(NEW YORK) MintPress — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum took on the Occupy Wall Street movement at his campaign event in Washington state on Monday. After Occupy Tacoma protesters began chanting and shouting, and two were dragged away by police, Santorum said, “I think it’s really important to understand what this radical element represents. What they represent is true intolerance.”
Santorum, a social conservative and Republican candidate, was speaking to hundreds of supporters gathered outside the Washington Historical Museum. The setting was ironic: A number of major museums and libraries across the country are validating its legacy as part of the country’s social history. Institutions from the Smithsonian, the world’s biggest museum, to the New York Historical Society have been actively collecting material produced by Occupiers for preservation, many sending staff members to occupied parks to gather posters, signs and other artifacts.
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Memorabilia goes mainstream
Unlike other institutions focused only on collecting, the Museum of the City of New York is currently holding a photography exhibit on Occupy at its South Street Seaport Museum offshoot, which reopened last month after a year of being closed for renovations. It will also include materials on the movement in a new gallery opening in the spring that focuses on social activism inNew York City.
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Occupy Classrooms
It’s not just established museums and libraries that are recognizing the role of the Occupy movement. Several universities across the country have recently rolled out courses dedicated entirely to the subject. Chicago’s Roosevelt University, for one, offers a political science course, “Occupy Everywhere,” that focuses on the history of the movement. Reading includes a range of analysis related to corporate greed and the division of wealth.
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and the University of CaIifornia at San Diego are also adding Occupy related course to their curriculum. And upperclassmen and graduate students at New York City’s Columbia University are now able take an anthropology course called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” Taught by Occupy Wall Street participant Hannah Appel, it will require students to get involved with the movement outside of the classroom.
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Springing forward
Critics have challenged that while the movement has been able to attract scores of students, it has not drawn enough people from different classes and ethnic groups to fully represent the “99%.”