New York City, November 15 — The fight against militarization and repression at City University of New York (CUNY) is drawing more students and faculty into action.  Today a strategy meeting that organizers thought might draw 50, instead brought 120 people to four hours of intense talk about every aspect of the CUNY struggle. There were many new faces: an energetic group of undergrads and grad students along with professors, both veterans and young adjuncts.
Progressive Labor Party members were among the organizers. Participants distributed CHALLENGE and got to know several new fighters.  Many are making up their minds about their basic political outlook, including Progressive Labor Party’s revolutionary communist ideas.
The majority are outraged at CUNY’s suppression of resistence on campus and its welcome to General “Drones” Petraeus and ROTC.  While jobs evaporate, CUNY continues its racist dumbing down of curriculum combined with rising tuition and student debt. It is a fluid moment when militants are looking for the best path ahead, as capitalism exposes its contradictions and failures.
Petraeus, ROTC =Militarization
The hiring of Petraeus and the return of ROTC have reminded all how the universities are tied to the military and the ruling class. The campus is not exempt from the intensifying racist police oppression, especially in the black and Latino communities from which most of our students come.
In one small breakout group, four grad student adjuncts were there because they thought it was time they got involved. One was angry at the raid by the City College Administration on the students’ Morales/Shakur Center and the arrest of two protest leaders.  One had been excited by the Occupy Wall St. movement and was looking to apply it to CUNY. Two others had been active as undergrads but not yet at CUNY until the issue of militarization brought them to this event.  These four show the potential for growth in this movement, and of the communist movement.  
The group included union fighters and chapter leaders. One told the newcomers how her campus chapter had just met and agreed on an awareness campaign of union tabling outside the cafeteria about campus worker unity and opposing militarization and repression. Another described the antiwar committee just formed on campus, combining chapter militants and students.
A PL’er stressed that militarization on the campus reflected imperialist war preparations by the ruling class, and that the international working class had to prepare for the next big war on the horizon.  He said that the struggle against war and the militarization of society had to be international, and mentioned as examples the letters of solidarity with CUNY students from comrades in Haiti and the students at UNAM in Mexico City.
How To Teach Students the Truth  
The small-group discussion then focused on how we could use the classroom to make more students aware of militarization. A math teacher said he couldn’t teach politics in a math class, but a German historian told us how under the Nazis math lessons were politicized, with examples and problems reinforcing fascist propaganda.  A biochemist also couldn’t see how to teach politics in a science class, but someone noted the recruiting of the chemical industry for war and weaponry, the recruitment of health workers for the military’s detention/torture centers, or scientific war research on campus.   
A philosophy lecturer said he couldn’t ethically teach students his own politics because it would be taking advantage of his position of authority over them.  One response to that common faculty view said students are already bombarded by capitalist ideas  from the curriculum  and all the bosses’ media.
As a comrade passed the hat for students’ legal costs, the whole group resolved to build for the court appearance of two CCNY students on Nov. 19 (see page 8), and a protest at the CUNY Board of Trustees on Nov. 25 (see front page). While we didn’t agree on all our ideas, we nevertheless agreed to intensify our actions in the face of intimidation by the cops and the Administration.
PLP did disagree with the majority on the reformist demand to abolish the Board of Trustees appointed by the Mayor and Governor and to elect our own Board to run the university in our own interests (the student-power, faculty-power idea).  Most unionists know from experience that bosses will never allow workers this kind of control. Only one class at a time can hold state power.
PL believes that the capitalists run every institution including universities (public and private) to serve their class interests for profit and social control. They will never surrender control to students and faculty in a school or college, to health workers and patients in a hospital, to workers in a factory, field, mine, or office, or to rank-and-file soldiers.  
They run a racist, sexist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the whole society, while maintaining the illusion of popular democracy through elections (elections like that of their latest darling Bill De Blasio, determined by their money and their media).  But you can’t elect the boss of a factory or a mine or a hospital or a college or an army.
PL sees the campus not as a place where students and faculty can wrest power from the bosses, but as a site of class struggle where students and faculty — in a worker-student alliance — can link their own fights to the struggles of the whole working class.  We can help build a revolutionary movement for the working class to take state power and construct an alternative, boss-free communist society in which education is ours to remake and wars for profit are history.  
International Workers’ Unity Crucial
Want to end militarization? Fight for international communism. Join PLP.  CUNY students, faculty and staff active now should join with workers’ strikes and community battles against racist police, with teachers in Mexico, with students in Haiti, miners in South Africa and textile workers in Bangladesh. Our comrades at CUNY have always stood for this view, from the 1930s until now.  
Students have often initiated important struggles at CUNY and need to again.  But workers led by communists have the numbers and the potential power to finish them — everywhere the war clouds threaten — as a single international class. As critical, radical students and faculty, we must begin to see ourselves as part of that class.