'People are fed up with all the cuts.?

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The following is an interview with Mark Torres, spokesperson for Students for Educational Rights-Takeover Committee at City College of New York. The interview was conducted by Peter Atwood for Socialist Action.

Socialist Action: The type of student mobilization such as we've seen here in the last three weeks has been unusual during the last 20 years. What is the background?

Mark Torres: What we're talking about here is an error. It's an error where social services are being given a back seat to tax breaks for the rich and military buildups. The Reagan years are now the Bush years, and there's a feeling that nothing is going to improve, but instead Will get worse.

I think these mobilizations are appropriate now in light of all that's happened in the last several years. People are just fed up with all the cutbacks.

What you're looking at is a iwo-party system where the Democrats and Republicans are Tweedledee and Tweedledum. You get Republican budget cuts from Democrats and you get Democratic rhetoric from Republicans, and so people are becoming more and more alienated and isolated.

S.A.: What's the current situation?

Torres: The students have a whole list of demands. There are campus demands, university demands and, of course, budget demands. On those levels where you have severe budget cuts, it means tuition increases. It also means layoffs of faculty and staff-which means the deterioration and destruction of the university system, which until 1976 had been free.

There's a racist overtone to this. As soon as you have people of color entering the universities, you have the imposition of tuition. And as the numbers of people of color grow, you have more budget cuts, more layoffs.

Racism has become more apparent. You can tell a government's intentions by its budget. You can tell a college administration's intentions by its programs.

S.A.: How are you keeping the students mobilized?

Torres: We've had a lot of open air meetings and updates, factsheets have been distributed, live music, general discourses between students and faculty, and just a lot of hard work.

S.A.: You got a lot of support from unions—such as the striking machinists at Eastern Airlines. How did you accomplish this?

Torres: What we've tried to reiterate and what a lot of the papers didn't pick up is that this is not just a student fight. We realized that a lot of social programs were also being cut, and these social programs affected unions directly because their workers are the ones who give these services.

Also, these workers are part of the community that receives these services. So we understood that it was not just an attack on students, but part of an overall attack on the working class. We appealed to the working class and all people who have a direct stake in this.

Our main goal, of course, is to make sure our campus demands are met. But we also want to raise the whole issue of access, the issue of racism, the issues of classicism and sexism, and bring them to the forefront. We want to have the labor unions, the workers, students, and community activists address these issues.

This society is alienating more and more people. We've got to take action on that. If you don't say "stop" and if you don't act to put that stop in place, they'll just steamroll over you. So our vision is not so much just a vision of a better campus or better university but of a better society as a whole.

ICTION JUNE 1989 5

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