President Moses's Banana Republic

When students did what President Moses refused to do--fight back against attacks on City College--Moses had them jailed, suspended, spied on, their elections rigged, and their newspapers shut down.

Part 2 of 2 on the Moses era. Click here for Part 1 of the series on the Moses era.

by Rob Wallace

Time and again during her tenure, recently departed CCNY President Yolanda Moses bowed to political pressure and chopped her charge, City College, to pieces, closing a $14 million budget gap by shutting down numerous departments and firing faculty. She refused to fight back against "her friend" CUNY Chancellor Ann Reynolds, Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani. Meanwhile, City College students did Moses's job-without her $100,000+ salary, her limo, and her College-provided duplex on West 87th Street-and fought back against the cuts.

The following are some more not-quite-chronological snapshots from the Moses era. These show Moses in the fatigues and mirrored sunglasses of a dictatorship's commandant.

Throw 'Em All in Jail!

A semester-long campaign against the 1995 round of cuts culminated on March 23, 1995 when CCNY students joined 20,000 CUNY and high school students and faculty who rallied at City Hall in protest against Governor Pataki's budget proposal to cut TAP and raise CUNY tuition $1000. Weeks after the rally, protest continued at the City College campus in the form of a student hunger strike conducted in the NAC Rotunda near the Cohen Library against the proposed cuts.

On April 11, 1995, the SAFE Team-CUNY Central's political police-and the New York Police Department arrested 47 CUNY hunger strikers and their supporters. They were thrown in jail downtown for the night. President Moses and Security Director Timothy Hubbard called in the SAFE Team without consulting the student government, which CUNY Board of Trustees policy requires. Administrators claimed the hunger strikers were arrested because they were in NAC after building hours. But even as the strikers were arrested, other students moved about the Rotunda, in and out of the Cohen Library, without harassment, much less arrest.

Riveting video of the arrests taken by CCNY's SAME-TV shows about a hundred NYPD in full riot gear. The video also shows a cowardly Moses scuttling away toward her limo on Convent Avenue as the police moved in on the NAC Building. The student holding the SAME-TV camera, obviously angry, demanded Moses why she had the students arrested. A visibly shaken Moses, seeming on the verge of tears, refused to reply.

SAFE Team logs brought out in subsequent court cases against CUNY Central showed a well-choreographed ballet among the CCNY administration, the SAFE Team, and the NYPD: "When proper notification and warnings were given by President Moses to the students and supporters and were not adhered to, the arrest process began. SAFE Team and NYPD conducted same."

Two days later the log reads, "Paperwork related to the duties was conducted along with a constant observance of movements of 'Key' players involved in the hunger strike." So even with the hunger strike over, Security continued to spy on student activists at City College, a practice that would continue for years afterwards with Moses's evident approval.

Summer of Spying

In the early summer of 1998, a CCNY staff member alerted student activists that CUNY Security had hidden a surveillance camera in a fake fire detector outside a student activist office (NAC 3/201). The activists subsequently discovered video surveillance taping equipment in the room next door to the activists' office. The students filed a lawsuit against the College for violating their constitutional rights to free assembly, sparking national media coverage.

The lawsuit would motivate Moses and administrators like Vice President Thomas Morales and Dean Paul Bobb to void the recent Graduate Student Council elections wherein an activist slate, including those very students who filed the lawsuit, had won. The suit would also inspired the administrators to silence one of Moses's most piquant critics, the Graduate Student Messenger, a forerunner of the Messenger that had been funded by the Graduate Student Council. The administration then put into the chair of the GSC Martha Flores, a hack who lost the overturned election and later testified in support of the administration during the surveillance lawsuit. Quid pro quo: signed, sealed and delivered. (For a full recap, check out the Messenger website section on violations of democratic rights at CCNY.

Earlier this year Moses visited the University of New Mexico to interview for the presidency there, a job she did not get because UNM was informed of Moses's record. While there, the UNM student newspaper asked her about the hidden camera. Moses responded, "The cameras were placed there to guard against theft. A lot of computers were being stolen, so it was only for the students' protection." Moses gave the same type of explanation for arresting the hunger strikers in 1995: It was for their students' "safety." In other words, throwing you in jail and spying on you is for your own good.

