Friday, February 20, 2009

Note the highlighted portion

NYU'S SNIT-IN
By ANDREA PEYSER

THEY don't make radicals the way they used to.
Some 60 students - all elite, lily white and whiny - took over the cafeteria at New York University's Kimmel Center Wednesday night to stage not a party, but a protest.
The kids showed up armed for slumber, with sleeping bags, camera phones, laptops and plenty of cellphones for the homesick to call Mom.
Just minutes after the well-heeled warriors took over the room on the third floor, they made their first demand to the administration. Via cellphone, natch.
What was the No. 1 priority for this band of complainers? World peace? Free tuition? A hot bath?
Close. They demanded the right to use the bathroom.
"Not allowing us bathroom rights is a human-rights violation!" Emily Stainkamp, an 18-year-old freshman, said from her cellphone inside the cafeteria. The university relented, and students won the right to tinkle.
"My parents are a little worried," Fharah Khimji, 20, said from inside. "They're paying a lot of money to send me here."
With the kids' human rights indulged, they unfurled a dizzying list of 13 demands, which ran the gamut from lower tuition, to NYU pulling out investments in Israel, to giving freebies to Palestinian students. But their No. 1 demand was this: "Full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation."
You can't say these kids are too dumb to look out for their own interests.
Outside, about 40 supporters held a rally. Keri Lyons, 20, and Nadia Collado, 19, walked around topless in some kind of protest over NYU's failure to expose where its money goes. Or something. It was cold.
A cop eyed the crowd and shook his head.
"It's pathetic," he said. "These are privileged kids. These kids have silver spoons in their mouths, and their parents send them here - so they can sit in the cafeteria."
As night turned into day yesterday, students, whose parents shell out an eye-gouging $48,000-plus a year for tuition and housing, slept in three-hour shifts, and e-mailed professors to ask if missing class was cool. The number of students dwindled to just over 20 by nightfall, as kids went to class or went home.
One who gave up was Colin Dillon, who bounded out of the building and reported that NYU would serve dinner. "A lot of people have very particular diets," he said. "Food allergies, or they're vegetarians or vegans."
NYU coddled its little radicals. A spokesman did warn, vaguely, that disruptive students "are accountable for violating university rules."
What will they do to these brats?
Give them a C grade? That would violate their rights.

No comments:

Post a Comment