🚀 go-pugleaf

"summoned to an administrative hearing for violating the code of 
student conduct by actions to cajole or proselytize students, 
distributing and/or posting unauthorized information,"

"Unauthorized information". What a bunch of moronic administrators,
their own computer servers provide the same information to all their 
campus. "the code of student conduct by actions to cajole or proselytize 
students". Don't tell me that the military does not recruit at Hampton U.


-------- Original Message --------
From: R Miller <millerz@mind
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 09:34:04 -0500
Subject: Peaceful Protesters Face Expulsion

http://www.traprockpeace.org/hampton_university_students/

 Corporate Plantation: Political Repression and the Hampton Model

Heavy-Handed Repression of Recent Student Activism

By John Robinson and Brandon King
November 25th, 2005

 
On Wednesday November 2, 2005 at Hampton University, the progressive
campus group affiliated with Amnesty International, United Students
Against Sweatshops, and Campus Anti-War Network held a student walk-out
on the issues of New Orleans urban renewal, AIDS crisis, homophobia,
the prison-industrial complex, the war in Iraq, and the crisis in
Sudan. The organizers for the group had been planning the action for
sometime, and promoted it with radio announcements, posters around the
campus, and handing out fliers at campus group meetings. The planned
activities included speeches, chants, poetry, and musical performances.

  Earlier that day an international student was subjected to intense
interrogation by the Dean of Women and was told by the Hampton
University police that she would be shadowed by a cop. At twelve noon
Brandon King began to speak to about 75-100 students in the Student
Center about our plans for the day. We handed out information on the
Iraq war and the Katrina disaster. Then armed HU police abruptly shut
down our activities.

The HU police booked several people just because they were wearing
stickers and other paraphernalia that advertised our events. They
booked people who werent even wearing paraphernalia because they
looked suspicious. The police used hand-held camcorders to record the
faces of the activists without our permission. They attempted to
intimidate the student onlookers by their random targeting. Three of us
were singled out as leaders by the Dean of Men and HU police, who
temporarily confiscated our students ID cards. The next day, one leader
of our group, Brandon King, was told by a Hampton University Lieutenant
Detective that, despite the fact that he was a hometown athlete, he
would be expelled if he did not cooperate and give up the names of
other group members.

Now Brandon, three sophomore activists, a junior activist, a
non-affiliated supporter and myself have all been summoned to an
administrative hearing for violating the code of student conduct by
actions to cajole or proselytize students, distributing and/or
posting unauthorized information, and violating the administrative
guidelines for student demonstrations. The students were given notice
at 5:00 p.m. Friday, November 18 to appear at an administrative hearing
at 10:00 a.m. Monday, November 21. This short notice obviously made it
virtually impossible for the students to organize support from lawyers,
parents, witnesses, other students, and sympathetic organizations both
on campus and in the wider community. Nevertheless, the administration
received many calls and e-mails and agreed on Monday morning to
postpone the hearings indefinitely. Upon returning to school from
thanksgiving break on Monday November 28, the students learned that the
hearings had been rescheduled for Friday, December 2.

Shortly before the break, students met with local reporters in a nearby
shopping center owned by the administration. As the students described
to the reporters the repressive conditions they face at Hampton
University, a Hampton University cop sent by the Dean of Students
confirmed the students allegations. He pulled his squad car to within
inches of the camera man and cut short the interview by stepping in
between the camera man and the student interviewee. After the reporters
put their camera away inside their car, the police still demanded that
they leave the property. The video footage of these events was shown on
the nightly news. The story also appeared the next day as the cover
story in the local newspaper, The Daily Press. The Dean of Students, in
turn, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Press responding that
the school encourages peaceful protest, and the kids who face
discipline refused to use the legitimate routes. This letter was mass
copied and two copies were placed on every dorm door on campus.

Repressive Rules, Selective Enforcement

It is clear that the school seeks to quell all social activism by
maintaining repressive rules and selectively enforcing them against any
progressive student activism. Actions to cajole and/or proselytize
students constitute an offense that is so vague and broad that
virtually every student, teacher, and administrator is guilty of it
every day. To cajole is defined as trying to influence or manipulate
others through insincere arguments, which is something Hampton
administrators routinely do to students. Every recognized student club
on campus to some extent attempts to proselytize, that is, to
persuade students to adopt a specific orientation or actions. This rule
is vague so that it can be selectively enforced in the interests of the
administration.

