On August 15 three students from Hostos and one from Hunter College were arrested by college security for handing out leaflets on school grounds. The flyers demanded the college administration cancel a $300 fee recently imposed on students for enrolling in the English 1306 workshop, which used to be free. They also called for additional tutors to be hired for mathematics and other subjects.

All the students were charged with disorderly conduct, except Miguel Malo, vice president of the Student Senate. He was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting two police officers, and could face up to seven years in prison. Malo was detained overnight in the 40th Precinct. He sustained injuries to both wrists and forearms and received welts across his back.

On August 16, college security officers also arrested Bill Crain, a City College psychology professor who had helped organize a small group of faculty members to picket Hostos over this violation of the students' First Amendment rights. The City Univ-ersity's faculty union also protested the arrests.

Protests erupted at Hostos last May when the Board of Trustees made plans to cut English as a Second Language (ESL) and Spanish-Language classes. The City University of New York (CUNY), which numbers Hostos among its campuses, claimed it was scaling back these programs because of students' poor performance on writing tests four years ago. Mobilizations by hundreds of students forced the trustees to step back and allow this policy to be reviewed.

Since the school has been back in session, the administration has not allowed school clubs and school newspaper to convene and has cut off the Student Government Organization's phone line.

According to Rivera, the fight now is to drop the charges against Miguel Malo and to continue to defend the ESL and Spanish-language courses. Malo's court date is set for September 20 and students and faculty members are discussing plans to organize a larger protest.

Student activists are circula-ting a petition calling on Hostos president Dolores Fernández to drop all charges against the students and faculty members who were arrested. The Hostos Senate, a student body, will convene September 13 to discuss the issues.

The right to public education and ESL classes are gains that have been won by working people through struggle over the decades. The fight at Hostos goes hand in hand with the fight by coal miners for safe working conditions and in defense of their union, as well as with the struggle by the Palestinian people for self-determination.

As Jack Barnes, the author of the Pathfinder pamphlet The Working-Class and the Transformation of Learning, explains, "Schools under capitalism are not institutions of learning but of social control.... The working class cannot begin with how to change things so that youth get a better education. We have to begin with how to transform the values of society, not just the economics.... To be meaningful, education has to create the possibilities for society as a whole to advance, instead of reinforcing the exploitation of the majority by the few."

As part of the fight at Hostos, the Young Socialists helped to build a Militant Labor Forum in Upper Manhattan on the fight for bilingual education. The speakers included the president of the student senate and one of those arrested on August 15. Twenty-three people attended the meeting.  
 
 
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