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For the last three years, the first week of March has seen a national day of co-ordinated student action in support of accessible, democratic higher education.
The 2010 day of action came as the nation’s most active year of student protest in decades was in full swing. Building on the California protests and occupations of Fall 2009, March 4 saw more than 120 actions in thirty-three states, and drew a level of media attention that was, for its time, astonishing. A year and a half before Occupy Wall Street was launched, eleven months before the Wisconsin statehouse occupation began, #March4 was for many the first sign that something big and new was bubbling up from the campuses.
March 2, 2011 was a bit smaller than March 4, 2010, at least in part because of administrators’ success in quieting student protest in California the previous fall. But it did produce three campus occupations — again, this is well before Occupy Wall Street — including a feminist protest in Pennsylvania, a statehouse solidarity occupation in Wisconsin, and the audacious (and chilling) occupation of the ledge of a building on the Berkeley campus. A week later, high school students staged their first nationally co-ordinated day of protest in recent memory, and the momentum of the campus movement hasn’t subsided since.
So what can we expect to see tomorrow, in the first day of campus action of the OWS era? The Nation has a piece up offering a taste of what’s brewing, while the coordinating group Occupy Colleges lists 64 campuses that they expect to be acting up in one way or another. In California, March 1 is the kickoff of a planned week of action that’s slated to culminate in a state capitol occupation, and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in the pipeline.
Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.
Evening Update | As I reported last week, there have been 37 campus occupations in the US and Canada so far this academic year. (That’s not protests, occupations.) It’s safe to say that number will be higher by Friday. Huffington Post also has a good overview of what’s in store (posted yesterday).
March 1 Morning Update | I’ll be liveblogging the day’s events here.
Like this:
As the map below shows, students have staged more than three dozen campus occupations across the United States and Canada during the 2011-12 academic year. Starting with the University of New Orleans at the end of August, more than two weeks before Occupy Wall Street kicked off, the movement has grown to encompass at least thirteen states and one Canadian province.
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Campuses hosting occupations have been public and private, urban and rural. They have included university centers and no fewer than four community colleges. Students have occupied indoors and outdoors. They have been rousted by police. They have been beaten. They have been arrested. They have been pepper-sprayed. And in many cases they have come back from such treatment to re-establish occupations larger and more lasting than those that were cut short.
Some occupations have won concrete victories, others have refused to articulate demands. Some have been mounted by students alone, others have been supported by faculty, staff, and community members. Together, these actions represent a new phase in American student organizing.
And it’s only February.
This map presently includes detailed information about all 37 campus occupations of which I’m aware. It will be updated on an ongoing basis for the rest of the academic year — please disseminate it widely and forward any additional data you may have.
Nineteen students and former students at UC Davis have filed a federal lawsuit charging the university’s chancellor, chief of police, and other officials of violating their civil rights in the November 18 pepper spray incident that made headlines around the world.
The lawsuit argues that “campus policies and practices” that led to the incident “offend both the state and federal constitutional guarantees of the rights to free speech and assembly.”
Five of those named in the suit are Davis administrators, including Chancellor Linda Katehi and Chief of Police Annette Spicuzza. The suit alleges that the five promulgated an unlawful dispersal order and failed in their duty to properly train the campus police in handling peaceful protests. It further alleges that the five were negligent in hiring and retaining campus police officer John Pike, who was “unqualified” for his job.
The nineteen plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and an injunction barring similar responses to student protest in the future.
Thirteen of the plaintiffs say they were pepper sprayed on November 18 “without legal cause or justification.” Four say they were physically mistreated in other ways. Eight say they were wrongfully arrested, and one says he was denied medical assistance while in custody.
Some highlights of today’s court filing:
- Seventeen of the nineteen plaintiffs in the case were UC Davis students last November. The other two were recent graduates, one of whom was teaching classes at Davis at the time. (The other was visiting the campus.)
- Eight of the ten protesters arrested at Davis on November 18 are parties to the lawsuit.
- The plaintiffs claim that the pepper spray used on the students carries a manufacturer’s recommendation that it be used from a distance of at least six feet. The lawsuit estimates that the students were sprayed from a distance of 1-2 feet.
- The suit alleges that “neither the University nor the police provided adequate medical attention on the scene to any of the students who had been sprayed.” It further claims that one defendant was taken to a hospital in an ambulance for treatment of the effects of the spray.
