More than 20 people occupied a building on the New School campus in Greenwich Village on Friday, demanding that the school’s embattled president, Bob Kerrey, be ousted. But unlike a similar protest in December that was peacefully negotiated to an end after 30 hours, Friday’s ordeal was concluded in a few hours after the school asked the police to remove the protesters.

Students, the justness of whose cause I’m not going to discuss, took to the streets and were kicked to the curb accordingly.  The question that plagues me is, Why would a group of Net Gen students resort to such 20th century methods of protest?  If you want your voices to be heard, and not just decontextualized sound clips to blip up on the evening news, you have to do so using methods institutions like the university can’t respond to swiftly or deftly.  (This goes for police, as well.) 

Rather than create a series stealthily orchestrated protests using text-messaging and Facebook groups, like young protesters in Egypt and other countries have, New School protesters showed a lack of originality and efficacy in their protest.  Egyptian protesters, this past summer, made it nearly impossible for law enforcement to stop them when they quickly texted instructions using a database created Facebook.  When the leader of the protest was eventually captured, he was interrogated for hours.  The interrogators wanted one thing: his Facebook password. 

New School protesters should learn from this.  They botched it all up.  Rather than a clear voice of dissent, news stations are focusing on how the police handled it.  Rather than making authorities play on their terms, protesters played created a situation that was textbook solvable.  I would hope next year’s course catalog offers Protesting in the Digital Age.

Related posts:

1. Between Paranoia and Protest
2. Online @ School
3. School of Games