[…] Small in number, confined to a few Montreal campuses and now with renewed violence from a police force that has stooped to new lows of brutality this spring, Quebec’s student strikers needed a win.
Today, on the campus of the Université du Québec à Montréal, facing a court order demanding that classes be held and the threat of expulsion issued by their administration, hundreds of students turned up to disrupt classes and enforce their democratically voted strike mandate.
In response, the university administration called in the Montreal police, who arrived in full riot gear with pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and batons at the ready. Paradoxically enough, their stated role there was to ensure that classes could occur as scheduled.
The students were shortly boxed in and it was clearly about to get very, very ugly. There were numerous reports of police violence on social media, and the bulk of the reported 22 arrests happened as riot police swept onto campus. Students then set up barricades, and police formed a line and prepared to move in.
Then a funny thing happened. A single man, a prof in a paperboy cap, walked out into the no man’s land between the lines and gestured to police that he was staying there. As students thunderously chanted “les profs! avec nous! les profs! avec nous!” a second prof came forward, and then a third, and in moments a line of professors had formed, linking arms and standing between students and police. […]
As a group of profs went to the police station to negotiate the release of their students (who were freed shortly thereafter on a promise to appear in court), remaining students and faculty proceeded to hold an impromptu sit-in in the university’s largest common area[…]
The demands put forward by these students and professors reportedly include an end to all political expulsions, a lifting of the injunction mandating access to classes and no more cops on campus[…]
It has been a troubling time for anyone who frowns upon the casual use of violence on young people, especially youth guilty of little more than expressing their opinions, and it has often seemed our response to this spasm of indiscriminate brutality has been a collective shrug.
Into this abyss of indifference stepped a couple dozen university professors who drew a line, both figuratively and literally, and demanded an end to the indiscriminate violence being inflicted upon their students. Somehow, up to this point, the well-documented abuses of Quebec police had escaped the gaze of our collective moral rebuke. The police, as Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois has written, take their cues from us, and so far we have given them license to run wild.
Today, if only for today, that lawless ride came to a screeching halt at the feet of a line of university professors. Either you beat us all, or you beat none of us, they dared the line of stone-faced officers, and it was the police who blinked. […]
As we now know, the police didn’t blink for long. But the gesture of solidarity still matters. Please visit the link for video of the professors forming a line in front of the students amidst appreciative chanting.
