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Non-Students, Then and Now

Remember the '60s and '70s, when student unrest on our university campuses resulted in disrupted class schedules, damaged property and radical changes: in dormitory rules (single-sex to co-ed, curfews to open door), admission policies (affirmative action), academic content (black history, women's studies, specialized individually tailored majors, and how administrators were chosen and campuses were run?

Remember how university chancellors and deans, embarrassed to admit that they were engaged in a struggle for control, were quick to blame "non-students"? Non-students, according to their view, were people of student age or older, unwilling or unable to perform adequately as students, who had dropped out to do dope and/or wreck academia/the neighborhood/the society/the morals of youth. They were accused of taking advantage of the gullibility, enthusiasm and romanticism of vulnerable, well meaning, idealistic and naive young people.

In opposition to this view stood a significant portion of the younger faculty, student leadership, and the student body itself. Never a majority, they nonetheless stood firm against refusals of tenure; dismissals from graduate programs (being told that boat rockers would never get the advanced degree they sought); and being clubbed and gassed by campus security, municipal police, state highway patrol, and in some cases private goon squads. For better or worse, depending on your point of view, the dissidents won: the draft is dead, the Viet Nam war was concluded before it was "won", the perception of universities as institutions rightfully disconnected from the community was smashed, and the idea that professors know better than students what students should be taught, forever demolished.

In the process, a generation of students learned that the police are not their friends, that historians and sociologists and scientists will lie for financial gain and prestige, and that government does not serve the people, but rather that the reverse is true.

Now I live in Oaxaca, where student unrest is an almost daily institution; where students have grown up with an acute awareness of the opportunity that controlling access to education might provide for the unscrupulous; and where non-students are seen as a threat to the social order. The difference is that here, the non-students are being denounced not by the administration, but by the students!

In late November 1996, students throughout Oaxaca organized a bus boycott, to protest fare raises. In the process, buses were commandeered by gangs of youths and driven to the street in front of the University's main downtown building. After being parked, they were vandalized: windows broken, seats slashed, tires flattened. The university blamed the students. The students blamed the Porros (non-students).

While there is some disagreement as to their origins, there is no dissension about how they operate and what they do. ("Porros" is a label derived from the word for a club, or other instrument of beating people.) They are gangsters, they are violent, they engage in extortion of other students and steal university property, and they do so with seeming impunity. Many believe they are responsible for the execution - in his office - of the last rector of the University. Most students believe that the Porros are an instrument of the Oaxaca state government and of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose main job is to discredit all legitimate student protest -- and to embarrass the newly elected Presidente (mayor) of Oaxaca, who belongs to the opposition Acción Nacionál (PAN).

Revelations about the workings of COINTELPRO and other government sponsored infiltration and slander of legitimate groups of political opponents leave us in no position to point a self-righteous finger at other governments who send in agents provocateur to disrupt forces for change. Nor do emerging testimonies regarding secret ties between law enforcement agencies and right wing white supremacy groups in the US, and with the counter-revolutionary dope smuggling Contras in Nicaragua, allow us to take a smug attitude toward the excesses of the dictatorships which we support.

The other day I happened upon a rally demanding more scholarships for poor students. It was held in front of the University. There was a large banner being held off to one side. It said "Somos Estudiantes, No Somos Porros" (we are students, not porros). I hadn't seen a sign like that since the Campus Republican Club put one up during the Free Speech demos at my old alma mater...

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