by Doug Singsen with assistance from Sophie Theven
From October 17 to 19, over 600 CUNY students, faculty, alumni, and others gathered at City College in Harlem to discuss political and social issues ranging from racial discrimination in CUNY admissions to international sex trafficking.
The event was called the CUNY Social Forum and it was organized by a new university-wide student group called the CUNY Student Union.
The purpose of the Social Forum was to educate CUNY students about issues that affect them and to give activists at CUNY as well as the greater New York City community the opportunity to meet, get to know one another and network.
The goal of the Social Forum is to “create a more accountable, accessible, and democratic CUNY” by “re-igniting a CUNY-wide movement, as well as student and youth movements,” according to the group’s website.
Fifty-nine workshops were held over the course of the weekend to discuss political and social issues that affect CUNY students, such as “Standardized Tests Produce Unequal Access to CUNY’s Senior Colleges” and “Generation Debt: Student Life Under Neoliberalism.” Other workshops focused on the history of student movements at CUNY, including “CUNY Student Struggle: Past, Present and Future” and “The Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter (CRAASH).”
There were also many workshops on local, national and international issues, such as “Police Brutality Against Youth,” “The Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Industry” and “G.I. Johns: Militarism and the Sex Trafficking Industry.”
The CUNY Student Union, the group that organized the CUNY Social Forum, consists of students from many different CUNY campuses, including City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, Queens College, Lehman College and the Graduate Center.
The event was inspired by the World Social Forum, an annual gathering of global justice activists founded in 2001 to give voice to the plight of poor and underprivileged people across the globe. The World Social Forum was created as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
One of the main concerns of the World Social Forum is resisting the harmful effects of globalization on the poor.
In addition to informing students about important social and political issues, the Student Union wanted the Social Forum to serve as a way for students and other concerned individuals to network with each other and make plans to build a larger student movement at CUNY.
They feel that a student movement is needed to address issues such as tuition and fee increases, budget cuts, discrimination, and making students’ voices heard in how CUNY is run.
To begin planning the future of the Student Union, participants in the culminating assembly of the Social Forum made plans to create chapters of the Student Union at different CUNY campuses and to coordinate Student Union activities with community groups.
So far, kickoff meetings for Student Union branches have been held at City College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College and the Graduate Center.
If anyone would like to start a branch here at Kingsborough, they are encouraged to contact the Student Union at cunysocialforum@gmail.com or visit the Social Forum’s website at www.cunysocialforum.com.
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