You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2009.
Here’s something kind of cool: A new Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year.
(The red markers are building occupations, the blue ones are demonstrations, the green ones are strikes, and the yellow ones are other newsworthy stories. A black dot means that one or more students were arrested in connection with the event.)
I’ve still got a lot to do to flesh it out, both in terms of adding more sites of activism and bulking up the information I include on the ones that are already there. I want to plug in links to websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds for as many of the actions as I can, for instance. But it’s well underway, and adding new material will go quicker if y’all are giving me the benefit of your knowledge.
Please feel free to make suggestions for new “pins” or other new info either in comments here or over at Google, and I’ll input what you give me as quickly as I can.
My inspiration for this map, by the way, came from this German map of student occupations. I figured I’d do my own since I wanted to recognize a broader spectrum of actions than they do (and, well, because theirs is in German), but that map is an excellent one with a global reach.
December 1 Update | The Nation has put up a very welcome online article about the map. If you’re interested in more detail about what I’m up to and why, that’s the place to go.
December 4 Update | There are now more than thirty pins in the map, in more than a dozen states, each with a link to media coverage of the event in question. Four of the incidents noted took place after I created the map earlier this week, and there are more updates coming this weekend.
December 8 Update | Closing in on fifty pins, including the new Wheeler Hall occupation at Berkeley and the CSU Stanislaus demonstration from Saturday. The Google Maps interface is annoyingly clunky and slow, but I’m adding new stuff pretty much every day.
January Update | I’m putting up a revised version of the map every Monday now, with a blogpost overview of what’s been added in the previous week. Check the main site on Mondays for new installments.
Back in April, I brought you the saga of a free-speech battle over the screening of sexual material at the University of Maryland. Now that story has another chapter.
This spring, the producers of a big budget porn flick were drumming up publicity by offering their film free for campus screenings, and the student programming board at UM announced plans to take them up on their offer. When word got out, conservatives in the state legislature gave the PR campaign a huge boost by threatening to cut the university’s budget if the movie was shown, and administrators banned the film from campus.
At that point a local campus group called the Student Power Party defied the ban and screened the film on campus … sort of. (They showed the first half hour of the movie, then got bored, turned it off, and talked about freedom of expression for a while.) The legislature backed down from their threat to cut funding to the university immediately, but directed UM’s regents to come up with a policy regulating “the displaying or screening of obscene films and materials” on campus. They gave them a deadline of December 1.
Which is this Tuesday.
As late as last month, the regents were widely expected to comply with the legislature’s order, even going so far as to write up a draft policy, but two weeks ago they announced that they would not be adopting it.
No other state university system in the nation regulates the display of sexually explicit material on campus, and any effort to do so would be certain to face strong constitutional challenges. The regents also concluded that adopting such a policy would “place undue financial and administrative burdens on the system’s campuses,” according to the Baltimore Sun.
It remains unclear whether legislators will punish UM for their defiance, as they had threatened to do, but at least a few are likely to try — State Senator Andy Harris, who was the engine behind the policy in the spring, is running for Congress.
Sunday Update | I have rewritten this post to reflect new information received this evening.
Ten days ago, fifty-one UC Davis students and one professor were arrested in the course of an occupation of Mrak Hall, the Davis administration building. Five days ago, students took over Mrak Hall again, demanding that criminal prosecution of those 52 be abandoned. On Friday afternoon, it looked like they had almost gotten their wish.
The UC Davis administration negotiated an end to the second takeover on Tuesday, agreeing — among other things — to urge the Yolo County DA to set aside all charges against those demonstrators. On Friday it was widely reported that the DA had agreed not to bring charges against 51 of them.
But that’s not quite what happened.
The charges against the “Mrak 51” haven’t been dropped, they’ve just been set aside, and they can be brought forward again at any time during the coming year. As the DA said in a news release, he hopes “that future student demonstrations will comply with the law and eliminate the need for the district attorney’s involvement.” If students act up again, in other words, last week’s threats of prosecution can be revived.
Meanwhile, charges are going forward against Bree Holmes, a student who was accused of assaulting a police officer during the demonstration. Holmes is said to have been slammed up against a police cruiser while being arrested, and the Davis administration has agreed to conduct a review of the circumstances of her arrest.
Supporters of the Mrak Hall activists will be holding a rally on the UC Davis quad on Monday, November 30 at 2 pm.
Posting will be light from now until Sunday, as I’m taking the opportunity presented by these next few slow news days to get some cool new site features up and running. But I’ll be here all weekend, and I’ve got some writing and links in the works, so don’t go far.
If there’s something going on that I should know about, either now or planned for next week, please feel free to leave a mention of it in comments to this post.
Last night students at UC Davis went back to Mrak Hall, where 52 people were arrested last Thursday, and launched the week’s eighth UC building occupation.
This takeover was shorter than several of its predecessors, but dramatic — it was the first in this wave of occupations to end with a written commitment by the administration to honor a set of protest demands.
The students began the occupation with a lengthy list of demands, but negotiated a suspension of the occupation on the basis of five: the university committed to conducting a review of one previous campus arrest, to urging the district attorney to “strongly consider … not filing charges” against the 52 Thursday arrestees, to dropping any disciplinary action against those students, to pursuing “further discussion” about co-op housing on campus based on “a mutual desire to promote sustainable, affordable cooperative living facilities,” and to holding “further discussions on all other demands with a representative group, as early as Monday, November 30.”
There’s nothing earth-shattering here, of course, but it’s still significant in at least three ways.
First, it gives students throughout the UC system a precedent for negotiated settlement of an occupation. There has been some resistance to that approach from both sides in the last week — from students who conducted “demandless” occupations, and from administrators who refused to enter into dialogue. Last night’s agreement affirms that negotiation is a live option in this series of actions.
Second, it provides a template for such negotiations. The Davis administration’s biggest concession was its agreement to forego disciplinary action against the Thursday demonstrators (and, implicitly, against last night’s demonstrators as well). That concession sets up amnesty as an achievable demand in future occupations.
Third, it opens up ongoing negotiations on local campus issues. A single university’s administrators have no direct power to roll back fees or reform the UC board of regents — such demands are aimed at off campus targets, and winning full victories on them is not a project for a single day. But local concessions can be won in a single action, and ongoing negotiations are a mechanism for refining and sharpening such demands to the point that more substantive victories become more likely.
In the NYU and New School occupations of 2008-09, those universities’ administrations shifted away from negotiation and toward punitive legal action as the students’ campaigns developed. The resolution of yesterday’s Mrak Hall occupation is the strongest evidence yet that the University of California is now moving in the opposite direction.
Update | Here is the UC Davis administration’s official statement on the occupation. Note that it describes the takeover as beginning with a study-in at eight o’clock yesterday morning, that it says that 150 demonstrators were present in Mrak at the end of the night, and that it strikes a conciliatory, respectful tone throughout. Note also that it binds the university to a new commitment beyond the five agreed to last night — the presence of Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi at a meeting with students next Monday.
Second Update | Commenter Cynthia D. notes that the Monday student meeting with the chancellor is actually a long-planned, regularly scheduled event. She also has a perspective on the administration’s behavior during the occupation that’s worth reading, so click through and read it.
Third Update | The Yolo County District Attorney announced on Friday that charges against 51 of the 52 Mrak Hall demonstrators have been dropped, with the only exception being the student charged with assault and resisting arrest. This is obviously a further victory for the second occupation.
Fourth Update | The third update above, based on a report from a local news station’s website, is inaccurate. Charges against the Mrak 51 have not been dropped, they’ve just been set aside, and they can be re-instated at any time in the next year.
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