Petraeus Leaves CUNY But Fight Continues

New York City, May 6 — Today a small squad of 30 City University of New York (CUNY) students and 10 faculty bid a noisy farewell to the hated mass murderer general David Petraeus. He has been masquerading as a professor for a year to cover his war crimes and his disgrace after a sex scandal drove him out as CIA director.  This was his last public appearance here and chants of “Death Squads Petraeus, you can’t hide, We charge you with genocide!” greeted him as he slunk into Macaulay Honors College behind a wall of uneasy administrators and city police.
“Drones” Petraeus is also chairman of the KKR Global Institute, Judge Widney professor at USC, senior fellow at Harvard, and co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on North America. He recently co-published an article in Politico titled, “The Great American Comeback” where he argues that this racist country is on the cusp of a “great revival.” This is exactly the kind of warrior scholar the ruling class desires, one who mucks up the minds of working-class youth with bourgeois ideas and practices.  
Recently, Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel her commencement address at Rutgers. Homeland Security czar Janet Napolitano faced big protests at the University of California. Now, Petraues leaves CUNY after a semester of pushback.
While the chants and speeches were spirited enough, PLP members were joined only by a few of our student and faculty friends and some leftists. It was good to protest Petraeus as he moves his warrior-scholar self to other colleges, and militant students did make his tenure here pretty uncomfortable. But the small numbers show that imperialist war, preparations for war, and the militarization of the capitalist university are not on most people’s minds.  We have a lot of work to do. This campaign was good practice for the Party’s forces, young and veteran.
The campaign against the CUNY ROTC officer-training corps will continue in the Fall, along with a focus on opposing military research. The faculty/staff union has set up a Committee on Militarization and is considering a resolution against ROTC later this month. Faculty are working with students on events to make the danger of imperialist war better understood on CUNY campuses.
Our anger will continue to disrupt the use of the university by the war machine and the police state. PLP’s view is that the bourgeois university, an integral part of the capitalist state, must be smashed along with its military power. Communist revolution will have to transform all levels of education so that it contributes, not to profit wars, but to a society capable of abolishing war.