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Today started off quietly in the University of California — for the first time in nearly a week, the day began without students hunkered down behind barricades anywhere in the UC system.
Students were still sitting in at UCSC’s Kresge Town Hall, but the mood there was hardly confrontational on either side — the university’s administration described them as “hanging out” rather than occupying. Similarly, when students returned to Mrak Hall at UC Davis, the site of 52 arrests on Thursday night, they called it a study-in, not an occupation.
Several other campuses hosted mass student meetings to debrief and plan strategy — throughout the state there was a sense that activists were pausing for a breath after the tumult of the previous five days.
That didn’t last long.
A little before three o’clock this afternoon, a crowd of more than a hundred students estimated entered the lobby of the offices of UC president Mark Yudof in Oakland, asking to speak with Yudof. Three hours later, they’re still there.
The building is scheduled to close at six o’clock — eight minutes from now, as I write this. I’ll have more soon.
6:10 pm | Multiple sources on Twitter are reporting that the students left UCOP peacefully before the building closed. An official UC Twitter feed says that a university vice president and provost pledged “to march to Sacramento with students to advocate for more higher ed funding.”
In the spring of this year a wave of campus occupations swept Croatia, beginning with the takeover of the school of humanities and social sciences at the University of Zagreb on April 20. The protesters demanded free and universally available higher education, and by the end of their campaign all or part of twenty universities in eight Croatian cities had been occupied.
I had a chance to talk to some of the leaders of the Croatian occupations when I was in Zagreb earlier this month, and those conversations (and others I had there) were a real crash course in the student movements that have swept Europe this year. Much of what I learned is highly relevant to the American situation, particularly now that campus occupations are becoming a regular occurrence here.
The U of Zagreb occupation lasted for thirty-five days this spring. It took place not behind barricades but in a freely accessible building, with democratic governance meetings open to all, regular teach-ins and seminars — even a daily morning yoga session.
Today at a noon mass gathering, or plenum, Zagreb’s student activists voted to take up their occupation again. Occupations are also underway at the Universities of Pula and Rijeka, with a meeting scheduled for tomorrow at Split to consider similar action.
There hasn’t been much coverage of the current European wave of student protest in the United States, and what there has been has often been fragmented and decontextualized. I’m going to make an effort to overcome those problems in the coming days, using Croatia’s occupations — those of this spring and those going on now — as a case study and a starting point for broader discussion. Stay tuned!
studentactivism.net 
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