Moses's explanation for the spying falls apart when one considers that no computer had ever been stolen out of 3/201, which at that time had only three computers. Meanwhile, down the hall from 3/201, a computer lab with 50 computers never had a hidden camera on it. Finally, Security Director Hubbard admitted in an affidavit submitted in the students' lawsuit that the camera was placed there because of Hubbard had been informed by CCNY PR spokesman Charles DeCicco, erroneously at that, that student activists were planning on taking over the NAC Building on graduation day in response to the CUNY Board of Trustees' vote to end remediation at senior colleges.

Target: Dissidents

In 1996, Moses and her administrators were confronted by more protest from students and faculty for her threats to scuttle the ethnic studies departments. Rather than throwing the whole lot in jail like she did in 1995, a tactic that landed Moses a shit pie of bad publicity in her face, Moses tried a different approach. Now she, along with the "little men" administrators around her, as Professor Leonard Jeffries has called them, would target key student organizers.

The case of David Suker shows just how dysfunctional Moses's administration became as it became obsessed with destroying a student who added so much to CCNY life and, in turn, made administrators' jobs easier (though they would likely never admit it).

Suker was in many ways more CCNY's president than Moses could ever be. Besides a continual presence at the Graduate Student Council, serving as its chair in 1996, Suker was a key part of the fabric of student life at City College for almost five years. So much so that the busy Suker often slept in various niches on campus at night.

Suker had a prominent role in resuscitating the Graduate Student Council, which had been little else but a patronage farm (and is once again under the current reign of Martha Flores). He helped numerous students maneuver through the Finley Center bureaucracy, form cultural clubs, and receive funding. He was a key organizer of events including the incredibly popular Talent and Fashion Show.

Moreover, he was a major organizer in every CUNY-wide political event since 1995. Suker was a founder of the CCNY Coalition to Stop the Cuts in 1995, the backbone of hunger strikers against the budget cuts that were jailed. He was a founding member of the CUNY-wide SLAM! network that began in 1996. He took a key role in a group called Students for a New USS (SNUSS) that attempted to bring new blood into the usually and still corrupt and ineffective CUNY-wide government. Suker also hit the streets, attending just about every demonstration on- and off-campus against Moses, Giuliani, Pataki, the Board of Trustees and all their plans to wreck CUNY with budget cuts, tuition hikes, departmental closures, guns on campus, CUNY Cards, etc.

Suker was also involved in two lawsuits against CUNY. He was a plaintiff in the lawsuit brought against CCNY for spying on activists with a hidden surveillance camera. He was also a plaintiff along with Professor William Crain that temporarily blocked CUNY's attempt to end remedial classes in the senior colleges.

Clearly, Suker was a royal pain in the ass to the CCNY administration. And Moses and Student Affairs Vice President Morales went after him with a vengeance. Suker's personality-at times rancorous and petulant-fueled the personal nature of the administrators' attacks on him. This was especially the case for the touchy Moses who often felt humiliated by Suker and the example he set, a standard she could not meet. It was also the case for Vice President Morales whose pomposity and self-importance made him envision Suker's actions as personal insults.

In 1996, Morales convened a disciplinary panel at City College-stocked with personal appointments-that suspended Suker for an entire academic year. Suker's crimes? At the administration building he loudly demanded to see President Moses. He got some paint on the NAC Rotunda floor when making banners against the budget cuts. He demanded to be allowed onto a CCNY bus going to Albany to lobby legislators. He interrupted Carl McCall's budget-cut apologia when the State Comptroller spoke at CCNY. The panel's penalty was so egregiously political that a CUNY Central appeal committee reduced the suspension to one semester- still an absurdity.

In 1998, Morales again went after Suker. His crime this time? During the summer of 1998, soon after Suker and other activists leveled a lawsuit against the College for the surveillance camera, Suker, a GSC member, attempted to bring his then-two year old daughter Serenity with him on the annual student government retreat to Pennsylvania. Only after Suker had boarded the bus with his daughter did administrators inform him that his daughter wasn't allowed to go. This, despite the fact that students and administrators in years past had brought their children including, ironically enough, Morales himself. Suker never raised his voice or even refused to leave the bus. He only demanded the incident be documented by a security guard.

Nevertheless, for this heinous crime another disciplinary panel convened by Morales punished Suker with a five-semester prohibition from student life activities, including participation on the GSC, a clear violation of his right to participate in government and a punishment clearly tailored to end his activism.

During this second "trial", all testimony about the pattern of administration harassment against him was ruled out of order, while Morales was allowed to give the panel's members copies of Suker's disciplinary record and to verbally malign Suker's character.

