My Miserable Brooklyn College Activist Experience

I hated absolutely every second of “activism” at Brooklyn College. It made me sick. The awkward attempts at adjunct-professor-student relations that constantly failed to overcome the implicit hierarchies to endless meetings that discussed nothing but were treated as absolutely necessary. From bizarre personalities that used activism as a career platform to professors that thought throwing a bone our way was “sticking to it to the man” and were ignorant of the class differences between them and the adjuncts and students they were working with. We’re all in this together? No, we aren’t. How can I forget the immediate silence of an adjunct entering the room of students, the shift of power as the most powerful personalities decided what was to be done. Even the voting processes were based on shame, manipulation, and exhaustion. Sure, let’s do that. It has been 2 hours. I will agree to anything that let’s me go home.

For everything I said, there was always some attempt at counter-measure. Okay, so the most powerful personalities are taking over a room, so let’s force people who don’t feel comfortable to speak! Surely that will work! Single out people who have nothing to say, put them on the spot, demand they contribute. Talk about the professors behind their back. Speak constantly of adjunct-student solidarity as a way to combat the utter lack of real solidarity. By speaking it you hope to bring it into existence. All the counter-measures complete failures, because the problem is not the organization structure, but the intrinsic social dynamics(and personalities) of the people themselves. We cannot be honest with each other, every is deeply alienated, uncomfortable, and slightly anxious at all times.

The left at CUNY was mostly united by its disgust of its own members. They hate most of the people they work with. He’s a creep, she’s power hungry, he’s bitter, he’s always drunk, she never does her fair share, he always leaves early. These things are always spoken about in a hushed whisper until they explode and become completely unbearable. We have to be in solidarity…they are all we have. Functioning more like an abusive home as opposed to an organization. With everyone in their pathology being well adjusted to their unfair place. This is what we have to do, this is what must be done. The dynamic of the abusive household is alienating to outsiders, the constant tension of these dynamics radiate in the air and everyone who is interested in joining must violently adjust themselves to the unfair reality of sacrifice, or be kept in the dark.

Race and gender dynamics are recreated in more subtle manners. The left, aware of the importance of racism, sexism, homophobia, actually just end up being perfect in creating people capable of manipulating these discourses for political means. There is nothing more dangerous than a racist who knows all the right words to say, the misogynist who weaponizes feminism against the women around him. They become experts in weaponizing the discourse of decency. Everyone has some implicit bias in one direction or another, but the left must constantly be battling against racism, homophobia, sexism but the only battle against in the abstract. The reality is they are normal people and this reality disgusts them. They suppress their bias instead of dealing with it, which only means the implosion of the bias in the direction of each other. Until one day it comes out at a meeting. She did this because she’s racist. The organizations who only talk about this in hushed whispers are completely unprepared to deal with overt disdain, and collapse under the weight of the acknowledgement of their hypocrisy.

But surely this could all be worth it? If only we could get what we are trying to get! The sad thing is absolutely no one knows what they’re trying to get. You are more likely to find more similar opinions in a room full of strangers than you are with a room full of a leftist. This is especially bad in university activism. Because of their obsession with reading, and studying every member ends up with very specific opinions based on the unique combination of text they read. Surely everyone else is an idiot, because they haven’t read this one book which is brilliant which clarifies everything. It can be something as simple as the communist manifesto, or some obscure unpublished text available on a website you never heard of. But what’s important is they are always absolutely sure. Even the person who is sure everyone’s opinion matters and all voices count is violent in their confidence of this fact, and this equality of ideas will be upheld at any cost! This confidence is usually associated with the loud and tyrannical personalities, but the arrogance of silence is just as guilty. Sometimes people are so sure of their view they don’t even think it’s worth their time to speak to you. They sit silent, thinking to engage with everyone in this room is a waste of their time. Arrogance has many forms, it loud, quiet, empathetic, bitter, joyful, all to be found among the left.

But let’s put all of this aside for a moment. The personalities, the lack of solidarity, and all the like. They are leftist for a reason after all, they all support some broad things. Free healthcare, adjuncts getting paid more, and in this specific case the free university. So what are we to do? How do we get it? Well no one has any idea, really. Considering the fact the entire CUNY left is around the same 50–100 to people and is constantly depleting because of graduations, firings, and burn-out. So every 4 years the memory is completely wiped, the history of recent activism disappears and new people go through the same process of making the same mistakes. The only evidence we see of the past is pictures with no-context, one side of an old story about the previous organization, a dead facebook page, a mysterious flier that’s been up for 10 years and so on.

But there is one moment in CUNY history that is well documented, the 60s, the radical movements that changed everything. Everyone in the CUNY left knows about this because the nostalgia for such a moment is all they ever really talk about. It’s possible, if they could do it, so could we. They grabbed history, in the case of Brooklyn College, they started some of the first women studies, Africana studies, and Puerto Rican studies departments in the country. The CUNY left imagines themselves in their image, the successors to a radical history, except for the fact that it has done nothing to earn such a place. Those movements are in our memory because they did something, they left a mark, but the reality of the situation is no student organization has done anything of even half that importance in the previous decade. The obsession with the 60s and claiming that legacy is just narcissistic and insulting. There is no connection between us and them, except we live in the shadow of their accomplishments. As the ethnic and gender studies departments face an unprecedented attack, the clubs on campus are slowly eradicated, no student movement has in recent memory has done anything except slow the inevitable decay.

Even if they managed to do the same things these old organizations did, there is no acknowledgement of the necessity of the change of tactics. The university system remembers the 60s better than we do, in their endless red tape and bureaucracy they have encoded rules to prevent the same thing from happening again. Even the biggest protest I’ve ever seen on Brooklyn College about the sexist and homophobic Mitchell Lambert, did nothing. It got the most people on the Quad I’ve ever seen. Studies even got to have a meeting with President Anderson? And did he get fired? There was absolutely nothing to show for it. It was more a parade than a protest, a cathartic outcry that got us workshops to go to and no actual real change. Occasionally students, adjuncts, and workers, will go to the board of trustees meeting and protest or beg, but the board of trustees does not care. You could protest every single one of their meetings and they would barely look up from their phones. The protest, even the most successful one, has been proven to accomplish nothing, so why keep doing it? Who is it for? It’s not improving the material life of a single person, all it does is feed the egos of the leftist, they get cool pictures, they feel empowered. Someone really told off the board of trustees in their 60 allowed 60 seconds! So cool! The worst part is that nothing has a huge cost. Endless time sinks, failed organization after failed organization. We had another meeting, it’s the same 7 people. Wait, actually only 6 of us, one of the 7 took a day off for no other reason than they hate it here. Miserable amounts of stress put on students and adjuncts already struggling with the realities of poverty. All we have to show for is this cool Instagram picture.

I’ve raised all these complaints pretty much all the time only to be constantly dismissed as “bitter” and “negative” with the delusional rhetoric of hope. The truth of the matter is the CUNY left simply does not have the capacity to do all the things it’s doing. How many more demands list am I going to see? A demand list without a threat is just a wish list and these wish-list don’t actually matter, because what are the 10 people who made it going to do when it’s ignored. The answer is nothing. The problem with the CUNY left is there are not enough people in it and the few people in it are never on the same page, but trying to set more realistic goals is shitting on the struggle..

I was and am still absolutely exhausted and deeply embittered by my experience with activists Brooklyn College. Because the worst part of all this is, after all these meetings, all this pain, I cannot think of a single person who I helped, whose life I materially improved, even in a small way. All I remember is talking about it.