Moreover, the schools concern about the actions of our group speaks to
a much deeper issue. The administration itself has long been guilty of
attempts at cajoling and proselytizing black students with its strict
assimilationist program. The most profound contradiction in Hamptons
program is that it aims to make its black students ignorant of the
racism which pervades our society, while fostering an elitist and
individualist culture that works to the detriment of the Black
community. The accused students merely attempted to challenge the
corporate bourgeois indoctrination prevalent at Hampton and to promote
ideas more attuned to the interest of the community and humanity in
general. It is only in the sickest sense that the promotion of human
rights-related issues can be seen as an attempt to convert the students
from one persuasion to another. The school makes no attempt to educate
its black students on any of the issues, and seems to prefer
cultivating political docility and sub ordinance instead.

The students also face charges of violating the guidelines set forth by
the Administration on student demonstrations. It has been our
experience that the provisions which control student demonstrations as
delineated in the Student Handbook effectively prevent any expression
of dissent, and therefore any semblance of democracy. This is because
any demonstration, march, vigil, or rally on campus must be called by
an officially recognized student group and approved in advance by the
Chief of Police and Director of Student Activities. Any student group
that might call for such actions never gets recognized by the
Administration in the first place.

Hampton Universitys administration has shown time and time again that
it will not recognize, nor give any legitimacy to our organizations and
our causes. We have repeatedly been denied access even to the
Administrations own procedures through which groups are evaluated and
then either recognized or denied recognition. Our applications have
never been afforded the hearings and votes to which we are supposed to
be entitled. The Administration, whenever it feels like, simply
announces that there is a moratorium on new student organizations.

In refusing to acknowledge and recognize the groups that they suspect
to be prone to protest and activism, the administration of Hampton, in
effect, bans activism on campus. This is what has long been enforced at
Hampton University. The violations outlined in the hearings summons
were only technicalities, created by the arbitrary and repressive
policies of the administration itself, which seek to deny any free and
independent social and political expression by Hampton University
students. And now the administration has informed the accused students
that they can be expelled for their offenses. More and more students at
HU believe, however, that their schools disdain for democratic
principles is unacceptable and must, at all costs, be resisted.

The administration was very clear in its opposition to our agenda from
the very beginning. When we put up the posters and fliers across campus
at night, they organized police teams during the day to march through
the campus and snatch down every paper. But the corporate elitist ethos
cultivated by Hampton still had to be counteracted, so we put up more
and more. The administrative response was always swift but never swift
enough, each time more overtly repressive than before.

Meanwhile, students and other groups, whether officially recognized or
not, routinely pass out unauthorized fliers and put up unauthorized
advertisements on campus daily. The advertisements are usually
promoting parties, bars and other venues for alcoholic consumption. The
administration rarely interferes with this activity and never punishes
those who engage in it. But the activists at Hampton put up posters
about a social justice-oriented student walk-out, and passed out
information on the brutal, highly unpopular War in Iraq, and they alone
are threatened with the penalties outlined in the student handbook.
This selective enforcement of the rules reveals the true nature of the
Hampton administration.

The Hampton Model as Apparatus of Exploitation

 Some of the Hampton police who harassed us said that they just had to
do their job. Just for clarification, their bosses are the University
President Dr. William R. Harvey, who is a Bush appointee to the Federal
National Mortgage Association, and a Board of Trustees bounteous with
Bush-Cheney campaign beneficiaries. A close friend of President Harvey
especially relevant to this discussion is the commencement speaker he
selected this past spring, Alphonso Jackson, Bushs Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development. Jackson has made a priority of cutting
back access by poor black people to subsidized Section 8 housing.
Shortly after hurricane Katrina, Jackson told the Houston Chronicle
that most of the black population of New Orleans should not be allowed
to return, and that New Orleans in the future will be a predominantly
white city. The University president has often shown this same contempt
for the Black community. A recent example is when he was asked by a few
members of our group at a Town Hall Meeting, the reason why the school
did not have an aids awareness group. President Harvey responded that
we probably did not need one because everyone knows about Aids. The
girls did not accept that answer because they knew that AIDS
disproportionately affected Blacks, and the Hampton Roads area was in
the Top ten AIDS infected areas--therefore they started a campus AIDs
group the next week.

