#datmovementsu

Now our loyal readers will remember #DATmovementSU. It started with a rally, then a sit-in, an occupation. Then it became a movement. Check out our twitter timeline for a live unfolding of the events, the hashtags, and @Thegeneralbody. Do you remember the beginning? When Kent thought that he could keep sending us his blog posts without mentioning #DATmovementSU?!

  Here's a little reminder that Kent is still trying to control the narrative. On his "Orange Bleeders" blog, <image> where every single email he has sent out to the community – including the one about the deer or bear poll – is there. Something is missing. None of the emails that he sent out about #DATmovementSU are there. <image> (Don't worry, we've kept an archive. And our loyal writers have been responding to him all along.)

  But first, here's a little timeline, a reminder of the "important" things that Kent emailed us about during #DATMovementSU

  Nov 3rd:

  Rally and Occupation of Crouse Hinds begins!

  Meanwhile, in Kentland (http://chancellor.syr.edu/messages/m/family-weekend.html)......

    La La La... I can't hear anything!! I don't see any protest!! Wasn't that Family weekend fun, kids?! Go Orange! (Just don't go to Crouse-Hinds, mmkay?) Maybe if I just re-play this song over and over again, this will stop. http://youtu.be/c6bEic1Jrok 

       November 11th,

  Students' rights restricted, policed and surveilled by DPS, locked in on weekends, fenced in. Multiple departments have signed letters of support. Faculty have been doing teach-ins since Day 1.

  Meanwhile, in Kentland (http://chancellor.syr.edu/messages/m/november-11.html).....

    LA LA LA. I STILL can't hear anything! Maybe if I put up an opaque fence to keep the public support from them, they'll see how transparent I am! (Transparently anti-student activism or involvement). By the way, did you guys know it's Veteran's Day?! Just a reminder you may want to leave C-H to celebrate, don't want to miss all those sales honoring all those vets at Destiny USA!!! No, you'll totally be allowed back in, feel free to go to the mall, seriously. I hear Penny's is having a sale!

       November 17th

  Day 14 of the Sit-in. Students keep getting national press, working hard for concrete changes, Kent keeps ignoring them, students protest IN FRONT OF KENT"S HOUSE.

  Meanwhile, in Kentland (http://chancellor.syr.edu/messages/m/many-dimensions.html).....

    LA LA LA LA LA. "RUTH WILL YOU TURN THAT DAMN MUSIC UP!?! Guests will be hear any minute for the party and I don't want them seeing those unwashed, protesting riff-raff. Have Jeeves bring everyone in the back entrance." LA LA LA LA...no no, rich donor who only gives to the football program, those aren't protesting students out my window, they are snowmen! The kids here love having a jolly good time. Have I showed you the lovely Fall Wreath Ruth ordered from Williams Sonoma? It's artisanal! [RUTH, HAVE THE MAID SHUT THE DAMN DRAPES, WOMAN! I'M TRYING TO RAISE MONEY HERE!] "Here Ruth, show Chad your wreath!" Kent dashes to the phone: "Operator, get me the legal department, pronto!... I don't care who you have to call up to drive in the snow in for, go give those students some legal intimidation, damnit! Fuck them and their demands! We don't want our Thanksgiving ruined, see! Betty and Don Draper are coming over and we need to impress!"

          November 24th,

  Students have been denied legal representation, have been intimidated by college counsel, DPS, and everyone else. They decide to end this portion of their protest and begin the next phase in the Spring! Final rally in front of Hendricks Chapel.

  Meanwhile, in Kentland (http://chancellor.syr.edu/messages/m/orange-teamwork.html)..............

Kent, 

  You say you care about memory, but everything you've done since you've arrived at Syracuse has ignored the memory of our students. Funny how lawyers have a way of forgetting history. Kent, I'm a Remembrance Scholar. And I learned a lot about my student and the time period in which they attended SU. I'd like to think that living in that time, they cared about pressing social issues, like AIDS and the war on poverty. I don't think they would want their deaths used to obscure the social problems facing us today.

  There ARE urgent challenges that require our attention: well-documented micro-aggressions that occur in class and on campus; endemic racism, classism, ableism, hetero-patriarchy; vicious sexual assaults and no resources afforded to survivors, just a bro-tastic campus that breeds rape culture, struggles for diversity that are about numbers but so much more;

  Kent, we want to assure that your memory of our students is long--of their accomplishments long before you arrived, of the accumulated education debt anchored in legacies of chattel slavery, share cropping, and Jim Crow laws, of the gender disparities and violences women, queer students, and trans* students face on campus. If we are to memorialize the loss of those killed on Pan Am Flight 103, we must also face Syracuse's deeper, albeit tarnished, history. Cutting programs like POSSE or The Advocacy Center merely push these histories, and their memories, under the rug; it is a shameful history Syracuse chooses to ignore or, more accurately, erase. We refuse this erasure. Memory-work, after all, compels us to face all histories, not through the perspectives of those in power. 

  We ask you, Kent, to "Act Forward," maybe taking a cue from #DATmovementSU??