Sanctioned Student Shares Personal Account of Demonstration for Faculty Rights

Story from Fordham's The Paper

by Sarah Lopez

Last Thursday, protesters, including myself, were marching into Cunniffe in order to demand an answer from Father McShane about granting the union a free and fair election—an answer that the school promised but did not live up to. This was not the first action we organized to ask that the administration clarify their stance and respond to our inquiries, but the administration deflected or ignored our requests after each of our past actions. At an earlier demonstration on April 18th, students and faculty demonstrating outside of President McShane’s office were told that administration would give them an answer by the end of the day as to whether the university would allow a free union election for contingent faculty. Those students and faculty waited for an answer for four hours. At the end of the business day, students and faculty were told that the university’s president had more pressing matters to attend to than faculty labor rights.

That is why we decided to enter the building last Thursday—so we could see Father McShane in person and demand answers without being turned away. We were not looking to get involved in any physical altercations, nor to cause a huge commotion inside the building. We just wanted to have a presence there so the president would know that the student body and faculty were together on this issue, and that we were not going to stand by while it was ignored. However, the security blocked the doors as if we were criminals looking to cause harm rather than adults and concerned parties trying to be heard. We were students and faculty going to see our school president, which should be within our rights as he is meant to be the representative of our school. We were able to get inside because the door was unlocked.

However, once we were inside, Public Safety officers charged at us to scare and intimidate us....[Read more...]

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The Fordham 14: Some of Fordham's Best

It is wonderful news that President McShane has reversed his position on the unionization of contingent faculty at Fordham because, he notes, it is "the right thing to do." In his announcement, he recognized that "organized labor has deep roots in Catholic social justice teachings." Social justice is one of the pillars in the university's mission and social justice is what motivated a group of students to rally and protest in support of those of their professors on April 27. These students are an extraordinary group who are in many ways the very best and most dedicated student-scholars that Fordham has nurtured. They are honors students who have undertaken and excelled in the most challenging intellectual paths we offer, and they are award winners whose writings have dazzled their professors. Above all, they are students who, through their actions, strove to embody the Jesuit ideal of "men and women for others." Their collective pursuit of ...

"My hope is that we admirers of the Jesuit ethos will not be disappointed in how the demonstrators are ultimately treated."

"I have always been so proud of my son's Fordham education and his steeping in Jesuit standards of intellectual rigor, personal integrity and social justice. Please don't betray those values by anything less than giving fair treatment to those students who were pursuing what they saw as fairness for others. My hope is that we admirers of the Jesuit ethos will not be disappointed in how the demonstrators are ultimately treated." Mary Killenberg Riley, parent of an alum The petition protesting the initial, punitive treatment of accused students, which was sent to Fordham President Joseph McShane on May 1, now has over 1650 signatures (and you can still sign it). Many signers added passionate and powerful comments with their signatures. Those comments will be posted here, anonymously or attributed, depending on what the signer gave permission to do.

Verdicts and Sanctions Announced

On Monday evening, the 14 accused students received letters from the administration officials who had held their hearings. These hearings consisted of one-on-one, closed door meetings with either the Dean of Students or his designated representative. Accused students were not permitted to bring faculty advocates, student supporters, or anyone else to accompany them. Supporters were kept outside the Student Life Offices; in some cases faculty members from barred from even entering the buildings where the hearings were taking place. Nor were students allowed any witnesses in these "hearings." Even so, some of them took as long as 90 minutes. Some but not all of the students have shared the letters they received from university officials announcing their verdicts and sanctions. It is unsurprising that these patently unfair proceedings--which are standard operating procedure described in Fordham's Student Handbook--seem to have resulted in "convictions" on all ...

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