The Militant (logo) 
   Vol.64/No.37            October 2, 2000 
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
 
October 3, 1975 
NEW YORK--Seven thousand students and faculty massed in front of Gov. Hugh Carey's offices here September 18 to protest the threatened imposition of tuition at the City University of New York.

State Commissioner of Education Ewald Nyquist has called on the city's board of higher education to charge tuition of up to $800 a year at the traditionally tuition-free CUNY campuses.

The protest rally, sponsored by the University Student Senate of CUNY and the Professional Staff Congress, the union of CUNY faculty, was the first city-wide response this fall to already-announced cuts of $87 million in the CUNY budget.

Another $64 million in cuts are threatened by the city in an effort to balance its budget.

The September 18 rally was the culmination of two weeks of protests and demonstrations held on individual CUNY campuses since school opened and the cuts took form in larger class sizes, cancellation of courses, and drastically cut programs.

The cutbacks were especially hard-felt in Black and Puerto Rican studies. The entire Puerto Rican Studies Institute at Brooklyn College was eliminated.

The largest of these previous actions was held at Queens College on September 16, when 2,000 students and faculty rallied against the cuts.

Queens brought an impressive contingent of twenty busloads to the citywide demonstration. Cheers rang out from the picket lines as each bus pulled up and demonstrators poured out.  
 
October 2, 1950 
"We will fight this Nazi-like law to the last ditch," declared all candidates of the Socialist Workers Party today after Congress enacted the McCarran-Kilgore police-state law. In a joint campaign pledge, the 1950 candidates of the SWP throughout the country called on the American people to force repeal of the law and "to drive from public life every scoundrel who has helped--directly or indirectly--to impose it on this nation." Their statement said:

"Congress has ordered the American people to shut up or go to jail. Congress has commanded all of us not to think and not to speak except as the ruling plutocrats and their political gangsters dictate. Congress has demanded that we submit in servile silence to war, militarism, wage freezing, price-gouging, profiteering and Jim Crow. This is the real aim of the catch-all 'Internal Security Act' rushed through Congress over Truman's feeble veto.

"Both capitalist parties--Democratic and Republican--criminally conspired to subvert and destroy the Bill of Rights in order to suppress all dissent.

"We--the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party--openly and unequivocally declare: We will not submit. We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced.

"We predict that the American people, particularly the militant working class, will not submit and will not be silenced."  
 
 
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