bill Cosby Right?
Beva Eastman, Associate Professor, William Paterson University and New Jersey City University*
Judith Ezekiel, Universite de Toulouse le Mirail*
Bea Kreloff, director, Art Workshop International*
Allen Lang, National Student Organizer, The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime!
Efia Nwangaza, Executive Director, African American Institute for Policy Studies & Planning
Katha Pollitt, writer The Nation*
Sonia Jaffe Robins, freelance writer and editor
Alix Kates Shulman, writer
Sunsara Taylor, writer for Revolution, Co-Initiator of The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime!
Lise Vogel, Professor Emerita, Rider University*
Barbara Winslow, Brooklyn College*
Laura X, Women’s History Library*
Howard Zinn, Historian and Author
*affiliations for identification purposes only

Demand that the 7 students facing expulsion be cleared of any disciplinary measures and that the intimidation and punishment for student protest stop!
Call the Dean of Men (Woodson Hopewell Jr.) at 757-727-5303, the Dean of Women at 757-727-5486.

To add your name, email: youth_students-AT-worldcantwait.org and specify how you would like to be identified.