PATCO Strikers & “The Fence” Painters Protest Trump at CMU’s AI Summit

PITTSBURGH, PA - For the past two weeks, members of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Democrats have been sleeping next to "The Fence" preparing for Donald Trump's "Artificial Intelligence" Summit today. 

"The Fence" is a 100-year-old, 20-yard-long wooden fence located in the middle of CMU, which the Guinness Book of World Records has labeled the "most painted fence" in the world. CMU's students routinely paint it with various political and cultural messages. 

With Trump coming to town, the College Democrats wanted to make sure that their message, "No Rapists on Campus - Shame on CMU," could be seen by all CMU students.  

Under CMU tradition, whoever sleeps by The Fence each night has the right to paint it at midnight; it can't be painted during the day.

"We've had two people there, 24/7, that means sleeping there in a tent, that means hanging out there in the summer heat, and that means making their voices heard," says River Sepanuk, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student, active in the College Democrats. "We've been talking to people at The Fence all this time, handing out flyers for protests." 

Last night, the two-week-long vigil was dispersed by Trump's security. In the morning, the activists discovered that CMU had painted over their message. The activists then returned in the morning and painted their message again, but by midday, a crew of CMU maintenance workers was painting over it again. 

"I don't agree with doing this, but my supervisor told me that I had to," one of the workers told me. 

Students were outraged as the school's protocols have given student activist groups wide latitude in painting a variety of messages on "The Fence." 

"We painted 'no rapists on our campus,' which should be a relatively non-controversial opinion, right?," says Rivers. 

Last August, CMU rolled out the red carpet to welcome Vice President Kamala Harris, who presented her economic proposals at a high-profile campaign event on campus. Now, with Trump cutting off grants to universities that disobey him, Carnegie Mellon University, which received over $ 360 million in federal funding last year alone, was now rolling out all the stops to host the President. 

More than 2,000 CMU faculty and students had signed a petition demanding that Trump not be allowed to visit campus.

"Shame on CMU leadership for cowing to an authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-science government, that illegally terminated federal grants and research projects of scholars on this very campus," said CMU linguistics professor Uju Anya, "Ignoring the pleas of the nearly 2,000 signatories of our petition letter requesting our administration not to allow this visit to happen." 

Unlike the joyous crowds of nearly 1,000 students who lined Forbes Avenue to greet Kamala Harris a year prior, the campus was eerily silent for Trump's visit. It resembled a military occupation, with over 100 hundred police officers dressed in riot gear, over two dozen of them on horses, patrolling the campus and keeping protestors far away from the building where Trump was speaking. 

"In just a year, there's been a shift in America I would never have anticipated," says Tracy Baton, who was at CMU's Kamala Harris event just a year ago, "I guess, my experience in (Apartheid) South Africa did show me that fascism was possible, but I didn't think they would get it quite as effective, quite as quickly."

A half-mile away in the "free speech zone" at Schenley Plaza, Katie Dickey, a 25-year-old social worker who struggles with a rare form of immunodeficiency,  is dressed up as a "Statue of Liberty." She's smiling festively, but her reason for being there is quite grim. 

"I'm a disabled person and I want us to be counted in the death count. There's going to come a time where we are looking back on this era, and everybody Trump defunded healthcare-wise like me," says Dickey, who's struggled with medical bills. "I want to be counted in the death count." 

Peter, a CMU physics tutor, says that he is protesting the growing use of Artificial Intelligence. 

"I tutor a lot of people in the physics department, and the amount of damage that AI has done to education, even at the collegiate level, is astounding," says Peter. "I know a lot of younger people in middle school and high school, who also are struggling to critically use their brains to do their work because of AI. The fact that CMU is so in support of AI really doesn't sit well with me." 

Despite the gloomy mood, there was some joy in the crowd of nearly 1,000 people who turned out. 

"I had been complaining to my therapist about Trump for months, but when I started going to protests, I started feeling a lot better," said one protestor, who drove in from Somerset County, more than an hour and a half away. 

As protestors marched down the street, chanting "Trump's a Jagoff" (Pittsburghese for asshole), I spotted an older couple in the crowd wearing vintage red PATCO union hats. The hats from the infamous 1981 strike when Reagan broke the PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, were older than most of the people in the crowd. 

They told me that they retrieved the hats in 1981, when, as teachers' union activists, they walked the picket line at Allegheny County Airport in solidarity with the fired PATCO workers. Pittsburgh is the only major city to have voted against Reagan both times.

"This is where everything fell apart in this country, when PATCO went down, when Reagan fired these people," says Kate Gensure, a retired Pittsburgh public school teacher. "We wear these hats because our hearts are still with them." 

The hats are older than most of the activists in the crowd, and the couple says they wear them to protests to remind people of the dedication it takes to make long-term change.  "We gotta keep fighting," says Kate. "Unions are our only hope. We are making a comeback." 

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