Monthly Archive

December 11 update: The second Wheeler Hall takeover has ended in mass arrests after nearly four days of apparently peaceful occupation.

Before Thanksgiving, student activists snuck into UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall and managed to shut it down for a day before they were rousted and arrested.

Tonight (Monday, December 7) students are back at Wheeler with a more ambitious plan. Instead of shutting it down, they want to open it up.

This week is “dead week” at Berkeley — the study week between the end of classes and the beginning of finals — and the Wheeler occupiers have announced that they intend to turn Dead Week into Live Week. They’re aiming to keep Wheeler Hall occupied and open to all comer from now until finals begin.

In keeping with their plan for a liberated, open building, the activists are reaching out to the campus. Their Live Week website includes the usual manifesto, but it also boasts a Wiki on the occupation and a calendar of events. Earlier this evening, when the occupiers hosted a speaker, they put up streaming video of the event on the site’s main page.

Earlier tonight it was reported on Twitter that administrators had given the students a 7:30 deadline to vacate the building. That deadline came and went with no police action, though, and at a little before nine this tweet was posted from the @anticapitalproj Twitter feed:

#ucstrike TOTAL victory. Space held, cops retreat til morning.

See you then.

5:00 am California time | There was a bit of a scare after I went to bed, but the situation was apparently resolved. (This tweet and this correction are pretty amusing.) Things are quiet now, and the students have settled in.

There’s a live video feed up from Wheeler, just a camera in a dark room. I heard some show tunes earlier, and someone walking around.

The feed has a text chat option, too — it’s quiet at the moment, but I can see it being really valuable once everyone’s awake.

In addition to the live feed, the folks inside have posted a short video tour of the lobby and main auditorium at Wheeler. (The video opens with footage of some guys sweeping and mopping, by the way.) The video gives an introduction to the principles of the occupation, and a view of the way things are being run.

This new occupation has a lot in common with recent UC library study-ins, but it’s far bolder than those actions. Wheeler II is clearly modeled on the large-scale, long-term campus occupations that have swept Europe in the last year — occupations in which students have sought to establish functioning open university communities in campus spaces. A few recent American occupations have attempted to create similar environments, but I know of none which have reached the level of success that we’re seeing at Wheeler right now.

4:00 pm California time | The Wheeler occupation has passed the 24-hour mark with no end in sight. A list of today’s events indicates the group’s ambition and confidence — it includes everything from a scholarly talk and a legal rights training to a poetry reading and a knitting group. (Tomorrow there’s a film screening and a dance class on the agenda.)

9:00 pm California time | Wheeler Hall sources are reporting on Twitter that the Berkeley administration “has given us Wheeler Hall through Friday.” More details when I get them.

A crowd of students from California State University Stanislaus that the Modesto Bee estimated at “several dozen” spent a chunk of Saturday afternoon at the home of CSUS president Hamid Shirvani.

To be precise, they were on his front lawn.

One member of the group knocked on Shirvani’s door and got no answer, so the crowd spent an hour chanting and talking to reporters.

The protest was conceived after a meeting of student activists from a number of CSU campuses. It represents the latest step in the expansion of California budget protests, which for most of the semester were concentrated primarily in the University of California, to the Cal State system.

Asked about university reports that someone rang Shirvani’s door “multiple times” the following morning, protester Barbara Olave said, “that’s not us.”

I’ve thrown together an index of last week’s Campus Progress panel on college affordability and the UC student movement, which featured myself (Angus Johnston), Victor Sanchez of the University of California Student Association, University of California professor Bruce Cain, and Pedro de la Torre and Erica Williams of Campus Progress.

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“Student movements are signs of realities greater than themselves.”

–Mir Hossein Mousavi, statement commemorating Iran’s Student Day, December 7, 2009.

It’s 10:30 on Sunday night in New York, which means that it’s seven o’clock Monday morning in Tehran.

Monday, December 7. Student Day.

In August 1953 Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh was deposed in a CIA-backed coup. Four months later, US vice president Richard Nixon paid a diplomatic visit to the Shah of Iran, who had implemented Mossadegh’s removal from office. On 16 Azar by the Iranian calendar — December 6 — government troops opened fire on Tehran University students demonstrating against Nixon’s visit. Three were killed. Since then, 16 Azar has been commemorated as Student Day in Iran.

As I type this, the sun is rising on the morning of 16 Azar.

Media reports indicate that Iran’s government is doing everything it can to prevent protests from developing today. Campuses have been shuttered. Internet access has been cut. Student leaders have been arrested, as have the mothers of slain demonstrators. Press credentials for foreign media have been revoked.

The sun is rising.

9:30 am Tehran time | “Student movements are signs of realities greater than themselves.” – Mir Hossein Mousavi, statement commemorating Iran’s Student Day, December 7, 2009.

10:00 am Tehran time | Follow the hashtag #16Azar for news of the day, but remember to approach uncorroborated reports with skepticism.

3:30 pm Tehran time | An interesting insight from Iran News Now and the BBC: “We don’t hear ‘Where is my vote?’ anymore. The chants are mostly directed at the regime and its leaders in general.”

3:45 pm Tehran time | Media reports are still fragmentary, but video and photographs coming out of Iran show large-scale demonstrations on university campuses and beyond. Government forces are doing their best to clamp down, but it’s not yet clear how successful they’ve been.

Tuesday | Protests are continuing into a second day. Here’s a good news roundup from the New York Times.