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Students at California State University Fresno staged a walkout and teach-in on Wednesday, protesting the massive fee increases and budget cuts that are underway at California’s public universities.
An estimated four hundred Fresno State students participated in the walkout, which built steam over the course of the morning and included a march around campus.
At two o’clock that afternoon, one hundred students climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the campus library, which houses the offices of Fresno State president John D. Welty.
The students sat in outside his suite for two hours before Welty arrived, and secured an agreement that Welty will participate in a public meeting one week from Tuesday to discuss students’ demands.
This was the fifth sit-in of the fall semester at a California public university, following actions at UCLA and Berkeley, and two at UC Santa Cruz. This weekend, students from across California will gather at Berkeley for a statewide activist conference on the budget crisis.
Still recovering from two major computer meltdowns over the weekend, but we’ll be back up and running soon. Stay tuned…
Two weeks after their occupation of a graduate student union building ended, UCSC student activists staged another campus takeover last night.
Details are still sketchy on the current occupation, but here’s what I have so far:
Sometime yesterday, apparently yesterday evening, students began an occupation at the University of California Santa Cruz.
According to this post at Santa Cruz Indymedia, the occupation is of UCSC’s “Humanities 2” building, which houses classrooms and offices, including the office of the Dean of Social Sciences. A comment there says that one student was maced and arrested early in the occupation, but that as of one o’clock this morning, other students remained barricaded inside, controlling the entire building.
This statement from UCSC activists, dated yesterday, indicates that more than one student was arrested and maced, and charges that students were not given proper warning before police moved in.
2:30 pm update | New details from Twitterer @creativecstasy, a UCSC student who was on the scene last night (and who took the photo posted above). She says the activists who conducted the takeover “knew what they were doing,” and that they “moved swiftly,” using “furniture/benches/trash [cans] to barricade doors.”
Once the occupiers were inside, supporters of the takeover massed for a dance party in front of the building, while the occupation’s manifesto was read aloud and projected with scrolling text on an outside wall. The occupation was still going on when she left late last night, @creativecstasy says, and as far as she knows the students are still inside now.
4:00 pm update | UC Santa Cruz has released a statement on the events of last night. By that account, three students were pepper-sprayed while attempting to barricade the building with a table. One of the three was arrested, and the other two avoided capture.
The UCSC statement also says that students took over the building “for several hours last night,” but gives no details about when and how the occupation ended. A cryptic note posted moments ago on the Occupy CA website, however, seems to suggest that the students left the building voluntarily.
morning update | Two responses to the UCSC administration’s statement have been posted on the Occupy CA website.
Fears of massive student protests coordinated with an upcoming general strike have led the University of Puerto Rico to shut all eleven of its campuses for an entire week.
The Puerto Rican government announced plans late last month to lay off sixteen thousand government workers in an attempt to close a $3 billion budget deficit. Since the announcement, students and labor have taken a number of protest actions, with student strikes shuttering several UPR campuses in recent weeks.
Fearing similar actions in the lead-up to an island-wide general strike slated for Thursday, and hoping to “calm things down and to allow the university community to think peacefully and constructively about the problems facing Puerto Rico,” the university’s president announced a weeklong system-wide “recess” beginning on Monday.
October 15 update, 11:15 am | A hundred thousand protesters are expected to participate in this morning’s largest rally in support of the Puerto Rican general strike.
11:25 am | Reports from Twitter, citing local news coverage, say that students from the University of Puerto Rico’s school of law have marched onto the Luis A. Ferré Expressway, a major highway into San Juan, shutting it down. Follow #ParoPR for Twitter coverage of the day’s events, most of it in Spanish.
October 16 update | Students occupied the Luis A. Ferré Expressway for eight hours yesterday, maintaining their position long after the primary protest march had ended. They were eventually convinced to disperse after a personal appeal from the elderly Puerto Rican nationalist Rafael Cancel Miranda. [Spanish language news report here, Google automatic translation here.]
Britain’s Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, seem likely to sweep into power in Britain next spring, and today a London newspaper is reporting that they may bring with them a doubling of tuition fees for British university students.
Undergraduate fees in Britain are currently capped at £3,225 a year, about $5,100, but the Tories’ chief higher education official was quoted this morning as saying that he’s open to raising that cap to as much as £7,000 — more than $11,000. Such an increase would dwarf even the massive hikes that are currently being proposed in the University of California system here in the United States.
The center-left Labour Party has led Britain’s government since 1997, but recent polling has shown a strong and relatively stable lead for the Conservatives. By law, new parliamentary elections must be held by June of next year.
studentactivism.net 
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