B
Bothrops Alticola
Guest
Seven Steps to a Homeland Security Campus
By Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Nation and TomDispatch.com
Posted on January 11, 2008, Printed on January 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/73504/
Consider the ultimate gift in a homeland security country: the iTaser,
a weapon with its own MP3 player and earphones that can deliver a
50,000 volt electrical charge while you catch your favorite tunes.
This new Taser, on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, will be available, reports Richard Wray of the British
Guardian, in "red, pink and even leopard print designs." Anyone
carrying the iTaser will be able to make what may be the first
homeland-security fashion statement in any one of the 43 states where
Tasers are legal. The company that makes the weapon, Taser
International, has already sold 160,000 less-stylish versions to
private individuals. According to founder and company CEO Rick Smith,
"Personal protection can be both fashionable and functionable."
In November 2006, the Taser infamously broke into the news on campus
when a student at the University of Florida, questioning Senator John
Kerry harshly, was dragged off, Tased, and subdued by campus police.
His plea, "Don't Tase me, Bro!," is now the stuff of bumper stickers,
T-shirts, and cell phone ring tones. Thanks largely to him and the
publicity the incident got, the New Oxford Dictionary made "Tase" one
of its 2007 words of the year, the Yale Book of Quotations put it at
the top of its yearly list of most memorable quotes, and the rest of
us got a hint that something new might be happening in America's
"ivory towers."
As Michael Gould-Wartofsky indicates below, that incident was just the
tip of an enormous homeland-security presence on campus. Gould-
Wartofsky's remarkable report -- a piece that the Nation Magazine and
Tomdispatch.com are sharing -- offers real news about just how deeply
the new homeland security state is settling into every aspect of our
world. -- Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch
Repress U
How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven Steps By Michael
Gould-Wartofsky
Free speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new
security curriculum. Private security contractors... Welcome to the
new homeland security campus
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest
watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned
their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism" --
as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the
same name -- have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of
radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland-security campus and bringing the university to
heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents: As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the
campus has increasingly become a target gallery -- with student
protesters in the crosshairs. The government's number one target?
Peace and justice organizations.
From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the
Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a
secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct
"potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself.
Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered
at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the
U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" -- from student groups at
the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York,
Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other
campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now
double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law
Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism
Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student
activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of
Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work
themselves. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free
speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those
who step outside them. Last year, protests were typically forced into
"free assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson
University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced
expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka "unauthorized
materials."
2. Lock and load: Many campus police departments are morphing into
heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry from
Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles.
Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of
"the war on crime" only escalated with the President's Global War on
Terror. Each school shooting -- most recently the massacre at Virginia
Tech -- just adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities now arm their police, according to the
Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously
in the province of military units and SWAT teams. For instance, AR-15
rifles (similar to M-16s) are now in the arsenal of the University of
Texas campus police. Last April, City University of New York bought
dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Now, states like Nevada are even
considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special
reserve officer corps."
Most of the force used on campus these days, though, comes in "less
lethal" form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets
increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the
ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of
torture" by the UN. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006
to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for
failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. Last September, a
University of Florida student was Tased after asking pointed questions
of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea of "Don't Tase me,
bro" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus: Surveillance
has become a boom industry nationally -- one that now reaches deep
into the heart of the American campus. In fact, universities have
witnessed explosive growth in the electronic surveillance of students,
faculty, and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit
security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or
undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators
reports that surveillance cameras have now found their way onto at
least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus
doubling, tripling, and in a few cases, rising tenfold since September
11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private
campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance,
has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about
200 each.
Elsewhere, it can be tricky just to find out where the cameras are and
what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas, for
example, battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately
kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, a camera's purpose seems
obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the
Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno.
In January 2005, the widely respected professor found a hidden camera
redirected to monitor his office.
4. Mine student records: Student records have, in recent years, been
opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation,
recruitment, or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an
operation code-named "Project Strike Back," the Department of
Education teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14
million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The
objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an
FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential
terrorist activity."
Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students
at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later,
the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher
Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the
creation of a federal "unit record" database that would track the
activities and studies of college students nationwide. The
Department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype
for such a national database.
It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn
campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed
forces. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own
database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market
Research and Studies, this program now tracks 30 million young people,
ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has
partnered with private marketing and data mining firms, which, in
turn, sell the government reams of information on students and other
potential recruits.
5. Track foreign-born students, keep the undocumented out: Under the
auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign
students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor
Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it
was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while
keeping more than 4.7 million names in its database.
The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students
throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick
files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated
with all academic, biographical, and employment records -- all of
which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall
out of "status" at school -- or if the database thinks they have --
the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.
