Ringing cowbells, clanging pots, pans and bowls and playing music from speakers, about 75 students gathered on the steps of Deering Library Saturday to protest in solidarity with Northwestern cheerleaders and for police abolition.
The NU Community Not Cops action came just a day after NU and Evanston community members marched to University President Morton Schapiro’s house to protest the appointment of Mike Polisky as the University’s next athletic director.
Polisky was named as a defendant in a sexual harassment case filed in January by a member of NU’s cheerleading team, and members of the team also claimed in a February Daily investigation that Polisky did not appropriately respond to anti-Black racism.
On the sixth anniversary of Chicago’s reparations ordinance, local activists and scholars discussed police abolition, collective approaches to community organizing and healing from state violence in a Thursday discussion.
The event, hosted by the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies in its inaugural spring speaker event “Abolitionist Futures,” was moderated by Asian American Studies Prof. Patricia Nguyen.
The discussion and Q&A featured founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago and co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center Aislinn Pulley, and Prof. Dylan Rodriguez, who teaches media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside.
The conversation began with an acknowledgement of Chicago’s reparations legislation anniversary and the role of community organizing, especially from incarcerated individuals and police violence survivors, in the passage of the historic law.
Despite an 8-hour time difference, members of Students Organizing for Labor Rights and the American University of Beirut Secular Club discussed the importance of interconnectedness in campus activism during a Monday event.
The talk, aimed at connecting student movements, was presented by the Middle East North African Undergraduate Group and moderated by Northwestern University in Qatar Prof. Sami Hermez, director of the Liberal Arts Program at NU-Q. Student activists discussed activism on their respective campuses and took questions from attendees.
Lara Sabra, AUB Secular Club president, said the organization started in 2008 to practice politics “separate from, but also opposed to, the sectarian binary.” The club seeks to advocate for causes under the umbrella of sectarianism, such as feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism and freedom of expression, she said.
When Communication sophomore and former Shepard Residential College president Zach Forbes saw his residential college’s community service officer without a mask, he asked her to comply with Northwestern’s COVID-19 guidelines. He said he found her to be unresponsive to his requests.
Forbes, who fielded resident complaints that the officer made them feel unsafe, said he brought the issue to the Residential College Board and area council advisors.
After a short, unexplained hiatus from the dorm, the same officer was back a few weeks later without a mask, still unresponsive to requests that she wear a mask, he said.
SESP junior Christian Wade and Medill sophomore Adaeze Ogbonna won in a landslide election for Associated Student Government’s next student body president and vice president Saturday.
The slate won 80 percent of the votes, defeating Sahibzada Mayed and McKenna Troy in the second virtual election in ASG history, election commissioner Donovan Cusick confirmed. Mayed and running mate Troy won 16 percent of the votes and 4 percent voted no confidence.
This year also saw 1,353 total votes, down from 2,064 in 2020 and up from 852 in the uncontested 2019 election.
“We are truly so happy and grateful and will do our best to serve (the Northwestern community as) chosen leaders,” Wade and Ogbonna said in a statement to The Daily. “Our work is just getting started and we are so excited to see all the ways in which we can make NU a better campus wholly dedicated to the needs of its students.”