On the 50th anniversary of the dismantling of free tuition at the City University of New York, our largest public urban university in the United States continues to be an epicenter for struggles over anticapitalist economic justice, Palestine/anticolonial solidarity and resisting a new Zionist McCarthyism, and labor union and community defense against ICE/policing. We are honored to share historical contexts and current organizing lessons with Debt Collective and our broader communities. In the process, we will offer a counter-institutional strategy that anchors radical intersectional study and movement within social spaces like universities where indebted people are already amassed.

• Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid, street scholar of social movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School. They collaborate with CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and the CUNY Digital History Archive. Coco has been immersed in two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond, and is now based in Philadelphia.
• Noelle Mapes is a PhD student in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center and a former public school elementary teacher in NYC. Noelle is a strike-ready member of PSC-CUNY and an organizer with MORE-UFT, a k-12 social justice caucus of the NYC teachers’ union. Noelle’s research focuses on participatory democracy, teachers’ unions, and the political economy of schools.

This session is a part of the larger Jubilee School: College for All series.