This post is the ninth in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!
California was the epicenter of last year’s resurgence of American student activism. Ten thousand studends marched at UC campuses on the first day of classes last fall. Students across California took over university buildings well over a dozen times. The March 4 Day of Action, the largest co-ordinated day of campus protest the nation has seen since the sixties, originated in the Golden State.
It’s not surprising that California students rose up the way they did — their state has been hit harder by the current fiscal crisis in higher education than any other, and their state government and public universities have put more of the weight of that crisis on students’ backs than any other. And California students confronted a long list of local crises last year as well, most notably a series of racist incidents that shocked and angered students across the state.
California’s institutions of higher education, confronted with this wave of righteous anger and action, moved forcefully to suppress it. Hundreds of students were arrested on California campuses last year, many of them protesting peacefully. And administrators have imposed harsh campus sanctions as well.
Many students arrested or cited during last year’s demonstrations remain in legal and administrative limbo. Increasingly, faculty and students uninvolved in the demonstrations are questioning the administration’s handling of these events.
How this conflict is resolved has profound implications for student protest in California and throughout the United States, and it’s going to be one of the biggest student activism stories on this blog and beyond in the coming year.
studentactivism.net 
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September 17, 2010 at 3:37 pm
reclaimuc
in the last two days, “pre-hearing conferences” for those facing student conduct charges have begun to take place, and the hearings themselves have apparently been scheduled for next week. the entire process is flawed: the office of student conduct has committed dozens of procedural violations of their own rules. (check out @callie_hoo on twitter yesterday for just some very recent examples.) but they claim the only way to get accountability for these violations is through appeal… to the very administrators who last year were working furiously to punish student protesters and impose a chill on campus activism. the student conduct system is broken. there will be more news coming out in the next week or so on this issue, so it’s very important and incredibly timely. thanks for writing on this!
September 17, 2010 at 11:27 pm
spsukaton
Hey Angus,
I was reading some of Mario Savio’s old speeches; he wrote the following passage in an introduction to Hal Draper’s book about Berkeley that (if “Berkeley” is replaced with “California”) remains particularly telling about the state of (particularly but not exclusively “public”) higher ed:
“The forces influencing students at Berkeley — not merely those resulting from participation in the university itself, but also those deriving from student involvement in politics — these forces are likewise exaggerations of the forces to which society subjects other university students in other parts of the country. So probably the reason it could happen here first is this: while the same influences are present elsewhere, there is no university (none that I know of, at all events) where these influences are present in as extreme a form as here in Berkeley.”
Our responses within society are also exaggerated due to size (more colleges = more students = more student activists) – immigrant rights, student-labor solidarity work, etc.
September 19, 2010 at 3:42 pm
reclaimuc
more details here: http://bit.ly/aQFP1i