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The Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park has been under strain recently, with growing numbers of visitors putting new demands on OWS’s ad-hoc infrastructure. Now some are charging that the New York Police Department is intentionally adding to the stress in an attempt to bring the occupation down.
Zuccotti’s activists and agitators have been joined by an increasingly visible contingent of folks drawn by the plaza’s free food and other attractions, a group that Harry Siegel in the New York Daily News described yesterday as “a fast-growing contingent of lawbreakers and lowlifes, many of whom seem to have come to Zuccotti in the last week with the cynical encouragement of the NYPD.” The Daily News describes a growing division in the park between an activist east and a “non-participant” west, the latter representing “a shady mélange of crusty punks, angry drunks, drug dealers and the city’s many varieties of park denizens.” (Tabloid editorializing aside, this characterization of the park’s split is supported by other observers.)
This new dynamic, Siegel says, is a result of police action:
“The NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals.”
The NYPD’s press office, Seigel reports, “declined to comment on the record about any such policy,” though police behavior in the park seems to lend it credence:
“‘He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,’ I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene with troublemakers inside the park, including a clearly disturbed man screaming and singing wildly at 3 a.m. for the second straight night.”
The question of how to address the problems posed by Zuccotti Park’s changing composition has been the subject of increasing debate in recent days, but that question has so far been framed primarily in terms of challenges arising organically out of the plaza’s identity as a source of resources and amenities. If the NYPD is in fact actively seeding the space with addicts and street people — if their goal is to turn Zuccotti Park into Hamsterdam — that debate may take a new turn.
“Student fees in state universities are usually confined to minor charges for matriculation, gymnasium, laboratory materials, and breakages, etc., which rarely amount to more than $50 a year for undergraduates. With the exception of Vermont none of the institutions in this group charges a regular tuition fee to residents of their respective states except in the professional departments, and in a few cases in engineering colleges. … The total revenue from student fees in 1910-1911, excluding board and rental of rooms, exceeded $100,000 in only six of the state universities — California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Michigan leading with $339,000. … The University of Washington, with half as many students as Michigan, but with only 277 professional students out of 2142, received from student fees $15,000. In contrast to these figures of the revenues from student fees, should be placed those of Harvard, $651,000, Chicago, $581,000, and Columbia, including the Teacher’s College and Summer School, $1,164,000.”
—A Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Paul Monroe, 1913.
If you enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley this fall, and you weren’t a California resident, you paid more than you would have if you had gone to Harvard.
That’s not a joke, or a misprint. Berkeley, a public university, now charges its out-of-state attendees more than Harvard does. Choose Harvard instead of Berkeley, and you’ll save enough to buy a top-of-the-line iPad. With a data plan.
“But that’s just out-of-state students!” I hear you cry. “The University of California is a state university, serving the people of the state of California! Out-of-state students should pay more!”
Well, yeah. Fair enough. But in-state tuition at Berkeley is now brushing up against fifteen grand, and even at that price it’s available to fewer and fewer Californians every year. Why? Because those higher-than-Harvard fees are really hard to pass up.
Berkeley’s out-of-state enrollment historically hovered around ten percent. But it rose to 15% two years ago as the current financial crisis hit, then jumped to 23% last year. For the fall of 2011, it skyrocketed to 29.8%. Even with increased enrollment overall, that translates to a loss of more than one thousand places for California residents in just two years.
Education activists talk about “privatization” of higher education a lot, and there’s a danger of that word losing its meaning through repetition. But here it is — privatization in action in the most concrete way. First Berkeley raises its out-of-state pricing to private university levels, and then it starts jacking up out-of-school enrollments to squeeze the most revenue out of its new policy. The public university withers, replaced by something very very different.
And this process is just getting underway. It’s going to get far worse before it gets better.
Update | An eagle-eyed commenter noticed that the webpage I used as my original source for Harvard’s rates omitted two apparently mandatory fees. Once those are taken into account, Harvard’s tuition costs remain slightly higher than Berkeley’s, for now at least. Once you factor in room and board, however, Berkeley takes the lead again — and by a slightly wider margin than I reported in the original version of this post. Full details in comments.
A recent CBS poll found that 43% of Americans agree with the views of Occupy Wall Street, with only 27% disagreeing. (Other polls have found similar sentiments.) But what do these numbers mean?
Here’s some historical context:
- In 1959, five years after Brown v. Board of Ed, a 53-37 majority of Americans thought the decision had “caused a lot more trouble than it was worth.”
- In 1961, Americans believed by a 57-28 margin that civil rights demonstrations were doing more harm than good to the cause of integration.
- In October 1964, some 57% of Americans thought racial integration was moving “too fast,” and only 18% thought it wasn’t moving fast enough.
- In 1971, a national poll found only 39% percent of Americans “sympathetic … with efforts of the women’s liberation groups,” with 47% unsympathetic.
That’s right. More Americans support Occupy Wall Street than supported Brown v. Board of Ed in 1959, the civil rights movement in 1961, desegregation in 1964, or feminism in 1971.
Oh, and here’s one more: In 1948, Americans disapproved of “women of any age wearing slacks in public” by a 39-34 margin.
Yep. OWS is more popular today than pants on women was 63 years ago.
The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an umbrella group representing faculty bodies throughout the UC system, has released a statement “in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere” and is urging UC faculty to endorse that statement on an individual and collective basis.
OWS, they say, “aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few.” The statement ends with a call for “all members of the University of California community to lend their support to the peaceful and potentially transformative movement.”
Good stuff. But it stands in stark contrast to CUCFA’s silence on the student protests that have been sweeping the UC system for more than two years, and its timidity in addressing the root causes of those protests.
The current wave of UC student agitation began in earnest in the fall of 2009, sparked by plans for huge tuition hikes in the system. In November of that year, one week before the Regents’ fee hike vote, CUCFA called for a “postponement” of the vote to ensure “transparency, accountability, and fair consideration of other options” in the decision-making process. They did not oppose the hike itself.
CUCFA was silent the following month when sixty-six Berkeley students were arrested in the course of a peaceful, non-disruptive occupation on campus, and they remained silent throughout the wave of protest and repression that followed. In November 2010 they expressed “concern” about an incident in which a UC police officer drew a gun on student protesters and the UC system lied about why, but they released no statement condemning the incident and took no action in opposition to it. They remained silent as well as student activists’ due process rights were violated in campus judicial proceedings
The University of California has engaged in a massive campaign of intimidation, disruption, and physical violence against student activists since 2009, and CUCFA has — as far as can be determined from their own website’s archive of their public statements — never once stood up in support of the students’ protests or in opposition to those protests’ suppression.
Is this OWS endorsement a first step toward a new CUCFA policy?
One can only hope.
studentactivism.net 
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