Emerging from a long winter lull, the student Occupy movement in Rhode Island is looking forward to a spring of cooperation athrough Occupy Rhode Island Campuses, a new collaborative effort bringing together student protesters across the state.
Students from the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, Providence College, the Community College of Rhode Island and Brown are coming together to "unify the cause," said Professor Peter Nightingale, professor of physics at URI. The group aims to model itself after the national Occupy Colleges movement, which targets higher education reform, "the common thread" between the institutions, according to Nightingale. The group was founded after Occupy RIC members held a protest last November that attracted students from across the state.
"It brought people from other schools to RIC, and we connected from there," said Servio Gomez, a student at RIC.
But higher education reform is defined differently at each of the schools involved in Occupy Rhode Island Campuses. State-funded institutions in Rhode Island have all seen tuition hikes in the past few years. Nightingale said many students have trouble managing schoolwork while financing their education.
"Education is the best thing for society to improve itself, but money that goes to education keeps on declining every single year," Gomez said. Members of Occupy Rhode Island Campuses support increased state aid to public institutions.
A student recently emailed Nightingale explaining that he had taken and failed a course Nightingale teaches multiple times because working 25 hour per week prevented him from fully grasping the course material.
"One of the main problems at the state schools is the increase of tuition and the cost of education as a whole," Nightingale said. "We want to act on this together. The private schools like Brown and Providence College share a lot of concerns about social inequality, which has grown at the same time the tuition is rising."
Luke Lattanzi-Silveus '14 said Occupy College Hill is exploring how to "emphasize the ways in which higher education serves to perpetuate the class structures in society and what we could do to change these things." Though Occupy College Hill does not have an official list of demands, it has expressed interest in exploring increased transparency for University admissions and investments while approaching the "broad question of changing the University and the way it operates by perpetuating inequalities," Lattanzi-Silveus said.
But Occupy Rhode Island Campuses is about more than just education reform. Nightingale pointed out that each college is seeking to achieve different goals, but they are united by the fact that "there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that treats people as disposable commodities."
Though Occupy protestors nationwide also have not presented a unified agenda, the movement has made a huge impact on the United States, said William Keach, professor of English. He said the protests influenced President Barack Obama to address economic inequality in his State of the Union.
Keach said he would like to see more transparency from the University when it makes decisions.
The institutions involved in Occupy Rhode Island Campuses are planning separate teach-ins at their respective campuses next week, according to Gomez and Lattanzi-Silveus. Occupy Rhode Island Campuses is also organizing an event for March 1 in solidarity with Occupy Colleges, but plans have not yet been finalized.
