[863] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Discuss Mandatory Dining at the UA Town Hall Meeting Tonight
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter M Finin)
Wed Oct 3 22:38:19 2001
Message-ID: <200110040154.VAA25565@all-night-tool.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 21:54:27 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, Peter M Finin <pfinin@MIT.EDU>
From: Peter M Finin <pfinin@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 03 Oct 2001 17:11:01 EDT."
<Pine.LNX.4.21.0110031623310.19520-100000@sub-zero.mit.edu>
Niko sez:
|> The problem with MIT protest is that it's always civilized; it's always
|> reasonable; it always ends on time. People always go home and finish up
|> their work and view the protest is closed. It can't be that way.
|> We may be able to win a fight about the dot*, and we will almost certainly
|> win concessions on this issue, just as we won a few concessions on the housing
|> issue. If MIT students want the administration to get the idea that they
|> are not to be ignored in the future, they have to demonstrate that they
|> are not ignoreable! Ultimately, the administration knows that when all is
|> said and done, we will make noise and then stop. We need to NOT stop; we need
|> to make them rue the day they crossed such clever, vindictive individuals.
|> God could I go on about this, and other speculation on the fate of
|> student protest at mit. Suffice to say that I think simply being
|> reasonable is not enough. I also think that MIT Administrators are very
|> smart and dedicated people. I think they, like us, are working for a better
|> MIT: I just think that their vision of what a better MIT is differs
|> drastically from ours, and that this schism will always frustrate understanding
|> between the two groups.
Exactly. Administrators will continue to screw over the student as
long as the worst thing that will happen to them as a result is that
we'll tell them that we disagree. They'll keep coming up with
proposals that will screw us over. Maybe we'll manage to stop a few
of these proposals, but new ones will always keep coming.
If we want this to stop, we have to stop being polite, and civil,
and having orderly protests. We need to do more than give them well
thought out reasons that their proposals are horrible, and circulate
petitions. We need to make them very uncomfortable, we need to make
their lives difficult, we need to hit them where it hurts. This means
that people need to accept that they may get in trouble, and that they
may miss some classes. Until students are willing to go this far,
we're just going to keep getting shafted.
Here are a few ideas:
We can compose a list of administrators with a history of fucking
students over, and circulate their names and pictures to all
undergrads at MIT, along with a description of what they've done.
Everytime one of us sees these administrators in the hallway, in an
elevator, on the street, in a restaurant in Boston, or wherever, we
need to tell the something like, "Hey, fuckwad, you are a maggot
ridden sack of shit. You are ruining MIT. You are personally
responsible for ruining this school, your worthless, scum-sucking
whore."
We can invade the offices of whichever adminstrators most deserve
our ire, and refuse to let them in for days on end. This worked
fairly well for the Harvard living wage folks.
We can surround Chuck Vest's house one afternoon, and refuse to let
him back in for several days. For administrators who don't live so
conveniently close to campus, we can surround their car and refuse to
let them drive home.
We can take the list of admitted prefrosh, come April (or whenever
they release it), and contact each and every prefrosh on there and try
to convince them that MIT is a horrible school, and that they should
go to Harvard or something.
We can wait until the next time MIT has a bunch of multi-millionaire
alumns gathered in some classroom to try to squeeze them for
donations, and then burst into the room, en masse, ranting about how
the MIT administration is fucking over the students and running the
school into the ground, and tell them to not donate any money at all.
|> niko
-Peter Finin
