It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Students everywhere are far from their universities, celebrating the holidays with loved ones. Campuses are ghost towns. Blogs like this one are running at a tiny fraction of their usual traffic.
…And nineteen UC Irvine activists are being dragged in front of a judge.
Today is three hundred days exactly since the UC Irvine administration building takeover that resulted in nearly two dozen arrests. The county DA announced just three weeks ago — in the middle of finals — that charges would be brought, and scheduled their appearance date for tomorrow.
December 29.
Cute.
Update | And no, this is not a random artifact of the bureaucratic system. A UC Merced student who allegedly participated in the disruption of November’s UC Regents meeting — ten months after the UCI occupation — was called for a court appearance today. This is an intentional effort to both disrupt the lives of these student activists and deny them the community support that they would otherwise receive.)
studentactivism.net 
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December 28, 2010 at 6:08 pm
UCI Student
The other thing to note is that the charges for the Muslim students at UCI who disrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech will be running out in about a month and a half. Some of us at UCI fear that the charges against the 19 are being used to test the waters to see if they can charge the UCI 11 as well. As the sit-in organizers did very little in terms of a media campaign or student outreach to build support for their conduct cases, they were really unprepared to defend against the criminal charges. The MSU students did a better job of this, but much of their attention has been turned toward MSU’s suspension, which is now ending in the next week or so; the DA/UCI may be using this case to judge what sort of response students would have to charges against the Muslim students. If support for the 19 is high, they may not try anything with the 11; on the other hand, if the 19 are unable to mobilize support, there may be charges coming shortly against the 11. And it wouldn’t be much of a stretch; what the 17 did sitting in was hardly different than the 11’s protest.
It would be worth noting, too, that the only other case in recent memory–and Angus, maybe you could confirm whether this holds true back into the 60’s–where students were brought to trial for just a sit-in (rather than an occupation) was at UNC in 2008, where students sat in the Chancellor’s office for 2 WEEKS protesting sweatshop policy, with five being arrested during finals week. Each only faced 1 charge (rather than 3), plead guilty, and the judge vacated their sentences.