 Students at Hampton University have become accustomed to, although not
content with, the schools restraint of free thought and expression.
The issue has arisen publicly before with the Hampton school of
journalism. In 2003, a student writer for the supposedly student-run
campus newspaper, The Hampton Script, wrote an article about the
school cafeteria and its 100+ health code violations. The
administration wasnt particularly enthused about how the information
would affect the schools image, so they seized all copies and
destroyed them.
They also basically purged the staff, attempted to expel the student
writer,
and created a task force to supervise the creative process of the
newspaper.
This task force, chaired by the Universitys Dean of Students who has no
journalistic credentials, made several recommendations to the
newspaper staff. One worth mentioning here states that Oversight and
guidance from a faculty advisor (or advisors) with adequate
journalistic knowledge and an appreciation and commitment to the
Hampton Model are necessary. This model was used in the academic
programs of other HBCUs. And while the faces and tactics have changed,
the underlying principle is nonetheless the same.

Hampton History

 When providing an even closer look at the educational environment of
historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), one will gain a
clearer understanding of its purpose in society and also its setting
for which student resistance to its educational model originated.
William Watkins explained how with the creation of HBCUs more
specifically, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton
University) played no small role in creating a comprador class for the
twentieth century. Black compradors have anchored the Black South. They
have been pious, conservative, obedient, and loyal to the
sociopolitical order. They have supported gradualism, incrementalism,
and non-violence over revolution. They have provided a sometimes
prosperous middle class without which the capitalist economy could not
have stabilized. They have acted as a buffer in the South, providing
business services, education, religion, fraternal orders, and hope to a
people battered by slavery, sharecropping, violence and four centuries
of oppression.

An avid proponent of this as an educational model that creates these
pseudo-progressive results was the founder of Hampton Normal and
Agricultural Institute, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Armstrongs
true feelings of blacks should not go unmentioned due to how these
beliefs guided him in administering education to blacks. Armstrong felt
the black does not see the point of life clearly; he lacks
foresight, judgment, and hard sense. His main trouble is not ignorance,
but deficiency of character; his grievances occupy him more than his
deepest needs. There is no lack of those who have mental capacity. The
question with him is not one of brains, but of right instincts, of
morals and of hard work. Armstrong placed blacks in the category of
savage races that were mentally sluggish and indolent. Character
training was/is the only way blacks could be salvaged. This is why
Hampton Universitys educational model is so significant. It is not
just schooling, but also it was/is, as Watkins puts it, saving a race
from itself.

The most prominent black advocate for this model was Armstrongs
neophyte Booker T. Washington. Because blacks faced oppression and
political repression on a daily basis, W.E.B. Du Bois felt this reality
should not go ignored. He pleaded with Washington to address these
realities by stating It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in
evil doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because
it is unpopular not to do so.

We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are
sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white. In
saying this, Du Bois draws the line between himself and supporters of
Armstrong and Washingtons form of education and indoctrination. When
black students rebel against the existing social order, they are looked
at as deviant because they buck an educational model that truly does
not function in their favor.

Student Resistance Through the Years

At Hampton University in 2005, this student resistance has been more
intense perhaps than ever before. In the wake of such social atrocities
as the Katrina disaster, black students have achieved a much higher
degree of political consciousness than in previous years. The student
activist group at Hampton, whose members are now being threatened with
expulsion, has worked tirelessly for years promoting consciousness on
social issues and providing ways for students to become involved.

In the Fall of 2002, students attempted to get Dr. Taye Wolde-Semayat,
a former political prisoner in Ethiopia and President of the Ethiopian
Teachers Union, to speak on campus. He had been released following a
five-year campaign by Amnesty International, the National Union of
Teachers, and teachers unions around the world. Hampton University
refused to allow him to speak on campus. The Vice President of Student
Affairs, Dr. Bennie McMorris, signed a form which would allow for Dr.
Taye to speak on campus but later rescinded his signature and refused
to allow the event to take place on campus. The students got a local
church as a venue for Dr. Taye to speak. These students also organized
massive carpooling for students to attend the event. Over 200 people,
including community and church members, students, and faculty attended
the event which was held two miles away from the campus.

After this event, our organization continued to fight to be a
recognized organization on campus. We were met with an administration
that repudiated the idea of recognizing an organization that sees as
its mission advocating, promoting, and mobilizing people to fight for
human rights. Each year we applied for recognition and have been
consistently denied access to the democratic process to which we are
entitled. Not only has our organization been denied recognition, but
other socially conscious and politically aware groups have also been
denied. To date, there are no progressive groups on the campus of
Hampton University.

