Columbia University Launches Occupy Wall Street Class

Students at Columbia University are now able to take a class in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, while dozens are arrested at the site on New Year’s Eve.

Columbia University is set to offer a new course for its juniors, seniors, and graduate students based on the Occupy Wall Street Movement, writes CBS New York.

Starting next semester, the Occupy Wall Street class will send students into the field. They will become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom while also doing class work at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.

The anthropology department course will be taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, a “veteran” and vocal proponent of the Occupy movement.

The “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” syllabus states:

“The course offers training in ethnographic research methods alongside a critical exploration of the conjunctural issues in the Occupy movement: Wall Street, finance capital, and inequality; political strategies, property and public space, and the question of anarchy; and genealogies of the contemporary moment in global social movements.

“Class requirements will be divided between seminar at Columbia and fieldwork in and around the Occupy movement. In addition to scheduled seminar, this class will meet offcampus several times, and students will be expected to be involved in ongoing OWS projects outside of class.”

Appel was a leading member of the movement that began in September last year:

“It is important to push back against the rhetoric of ‘disorganization’ or ‘a movement without a message’ coming from left, right and center,” she said.

While her allegiance and involvement in Occupy Wall Street will have some effect in the way she teachers the material, it will not prevent Appel from being an objective teacher, she claims.

This comes after dozens of occupiers were arrested shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve as they tore down barricades surrounding New York City’s Zuccotti Park.

Zuccotti Park used to be the home of their encampment until it was dismantled several weeks ago. Around 500 protesters gathered in the park for New Year’s Eve, chanting “We are the 99 percent.” But after some protesters began to tear down the barricades that blocked off the evicted Occupy Wall Street area, police moved in.

The New York Police Department announced that a total of 68 people were arrested, with charges varying from trespassing to disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment, while one person was accused of assaulting a police officer with scissors.

Comments

Joe

January 3, 2012 at 5:53 pm

These kids and their professor need to look at pictures of soldiers fighting for them a little every day, might make them more appreciative of what they’ve got.

Reply
Linda Brees

January 3, 2012 at 5:56 pm

I wonder if everyone who tells me about my rights and the soldiers dying for them have actually know those rights they keep sending young American boys and girls to defend. First Amendment includes a right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Yet, the way people keep venting their spleen on OWS, you’d think they wouldn’t want anyone to actually go and do something silly like excersise that right or even learn about anyone excersising it. Is that what you mean, Joe?

Reply
John

January 4, 2012 at 3:14 am

Tax Columbia! It’s time for this freeloading “non-profit” ivy league school that produces the .oooo1% to pay it’s fair share. Same goes for Harvard, Yale and Princeton! Take half their endowment and give it to city college or use it to pay down the national debt.

Reply
Maryanne Stroud

January 4, 2012 at 3:38 am

One of the reasons that I am happy my kids went to Columbia is that the education there isn’t simply sitting in a classroom. Good for Columbia. Worth every penny.

Reply
Linda Brees

January 4, 2012 at 8:54 am

John, Columbia can pay “it’s” (not a grad, are we?) fair share right after Goldman Sachs pays its fair share or AIG pays its fair share. After all, no matter how odious you might find its politics, Columbia never drove any economy into the ground. Let’s take the pitchforks and torches first to entities that beggar and drain societies before those that enrich it.

Reply
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