ICE has also done its part to keep the homeland security campus
purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration
Law Foundation estimates that only one in 20 undocumented immigrants
who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college. Many don't go
because they cannot afford the tuition, but also because they have
good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did
make it to college, some before they could graduate.
6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom, and the laboratory:
Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security
threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen
as potential assets. To exploit these assets, the Department of
Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of
University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland
security culture within the academic community."
The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal
fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to
students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise."
Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate
programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses over
1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the
homeland security classroom are the U.S. Northern Command (Northcom)
and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland
Security and Defense Education Consortium.
OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align
scientific results with homeland security priorities." In Fiscal Year
2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland
security-related research. Grants correspond with 16 research topics
selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation, and a
smattering of scientific advice.
But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own
"Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of
universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence
for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the
funding for which cleared the House in October. The Center is mandated
to assist a National Commission in combating those "adopting or
promoting an extremist belief system... to advance political,
religious or social change."
7. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course, homeland security is
not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance
and data mining -- it's big business. (According to USA Today, global
homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a
year in 2006, a six-fold increase over 2000.)
Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent years,
established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the
corporations that have the most to gain from their research. The
Department of Homeland Security's on-campus National Consortium for
the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), for
instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center
for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group
that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and
direction," according to its chair.
While vast sums of money are flowing in from these corporate sponsors,
huge payments are also flowing out into "strategic supplier contracts"
with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource
security operations to big corporations like Securitas and
AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the
properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers at
universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with
little accountability for conditions on campus.
Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships
with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May,
for example, the University of Illinois and its police training
institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and
training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later
revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on
the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such
collaboration is apparently par for the course.
Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland
security state and its constituents have come a long way in their
drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on
lockdown. Somewhere, inside the growing homeland security state that
is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly
already being planned out.
Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland
security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny
or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes,
such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the
Pentagon's TALON de-clawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A
rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students
for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in
repression from Pace and Hampton, where the University dropped its
threats of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded
against passive resisters.
Yet, if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't
loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of
ivory, but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of
America.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York City and a recent
graduate of the new homeland security campus. He has written for the
Nation Online, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson,
where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has also appeared in
Poets Against the War (Nation Books). He was a recipient of the New
York Times James B. Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard's
James Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective memory. This
piece is also appearing in the latest issue of the Nation Magazine.
By Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Nation and TomDispatch.com
Posted on January 11, 2008, Printed on January 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/73504/
Consider the ultimate gift in a homeland security country: the iTaser,
a weapon with its own MP3 player and earphones that can deliver a
50,000 volt electrical charge while you catch your favorite tunes.
This new Taser, on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, will be available, reports Richard Wray of the British
Guardian, in "red, pink and even leopard print designs." Anyone
carrying the iTaser will be able to make what may be the first
homeland-security fashion statement in any one of the 43 states where
Tasers are legal. The company that makes the weapon, Taser
International, has already sold 160,000 less-stylish versions to
private individuals. According to founder and company CEO Rick Smith,
"Personal protection can be both fashionable and functionable."
In November 2006, the Taser infamously broke into the news on campus
when a student at the University of Florida, questioning Senator John
Kerry harshly, was dragged off, Tased, and subdued by campus police.
His plea, "Don't Tase me, Bro!," is now the stuff of bumper stickers,
T-shirts, and cell phone ring tones. Thanks largely to him and the
publicity the incident got, the New Oxford Dictionary made "Tase" one
of its 2007 words of the year, the Yale Book of Quotations put it at
the top of its yearly list of most memorable quotes, and the rest of
us got a hint that something new might be happening in America's
"ivory towers."
As Michael Gould-Wartofsky indicates below, that incident was just the
tip of an enormous homeland-security presence on campus. Gould-
Wartofsky's remarkable report -- a piece that the Nation Magazine and
Tomdispatch.com are sharing -- offers real news about just how deeply
the new homeland security state is settling into every aspect of our
world. -- Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch
Repress U
How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven Steps By Michael
Gould-Wartofsky
Free speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new
security curriculum. Private security contractors... Welcome to the
new homeland security campus
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest
watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned
their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism" --
as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the
same name -- have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of
radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland-security campus and bringing the university to
heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents: As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the
campus has increasingly become a target gallery -- with student
protesters in the crosshairs. The government's number one target?
Peace and justice organizations.
From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the
Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a
secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct
"potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself.
Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered
at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the
U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" -- from student groups at
the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York,
Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other
campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now
double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law
Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism
Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student
activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of
Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.
FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work
themselves. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free
speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those
who step outside them. Last year, protests were typically forced into
"free assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson
University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced
expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka "unauthorized
materials."
