Student protests

The Maroon’s March 3 editorial “Sound and Fury” is a transparent smear-job against the Spartacus Youth Club for protesting military recruiters, and by implication anyone else who opposes the administration’s arrest and threatened discipline of four anti-military recruitment protesters at the Reynolds Club on February 21.

The administration’s act of blatant political repression has sparked outrage across the campus. To stifle any further protest, the Maroon editors slander the SYC as “disrupters” and “grandstanders” whose ideas “have no content except shock-value.”

In reality, what the Maroon calls “disruption” is Marxist student activists fighting for the program that only socialist revolution can end the exploitation and oppression endemic to capitalism. The Maroon editors find this idea “shocking.” We joined the February 21 protest against Marine recruiters because we say: “ROTC and military recruiters off campus!” as part of our opposition to U.S. imperialism, including the bloody neo-colonial occupation of Iraq.

For all its talk of the “life of the mind,” the administration, with the Maroon as its mouthpiece, aims to preserve the campus as a bastion of bourgeois ideology, and therefore wants to censor revolutionary politics and protest.

You certainly don’t need to be a Marxist to understand that the rights to free speech and protest on campus are under serious attack at the U of C That’s why students and faculty from a variety of political persuasions have endorsed the SYC-initiated united front protest on Wednesday.

Tom Discepola

Spartacus Youth Club