The line of Pittsburgh riot police marched toward us with their nightsticks outstretched, yelling “Move! Move!” We expected to do what we had done all afternoon: hop on our bikes and try to find another route downtown ¬— still more than three miles away — where the heads of the 20 largest economies in the world were meeting. But this time was different. Before we could pedal away, one of the police broke ranks, ran around behind my friend Chris, and shoved him off of the sidewalk into oncoming traffic. Chris and his bike tangled up against the side of a black sedan. He was thrown onto the hood and five more officers leapt into action, cuffed him, and pushed Chris, a Latin American literature student, into a squad car. Less than a minute later, two officers tackled a journalist filming the arrest, smashing his camera in the process, and hauled him off to jail as well.
The next day, we marched with thousands of other protesters to the city offices, under the watchful eyes of the largest military mobilization in Pennsylvania since the 1892 Homestead Strike. Speakers lamented the militarization of their city, the increasing gap between rich and poor, and the disproportionate funding for military occupations while people still don’t have health care or education. Riot police readied their gas masks and marched through the crowd with muzzled attack dogs. Kate Gott from Students for a Democratic Society announced to the crowd that students at UC Santa Cruz occupied their student center in solidarity with a faculty strike against budget cuts (while university administrators got extravagant pay raises). We cheered.
To UC students grasping for affordable education but wading through ever-increasing fees and college debt, the dog-eat-dog capitalism that the G20 represents is a daily struggle. But what does this have to do with the privileged few? That is to say: what about Vanderbilt? As I prepared to move to Nashville for grad school, I sent off a few emails to local activists asking about social justice groups I could work with. “Vanderbilt?” they asked incredulously. “That school was started by a robber baron.”
This is what the world thinks of us as students here: direct descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the second-wealthiest man in American history. Heirs of the new aristocracy. The school with the highest-paid administration in the country, in the hopes that money can spin pretensions into prestige. When the line is drawn between haves and have-nots, no one in the world would expect us to shuck our privilege and take the side of the oppressed. After all, when have we before?
There are some green shoots appearing to comfort those who hope the future will be different: the living wage campaign that rocked the money-boat last year, Vanderbilt Students for Nonviolence and this year’s coming campaigns on homelessness and social responsibility in the university’s investments. Is this a generation of students that will break new ground and chart a new, more just course for the university’s future?
When Chris was released in the wee hours of the morning from the Pennsylvania state penitentiary, without his wallet or cell phone, what he wanted to talk about was Kafka and a theory of state power. He’ll surely write a poem about the people he met there, the sobbing red-head who only meant to leave her house for five minutes, the boy in the cow suit who sings for justice while drumming on an empty water jug, the judge who let Chris off easy because he was a U Pitt grad student. And he vows that he will return to the front lines again. His privilege — his degrees from well-respected universities, his earning power, his white skin, and his skill with words — means simply this: he will put that privilege on the line for those without it.
—Tristan Call is a first year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. He can be reached at Tristan.p.call@vanderbilt.edu.