Securing the Future

That has not stopped us from organizing. Weve managed to have our
meetings in random classrooms on campus through developing really good
relationships with campus workers. Many students see the need to
address social justice issues through activism and education. Even
though the University does not provide an environment conducive to
activism or allocate any resources to our group, weve managed not only
to function, but to grow. Our membership has increased exponentially
and the members are more passionate than ever. The administration is
now attempting to stifle this growth by singling out the next
generation of activists and trying to scare them into committing
themselves to the Hampton Model.

When the HU police and administration stopped our gathering, some of
the members of our group felt demoralized. We thought that the
intimidation of students by the Campus police and Administration meant
that we had failed. But seeing how energized the campus became after
the incident helped us change the way we saw the situation. Although
the police prevented us from making the point that we intended to make,
the students ultimately were made conscious in a much deeper way that
could not have been achieved through our speeches and poetry. The
students saw what their schools administration was really for by
seeing what it was against. Students saw first hand what happens when
students stand up for human rights and social justice. So many students
openly express their anger with the way Hampton handled the situation.

Students have been very supportive and sympathetic with what we are
doing at Hampton. Students who wouldnt have normally been involved are
now compelled to be active after watching their school reveal its true
colors. The administration was so arbitrary and ruthless that it
threatened an unaffiliated supporter with expulsion. It seems that even
moral support for activism is a grave violation to Hamptons
administration. These recent events have exposed the true nature of
Hampton University, its educational model, how it fits into the rest of
society, and above all else, why it should be resisted.

As students face administrative hearing that promise to be as grossly
undemocratic as the proceedings thus far, it is imperative that we send
a message to Hampton officials that they cannot get away with this. We
have gotten much support from students on campus, as well as individual
and groups outside the school who share our passion and recognize the
interconnectedness of our plights. However we still need a lot more. By
singling out the younger activists, the school figures it can nip
activism in the bud and it is thus our duty to make it clear that they
can do no such thing. It is vital that African Americans are able to
express their concern about the issues that so uniquely and
disproportionately affect our community. This remains true despite the
large sums of money the university receives from the military and other
places for maintaining a docile student body. We aim to act not
defensively, but counter-offensively in our resistance. It is not
enough to just ask the administration to leave us alone in this one
instance. We intend to illuminate problems that have perennially
plagued the campus of Hampton and we therefore DEMAND that Hampton
University drop all charges against the five students and change its
general policy toward social justice-oriented groups on campus. We will
not accept this denial of democratic procedure, nor the schools
betrayal of the black community. We are black students and we will no
longer be cajoled by the flattery of a dishonest administration nor
proselytized to the ways of the corporate elite. We will not be forget
about our people. We will not be intimidated. Fight not for us, but
with us because the actions of the Hampton Administration and the
increasingly frequent campus repression happening nationally ultimately
threaten us all.

----------------------------------------
John Robinson is an organizer at Hampton University. He is one of the
students charged in violation of the Hampton University Student Code of
Conduct. He is a senior sociology major from Washington D.C.

Brandon King is also both an organizer at Hampton U and one of the
students charged in violation of the Hampton University Student Code of
Conduct. He is a senior sociology major and a native of Chesapeake VA.

For updates on the situation unfolding at Hampton University go to

  www.campusantiwar.net ,

  http://www.traprockpeace.org/hampton_university_students ,

  http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/hampton/bbk66srv7wtwik .

  And for support please send email to hamptonsolidarity@yahoo.com .

------------------------------------------------

http://tinyurl.com/b9xq7

                                                     How to Take Action
Now to Support Students

Take action now to support Hampton University Students right to
educate and inform the student body about human rights.

Three Hampton University (Virginia) students face the possibility of
being expelled for participating in peaceful protest! They need your
solidarity now.

Tell Hampton University:
  -Drop all charges and cancel all hearings against the student
activists
  -Change your restrictive policy on student protests and demonstrations

Be sure to call and/or send a letter to the following decision maker(s):

Dr. Bennie McMorris,
Vice President for Student Affairs
757-727-5264
bennie.mcmorris@hamptonu.edu

Woodson Hopewell,
Dean of Men
woodson.hopewell@hamptonu.edu
757-727-5303

Jewel Long,
Dean of Women
jewel.long@hamptonu.edu
757-727-5486

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