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Articles: Counter-Recruitment: General

Twenty years ago this month a group known as "The Fordham 9" conducted
a successful blockade of a CIA recruiter at the Career Planning and
Placement Office at Fordham University's Rosehill Campus in the Bronx. The act
was carried out after months of negotiations with administrators that ended
in a stalemate. The result of the blockade was (as far as could be
ascertained) the cancellation of open CIA recruitment at Fordham for a
period of at least a year.

I was one of the organizers of this action as a senior in the spring of
1986. The action was conducted by two student organizations, the
Fordham Progressive Student Alliance and Fordham Pax Christi. It was a very
carefully thought out and planned action that took very seriously the
link between theory, strategy, and outcomes. Now twenty years later, plainly
this protest takes on a special resonance as students in colleges and
high schools organize to demand the removal of military recruiters from
campuses around the country. As a professor in the Twin Cities, I've had the
opportunity to observe two different patterns of anti-military
recruitment, one more directly politicized and militantly antiwar that resembles the
Fordham 9 model and one that eschews foregrounding the war question and
offers another model that is more in keeping with a narrow and
politically safer focus on issues of diversity.

The Fordham blockade was planned for easily 6 months, since it was
recognized by organizers that the protest was probably going to be
necessary after attempts to negotiate with the administration would
meet with refusals to disallow CIA recruitment at Fordham's campus. The
action was seen as necessary by activists at the campus for a number of
reasons. To begin with, in the early and mid-1980's they were very busy
disseminating leaflets, holding forums, showing documentaries, rallies,
and the like that highlighted the role of the US in providing direct and
indirect forms of aid to dictatorships aligned with landed elites in
Latin America and the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who had died
as a result of such intervention.

In the process of studying America's military, economic, and political
ties with right-wing military regimes in the Americas, the role of the CIA
in the Americas and the world was readily apparent. What was even more
immediate was the role Fordham itself played in granting the CIA access
and in supplying it with some of its most important lead players, not least
of which was then CIA chief William Casey. Casey was a venerated alumnus
of Fordham and had a lifelong relationship with and keen interest in
Fordham University. Many universities had engaged in blockades or protests of
the CIA during the 1980's. From the vantage of the students who would come
to take part in the Fordham 9 blockade, because of the Casey connection,
the symbolic importance of their act took on a special importance. Not only
would the act contribute to the widespread campus movements against the
CIA at the time, but it would send a direct message that would be noticed
by A: even at William Casey's conservative alma mater, the CIA's
role and US foreign policy around the world was being challenged.

For months, perhaps, more accurately, over a year, the Fordham PSA and
Pax Christi laid the groundwork for developing a cadre of non-violent
direct action participants and supporters. Special emphasis was put on
interrogating the contradiction between the proclaimed Jesuit mission
and the CIA's values. The students and their faculty supporters spent
several months in meetings at all levels with the Fordham administration. Not
taking lightly the gravity of their case and intentions to act on their
convictions, the Fordham 9 practically memorized the university
regulations for procedures to be followed in the event of an act of on-campus civil
disobedience. It would be not be an exaggeration to state that they
knew those procedures and rules better than the administration that had
drawn them up! This knowledge would prove especially helpful in the moment of
the occupation for reasons that will soon be clear.

In a nutshell, the 'compromise' that was worked out between the Fordham
9 and the administration in March of 1986 was that a 'debate' would take
place between the CIA recruiter and a representative of the Fordham 9
in Keating Hall. Presumably the CIA recruiter would then decide if he
wished to recruit and, if so, then his freedom of speech could not be
interfered with. At no time was there a quid pro quo for the 'debate' and the 9
prepared for the likelihood that the recruiter would proceed to Dealy
Hall afterwards and conduct interviews in the Career Planning and Placement
Office.

The agreement to this plan proved decisive in giving the 9 an edge
because they had to not only deal with the administration, but as well an
oppositional group of conservative and ROTC students led by Thomas
Liddy, son of another famous Fordham alumnus . Not having any other
information available, since the decision to go ahead with the blockade was a very
tightly kept secret, Liddy's group departed the debate between the late
Jesuit Brother Peter Cicchino and the CIA recruiter and returned to
their regular schedules. Unbeknownst to them at the time the 'debate'
concluded, the Fordham 9 had already occupied Deal Hall's second floor Career
Planning and Placement Center for over an hour and a half. Almost no one knew
this from the opposition and therefore they were unable to mount any
opposition to the actual blockade as a result.

This left just three groups to contend with and how they were dealt
with reflects on the time put into thinking and planning all the way up to 2
in the morning of the day the blockade was to occur. Upon entering the
Career Planning and Placement office, there was an immediate and anticipated
tension between the 9 and the clerical staff. This was expected given
age and class strata differences; older, white Catholic working class
secretaries and young white and Hispanic students whose parents tended
to  be professionals or managers. To minimize the level of threat to their
office and positions that the clerical staff perceived, the 9 prepared
two items, one a short letter for each of the staff apologizing for the
inconvenience and expressing respect for their work. They clarifyied
their position that the protest was not directed at the staff, and that the
occupation would remain throughout both non-violent and performed in a
manner that made it easy for the staff to do their work. The other
item, perhaps as critical in bridging the cultural gaps between elite
protesting students and working class staff was a bouquet of flowers presented to
the secretaries as a physical expression of their regret for causing them
inconvenience during the CIA recruitment blockade.