Human Rights Watch, the human rights organization, selected Moses earlier this year as a member of its board of directors. That's absurd. That she was then named chair of its committee on academic freedom is mind-boggling. CCNY during Moses's reign was a banana republic of rigged and stolen student elections, shut-down newspapers, backroom deals, as well as jail, harassment, suspension and surveillance of dissidents.

The Pentagon on the Hill

The expansion of Security during the very years that CCNY suffered its worst budget cuts in history showed CUNY more interested in social control than in education. CUNY Central's security budget jumped from $21.8 million to over $40 million in 1995 on salary and benefits alone, never mind expenses and equipment. CCNY Security took in $3.27 million in salaries alone that year, 5% of the College's total budget. While CUNY fired over 160 professors, it hired 161 new security officers. CCNY, which suffered the worst of the professorial firings, received the largest compliment of new guards.

The increase in Security presence on the campus led to a proliferation of security brutality and harassment incidents. Security guards sexually harassed female students. Male students were jumped and pepper-sprayed for such dangerous crimes as not showing their CCNY ID's fast enough or talking back to a disrespectful guard. One 1997 incident saw guards run wild at a student-run talent show in the Aranow Theater, verbally abusing performers and their parents and other audience members, and pushing one 14-year-old girl.

In 1996 the Pentagon on the Hill attempted to expand its armory. During the annual summer retreat with CCNY student government officials, Moses declared in a response to a question that she had heard nothing of rumors about arming campus security guards. Symbolic of how fucked-up and off-message the Moses administration was, the next day CCNY Security Director Timothy Hubbard told student government officials he was proposing arming campus security.

Student activists and the student government, a good progressive bunch that year, began a preemptive campaign against arming security. The campaign--with flyers, forums, and tabling--culminated in a raucous October 24, 1996 Town Hall meeting in the Aranow Theater where about 300 students and faculty denounced Hubbard's proposal.

To her credit, Moses rejected Hubbard's proposal several days after the Town Hall meeting, though several hundred people chanting "No guns!" at her in Aranow made that decision easy to make. Although a promised new bus, to transport students directly to nearby subway stations, never materialized, the decision to keep guards from being armed was Moses's finest moment at City.

The Arming Security forum marked the last time Moses would make a campus-wide appearance for the rest of her tenure outside of Freshman Convocations (for freshman who had yet to learn of her). In March 1998 students had to crash a faculty-only meeting Moses had set up so the students could speak with their own campus president. Moses for the most part spent the rest of her tenure holed up in her office or, more often, off-campus. She would make speeches on campuses across the country on her idealized vision of multicultural education, while ignoring the gritty, nuts-and-bolts problems at multiracial City College.

A Missed Opportunity

In the Buena Vista Social Club movie, so moved by the Cuban music he was helping record, the musician Ry Cooder tells his son, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I have this feeling that everything I've done and been, all the training I've undergone, has come down to this moment."

The CCNY presidency was Moses's moment. At no time in her life will she ever get the chance to act on what she thought she trained herself for and experienced. It was a perfect opportunity. As a Black woman versed in the arguments of race and multicultural pedagogy, at a college in the middle of Harlem and Washington Heights, at a time when an unrepentant racist ascended to the mayoralty and began to launch vicious attacks on CUNY and especially City College, the moment could have been hers.

Moses could have launched an uncompromising defense of the College, a defense that would likely have rallied support of the campus and the nearby communities. Had she been subsequently fired, well, it would have been no big deal personally. With her credentials she could land another job. But defending students who need a college education to avoid (at best) McDonald's jobs is well worth any repercussion which the Chancellor and Board of Trustees might level at her. Moses chose instead to cower behind her office and cultivate the image of an activist president, touring the country speaking against racism and for multiculturalism, but at home aiding the racists in their efforts to gut CUNY with budget cuts and so-called standards. And she still got canned for her obsequiousness! Now she's holed up alone in an office at the Graduate Center where she retains an appointment in the Anthropology Department, her reputation permanently in tatters.

But others would argue that Moses's record was in the crapper from her Cal-State days. Or that a landlord with $3 million in holdings in California, as she and her husband have, would hardly understand the plight of City's working class students. Or that she wouldn't have been recruited into the CCNY presidency in the first place if Chancellor Reynolds didn't understand that Moses would be amenable to instituting draconian cuts and policies. Or that Moses wasn't really much of an administrator to begin with: year-in and year-out registration was a mess, courses were canceled without notice, bathrooms closed, etc. In the words of one student, "Nothing really works here."

Either way, it's bye-bye, bumbler.