2. Lock and load: Many campus police departments are morphing into
heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry from
Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles.
Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of
"the war on crime" only escalated with the President's Global War on
Terror. Each school shooting -- most recently the massacre at Virginia
Tech -- just adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities now arm their police, according to the
Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously
in the province of military units and SWAT teams. For instance, AR-15
rifles (similar to M-16s) are now in the arsenal of the University of
Texas campus police. Last April, City University of New York bought
dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Now, states like Nevada are even
considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special
reserve officer corps."
Most of the force used on campus these days, though, comes in "less
lethal" form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets
increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the
ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of
torture" by the UN. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006
to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for
failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. Last September, a
University of Florida student was Tased after asking pointed questions
of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea of "Don't Tase me,
bro" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus: Surveillance
has become a boom industry nationally -- one that now reaches deep
into the heart of the American campus. In fact, universities have
witnessed explosive growth in the electronic surveillance of students,
faculty, and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit
security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or
undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators
reports that surveillance cameras have now found their way onto at
least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus
doubling, tripling, and in a few cases, rising tenfold since September
11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private
campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance,
has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about
200 each.
Elsewhere, it can be tricky just to find out where the cameras are and
what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas, for
example, battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately
kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, a camera's purpose seems
obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the
Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno.
In January 2005, the widely respected professor found a hidden camera
redirected to monitor his office.
4. Mine student records: Student records have, in recent years, been
opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation,
recruitment, or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an
operation code-named "Project Strike Back," the Department of
Education teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14
million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The
objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an
FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential
terrorist activity."
Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students
at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later,
the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher
Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the
creation of a federal "unit record" database that would track the
activities and studies of college students nationwide. The
Department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype
for such a national database.
It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn
campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed
forces. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own
database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market
Research and Studies, this program now tracks 30 million young people,
ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has
partnered with private marketing and data mining firms, which, in
turn, sell the government reams of information on students and other
potential recruits.
5. Track foreign-born students, keep the undocumented out: Under the
auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign
students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor
Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it
was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while
keeping more than 4.7 million names in its database.
The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students
throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick
files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated
with all academic, biographical, and employment records -- all of
which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall
out of "status" at school -- or if the database thinks they have --
the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.
ICE has also done its part to keep the homeland security campus
purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration
Law Foundation estimates that only one in 20 undocumented immigrants
who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college. Many don't go
because they cannot afford the tuition, but also because they have
good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did
make it to college, some before they could graduate.
6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom, and the laboratory:
Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security
threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen
as potential assets. To exploit these assets, the Department of
Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of
University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland
security culture within the academic community."
The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal
fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to
students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise."
Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate
programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses over
1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the
homeland security classroom are the U.S. Northern Command (Northcom)
and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland
Security and Defense Education Consortium.
OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align
scientific results with homeland security priorities." In Fiscal Year
2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland
security-related research. Grants correspond with 16 research topics
selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation, and a
smattering of scientific advice.
But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own
"Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of
universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence
for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the
funding for which cleared the House in October. The Center is mandated
to assist a National Commission in combating those "adopting or
promoting an extremist belief system... to advance political,
religious or social change."
7. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course, homeland security is
not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance
and data mining -- it's big business. (According to USA Today, global
homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a
year in 2006, a six-fold increase over 2000.)
Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent years,
established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the
corporations that have the most to gain from their research. The
Department of Homeland Security's on-campus National Consortium for
the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), for
instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center
for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group
that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and
direction," according to its chair.
While vast sums of money are flowing in from these corporate sponsors,
huge payments are also flowing out into "strategic supplier contracts"
with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource
security operations to big corporations like Securitas and
AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the
properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers at
universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with
little accountability for conditions on campus.
Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships
with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May,
for example, the University of Illinois and its police training
institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and
training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later
revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on
the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such
collaboration is apparently par for the course.
Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland
security state and its constituents have come a long way in their
drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on
lockdown. Somewhere, inside the growing homeland security state that
is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly
already being planned out.
Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland
security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny
or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes,
such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the
Pentagon's TALON de-clawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A
rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students
for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in
repression from Pace and Hampton, where the University dropped its
threats of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded
against passive resisters.
Yet, if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't
loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of
ivory, but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of
America.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York City and a recent
graduate of the new homeland security campus. He has written for the
Nation Online, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson,
where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has also appeared in
Poets Against the War (Nation Books). He was a recipient of the New
York Times James B. Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard's
James Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective memory. This
piece is also appearing in the latest issue of the Nation Magazine.