Take Back NYU! Protester Clara Totenberg Green

NYU student activist group Take Back NYU! (TBNYU!) staged a protest February 18-20 in the university's Kimmel Center to bring attention to their demands for social accountability at the university. The students occupied the Kimmel Center overnight despite threats of academic dismissal and possible arrest for trespassing. Eighteen students were suspended.

After suspensions were doled out, protesters and members of TBNYU! and even their supporters were reluctant to speak to the media for fear of punishment by the university. Twenty-two press inquiries were sent out by profilepicks.blogspot.com before one interview was granted.

The following is NYU student and TBNYU! member Clara Totenberg Green's explanation of the events, as told to profilepicks.blogspot.com

I was part of the group Students Creating Radical Change, which is the group that Take Back NYU! came out of. I’m interested in politics and social justice and I’ve always felt that you have to approach social rights issues within the community you’re a part of before you can affect change on a broader scale. I’ve always felt that disclosure was necessary in order to keep the NYU administration accountable to its students and to provide for transparency and democracy and the students’ say in what’s going on at our school. The ideas behind this campaign are absolutely necessary for all political campaigns on campus.

For everyone the disclosure demand was the biggest demand, the thing we’ve worked around most for the last two years, and that’s a representation of all the other demands. Besides that, the demands that go along with disclosure are important: the financially responsible committee, and also having a student on the board of trustees.

Administrators know that if they disclose the budget there’s gonna be mass political debates on campus and opposition. If we find out that women get paid substantially less than men professors, then of course there’s gonna be massive protests to that, and they know that, so
that’s why they don’t want disclosure. They know that they’re hiding something and they’re afraid of what would happen with that.

They don’t want to negotiate with us because that says that we’ve won in some manner, and they did the same thing with the graduate students [in fall 2005]. That’s just their way of shutting people down. By not even giving them someone to talk to, they’re silencing them.

Their public [statement] was that we students have no right to [occupy Kimmel] and this is an inappropriate way to project dissent, that there are proper channels to do that and this is not one of them.

It’s necessary that they speak to the students because the students have attempted to travel down all the traditional paths of expressing their opposition to what’s going on right now, and we’ve been consistently ignored. It’s time the administration actually sat down with them and talked about what we’re demanding: give us full disclosure of the budget because without that we can’t be a fair and democratic university in the public service.

They are Bernie Madoff in this case. That’s the most ironic thing about it all. They are filing all these claims saying that they were deceived and should have been told about everything. It’s the exact same thing because they were giving their money to someone who lied to them about where it was going and didn’t tell them the right places it was going. Of course, they’re doing the same thing to us. They were businessmen participating in a business and that’s exactly what we’re doing – students are shareholders and this is just another corporation. We give our money to this big business that does what it wants with our money and we have no idea where it’s going and we have no say in it.


Clara Totenberg Green


Take Back NYU!: http://takebacknyu.com/
Take Back NYU's demands
A video of the protest 2/19/09 5 p.m. via YouTube
More videos of the protest on YouTube
February 18, 2009 New York Times article

Ciga-rhett of The Chainsmokers

With pale skin, dark, messy hair, that subtle smell of old cigarette smoke and dressed all in black, 22-year-old Rhett Bixler hardly looks like a kid from Orange County, Calif. As his friends tell it, he’s a New Yorker at heart who thrives on the chaos of the city that never sleeps.

Since moving to New York in 2005, Bixler has used time outside his studies at NYU to explore his many interests and entrench himself in the city’s nightlife scene. Bixler is one-half of the DJ duo The Chainsmokers, known for spinning into the wee hours of the night at hipster hangouts like The Annex. He also runs a nightlife photo blog, A Coterie, where his job is to identify the who’s who of New York scenesters.

Bixler certainly has found no shortage of hobbies to explore in New York. Aside from DJing, he draws political cartoons and has done stand-up comedy at the Gotham Poetry Club. “Rhett’s really surprising,” said Lee Smith, a friend from NYU. “He’s always doing new things you didn’t know he could do.” Bixler interned at Rolling Stone magazine, a typical venture for the double major in journalism and politics, but he also interned at Harper’s Bazaar where he explored the possibility of becoming a wardrobe stylist.

Brent Shiohama, one of Bixler’s friends from California, recalls a night out at Costa Mesa nightclub La Cave in which Bixler spontaneously got into a rap battle. “There was this guy freestyle rapping outside for 30 or 40 people waiting in line, and Rhett walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, would you like to battle?’” Shiohama recalled with a laugh. “And he ended up totally schooling this guy, and we found out later from that guy’s friends that this guy is like a real rapper signed to Def Jam and has a track coming out with T-Pain. And Rhett beat him.”

According to Shiohama, Bixler has a unique ear for music and a taste for the unusual. When the two were teenagers, they would get together and jam on the guitar, exploring the blues and emulating greats like Stevie Ray Vaughn. “Not too many people our age were into that,” Shiohama said.

It was around that time that Bixler began honing his skills as a tastemaker. His sister Brittani Bixler still has the mix CDs of new music he would push on her as a high schooler. Five years later, Bixler still passionately exposes people to new music as Ciga-rhett of The Chainsmokers.

Bixler is cultured but not snobby, said Smith. “He’s not obnoxious about it but he definitely knows what’s going on in the entertainment world. He’s very down with what’s happening culturally,” Smith said.

His diverse interests can seem chaotic, according to Katie Willhoit, a friend and former classmate at Calvary Chapel High School in Costa Mesa. “Honestly, Rhett has had so many hobbies, it’s unbelievable,” Willhoit said.

His sister agreed. “He never really kept one interest for very long,” said Brittani Bixler, who also lives in New York City. “When we were young, one week he’d be really into yo-yos, and the next week he was into Star Wars figures and then baseballs cards. Then he wanted to go to law school, and then he wanted to be a doctor, and then he wanted to be a politician. That’s how he’s always been.”

His sister imagines New York is where Bixler will stay, and she envisions him involved in a career that will afford him the time to keep up with personal hobbies like DJing. “Rhett always has new interests,” she says, “but a lot of them are lame or they don’t really go anywhere and he’s not necessarily good at it, so it’s nice to see him have an interest in something and he’s actually really good at it.”


Rhett Bixler aka Ciga-rhett


The Chainsmokers
Interview @ ChiChi212.com

A Cotierie links:
A Coterie {blog}
A Coterie @twitter