Photo courtesy of NYU Local

Radical student group Take Back NYU (TCBY, no wait, TBNYU) has barricaded itself inside a dining hall at Kimmel Center, NYU’s non-diagonal equivalent of Lerner.

TBNYU had publicly planned to boogie tonight at their second annual “Study Breakdown,” but plans quickly went 1968 earlier this evening when several dozen students began barricading doors, hanging slogan-bearing signs in windows, and announcing their agenda via loudspeakers.

Among the group’s demands are more affordable tuition, public accounting of all university expenditures, more financial aid, and, in particular, financial aid for 13 Palestinian students. Signs at the center show the group has an international flair, as well, sporting slogans like, “Solidarity With Gaza.” (No explanation as to how the situation in Palestine relates to pricey East Village studio apartments, but maybe it’s an “everyone who wants to protest, do it here”-type of thing.)

NYU Local has been liveblogging the goings-on since around 9 and in the last hour has reported “Tons of cops outside!” Take Back NYU also has a live stream broadcasting on the Web.

UPDATE (12:17 a.m.): Our NYU correspondents tell Bwog that students outside the center are “happy and cheering.” Meanwhile on the streaming video, a TBNYU member describes their group: “It is a Marxist communist organization, but there’s no kind of — no, like, we don’t screen our members. There’s a little Trotsky in there. Maybe. We’re, like, a strong-minded group. But, yeah, no, absolutely. We’re democratic.”

UPDATE (1:02 a.m.): Bwog has been told that there is one Barnard student there and “a lot of Columbia students came here but either left for int’l student visa fears or couldn’t get in because they stopped letting people in at some point.” There will be a “support rally” in front of Kimmel tommorow at 12:15 p.m. for any students who feel strongly enough to make the “trek.”