- Fifty-one campus police officers are cited in the suit, of whom all but John Pike are unnamed.
- The lawsuit alleges violations of the plaintiffs’ First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well as their rights to free speech and assembly, medical care when in police custody, and freedom from arrest without probable cause, under California law.
Update | Key quote: “In prior years, Defendants … as well as their predecessors in their positions, permitted assemblies, demonstrations and protests on campus which included the erection of structures such as tents and domes, when the message and speakers were less controversial. In contrast, Defendants and each of them took the actions to disperse the lawful assembly on November 18, and to pepper spray and arrest students because of the demonstration’s message and who was delivering it.”
Also: “Certain plaintiffs were targeted by the police for forcible arrests based on their past political activism and associations at the University.”
And this: “The pepper spraying and arrest of peacefully assembled students on their college campus was so clearly in violation of established state and federal law that no inference other than that the Defendants acted maliciously with intent to injure and to deprive plaintiffs of their constitutional rights can be drawn.”
Second Update | The ACLU of Northern California is assisting with the lawsuit. Their press release can be found here.
What you see below is the first step toward a comprehensive interactive map of all American campus occupations during the 2011-12 academic year. It’s not close to done — I’ve got a lot more data to add, for starters — but it’s a beginning.
Fall 2011 occupations are marked in yellow. Spring 2012 (most of which aren’t on the map yet) are in blue. Occupations that saw arrests or other police violence are in red.
Each marker contains at least one link to the occupiers’ blog/Twitter/Facebook info and/or to media coverage of the action. Click here for the full map with a complete explanation and chronological list of occupations.
If you have info about occupations not listed here, or more data about occupations that ARE listed, please share. Include links if you can.
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No time for a full treatment of this right now, but can I just point out something?
There wasn’t a Superbowl riot at U Mass last night.
The AP story on last night’s events on campus says there were no hospitalizations, and no property damage. A university spokesperson says there were a few fistfights, but all thirteen of the student arrests were for either disorderly conduct or failure to disperse.
Why the “failure to disperse” arrests? Because fifteen minutes after students gathered in a main residential quad on campus, police told them to go home. They used horses, dogs, and smokebombs, cops to clear the area, and busted folks who wouldn’t leave. From everything I’ve seen the big drama all came from the cops.
Which is part of why I was a bit disappointed to see supporters of the Occupy movement snarking the U Mass students. No, their Superbowl party wasn’t a political act, but since when do any of us only like political parties? Occupy is about (among many other things) reclaiming public spaces, opposing police harassment, and creating community. Isn’t a mass campus gathering like the one that took place last night presumptively a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing even if we call it a riot?
A couple of years ago, Malcolm Harris — then a campus radical at UMD-College Park, now a writer and Occupy activist in New York — was present at a similar “riot” after Maryland’s basketball team beat Duke. His take on that night is well worth remembering now:
I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots. I’m supposed to complain that students are willing to take to the streets when the Terrapin mens’ basketball team wins but not when tuition increases or black enrollment drops. Sadly, I can’t play the alienated radical role today because I was there Wednesday night, and I saw more than drunk revelers.
When students took to Route 1 after a hard-fought victory over Duke, it was with joy and celebration. We chanted “Maaarylaaaand,” and we didn’t mean the buildings or the endowment or the logo. We meant one another.
Student activism (as I wrote then) has always straddled the line between politics and play, between organizing for social change and acting up for the hell of it. Either impulse can be creative or destructive, either can be deployed for positive or negative ends, but both impulses are inherent to student identity, and both are worth celebrating.
Go Terps.
Update | Aaron Bady passes along a fascinating piece on the role of Egyptian soccer fans in that country’s popular uprising. Here’s a taste:
I believe we are witnessing a natural development in an inevitable conflict between two parties that have found themselves following two different paradigms of life: the paradigm of the depression, control, and normalization of apathy versus the paradigm of joyful liberation from the shackles of social and institutional norms to create gratifying chaos.
The latter is what I call “the politics of fun”.
And another:
The key to understanding the Ultras phenomenon is to imagine it as a way of life for these youth. For them, becoming a football fan became a symbolic action that was both joyful and a means of self-expression. But the broader social, psychological, and cultural contexts were unable to adapt to the groups’ activities, in part by virtue of their rebellious nature and their defiance of norms.
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