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The Berkeley Student Advocate’s office released their report on the Wheeler Hall occupation yesterday, two days after a draft version of the report leaked on the internet. The official version of the report drops some of the draft’s most tweet-worthy adjectives, but its substance is pretty much unchanged, and its portrait of the university administration is no more flattering.

UC Berkeley’s initial press release on the Wheeler Hall arrests conceded that the occupation of the building had been “largely non-disruptive,” and that the occupiers had initially taken steps “to ensure that their activities would not conflict with classroom review sessions.” It claimed, however, that as the week wore on the nature of the occupation shifted. “Things began to change the last couple of nights,” said university spokesman Dan Mogulof. Students began “breaking into locked classrooms and things like that,” and started to plan a hip-hop concert and dance party for Friday night. “Once the group refused to reconsider plans to hold an unauthorized all-night concert in an academic building,” said Mogulof, “we had to take steps to ensure that finals could go forward.”

But Mogulof conceded that there had been no property damage in Wheeler Hall, and provided no details regarding the nature or adverse consequences of the supposed classroom break-ins. On the subject of the concert, one member of the occupation told the Berkeley Daily Planet that the students had been ready to “guarantee that Wheeler would be clean and functional by 6 am, well before final exams on Saturday morning.” But Mogulof denied that any promises to that effect had been made, saying — in the Daily Planet‘s paraphrase — that “had there been such a guarantee, things might have had a different outcome.”

According to the SAO, however, the outcome was predetermined.

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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