Even further contributing to the clerical staff's lack of investment in
actively taking on the role of our opponents was the Fordham 9's
immediately letting them know that, according to university
regulations, the matter was not one that they had to deal with; it was instead for
Campus Security and the Fordham College Dean to confront. And that
brings us to the next area where planning played a critical role in the
success of , namely handling of security. In this instance issues of
class and race entered into the picture as potential causes of unneeded
conflict. Security at the overwhelmingly white Fordham was majority African
American or Hispanic and sure enough the head of security who showed up, upon
being notified of the blockade, was African American and none too thrilled at
the sight of privileged white student radicals taking over a campus office.
The tension that emerged from that was quickly dissipated when the chief of
security was informed that the matter was one that he also did not have
to deal with unless and only if the protest in any way turned violent. As
long as the protest remained non-violent, the Dean of Students had to make
any decisions about physically removing non-violent student protestors and
that could only be done by NYPD. Again, as with the clerical staff, the head
of security realized that he was not responsible for much aside from
monitoring the situation and notifying the Dean of Students, whose
phone number he was provided with by the Fordham 9.

By this point, it should be mentioned, about 50 student and faculty
supporters had arrived to show support in the hallway, only further
contributing to the sense of magnitude of the protest-even though only
9 were inside actually blockading the recruiter's activities. While a few
interviews actually proceeded, upon the arrival of the Dean, he and the
recruiter both agreed that it was not desirable for the CIA or Fordham
to attract further publicity with the arrest of students at Fordham being
plastered all over the metropolitan and potentially national evening
news. The recruiter left and the next morning the campus awoke to the
surprising full page photo and headline in the Fordham Ram shouting "Fordham 9
Stops CIA".

The spirit and tactics of the Fordham 9 are seen in today's activism
against military recruitment as a means to pressure the US to end its
bloody war and occupation of Iraq. In the Twin Cities there have
emerged two tactics; the first is seen in the citywide protests against high
school and university campuses that culminated in a large rally of students
against military recruitment on campus at the University of Minnesota.
This protest took place as part of a nationwide protest against the ongoing
US military occupation of Iraq and highlighted the role of recruiters in
seeking out poor and/or minority youth to serve as canon fodder for
that adventure. The intensity of such protests reflects the potential for
directly and concretely confronting how this war and war generally
shapes and reproduces inequalities of race and class under US capitalism.

The other tactic has shown itself in the form of a protest against
military recruitment on Hamline University's campus where students and faculty
organized to disallow military recruiters from their campus. However,
the motivations for this departed from the nationwide antiwar movement,
with a focus instead on the military's blatant disregard for university
diversity provisions that prohibit organizations that utilize campus resources
from discriminating on the basis of race, creed, gender, sexuality, etc.
Diversity and the rights of minorities within the military are not
unimportant issues, and certainly leftists should affirm such rights
strongly. Nonetheless, it is odd that, at a time of massive death and
injury in Iraq being brought to Iraqis by the illegal US invasion and
occupation, this should be the primary issue and so much in the
forefront at this point. If anything the major problem with the military right
now might well be an in-your-face affirmative action policy of actively
recruiting poor and minorities to serve in the Iraq quagmire. When the
goal of forcing the military to recognize gays and lesbians as full citizen
soldiers is met and protest movements then welcome the military back to
campuses, what is the message conveyed aside from acceptance of
military recruitment on campuses in a time of ever mounting war atrocities as
long as diversity goals are met?

The spirit of the 1986 anti-CIA recruitment protest that guided the
Fordham 9 and other nationwide protests in that period can only be replicated
if the relationship between current protests against recruitment by the US
military on American high school and college campuses is linked as ones
against the military's role in reinforcing the political-economy of
capitalist inequality and empire building. These issues are perhaps
even more urgent today than they were in 1986, with a situation that
requires even sharper and more nuanced analyses of an empire building strategy
that s the language of global diversity and rights as the US seeks to
rationalize its mission as a newfangled kind of human rights
imperialism. With any luck, the Fordham 9 action will seem like a Sunday picnic
compared with future protests on college campuses against military recruitment
and US wars in the Middle East and elsewhere today and to come.

Stephen Philion is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Cloud
State University in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, teaching
social theory, sociology of race, and China and Globalization. His writings
can be found at his website. He can be reached at: stephen_philion@yahoo.com

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This archive consists of a topically organized selection of articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen material relevant to the work of Eugene, Oregon’s Committee for Countering Military Recruitment that we think may be of use to others individuals and groups with similar goals. 

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