You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
This fall’s wave of “Occupy” actions centered on the Occupy Wall Street encampment in NYC has drawn on many recent movements for inspiration, from the Arab Spring to the mass uprisings of Greece and Spain to the last few years’ campus occupations and street protests in Britain and the occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison.
But to anyone who has been focused on American student organizing in the recent past, “Occupy ________” has until recently meant one thing above all: California.
Since the fall of 2009, student activists in the University of California and Cal State systems have staged dozens of demonstrations and actions, many of them culminating in occupations of campus buildings. Well over two hundred students have been arrested.
The OccupyCA movement has evolved over time, and has tended to differ in some significant ways from its Occupy Wall Street successors, but it has provided a spark to American student organizing from the early days of the current economic crisis and has offered a clear example to OWS.
And now it’s getting rolling again.
This Wednesday, November 9, students and staff at UC Berkeley will be launching a two-day walkout and establishing an OWS-style encampment on the Berkeley campus. Berkeley has been the epicenter of the OccupyCA movement, and Wednesday’s action marks a milestone in the development of OWS — particularly given the importance of Occupy Oakland, just down the road, to the movement in recent weeks.
More soon.
A British court has ruled against Julian Assange in his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape and sexual molestation charges against two women.
The two judges ruled on a variety of technical and jurisdictional issues, but the meat of their ruling addressed two questions: whether the complaints against Assange accurately described the behaviors alleged, and whether such acts, if proven, constituted criminal offenses in the jurisdiction in which they occurred.
Rejecting the Assange legal team’s attempt to portray his alleged actions as “disrespectful” or “disturbing” but not criminal, the judges declared (PDF) that the behavior described in each of the charges was criminal under the laws of England and Wales:
The first complaint described a situation in which Assange held down the arms of the woman known as AA, preventing her from reaching a condom as he attempted to pry her legs open with his own legs in order to penetrate her vaginally. AA’s subsequent consent to intercourse after he had agreed to put on a condom, they found, did not render Assange’s alleged initial use of force against her lawful.
With regard to the second complaint, Assange’s lawyers contended that it is not illegal under English law to penetrate a partner without a condom in circumstances in which she has only consented to sex if a condom is used. The court ruled that such deception would be a criminal act in England, given that AA’s complaint alleged that Assange intentionally sabotaged the condom he was using while they were having intercourse.
In the third complaint, AA alleged that Assange rubbed his erect naked penis against her body while they were sharing a bed under non-sexual circumstances. The judges ruled that AA’s consent to sleep in the same bed as Assange “was not a consent to him removing his clothes from the lower part of his body and deliberately pressing that part and his erect penis against her.”
Finally, in the case of the fourth complaint, the judges rejected the Assange lawyers’ contention that the behavior described would not constitute rape under English law. Under that law, they found, the behavior alleged constituted rape in two separate ways: First, that Assange is said to have penetrated SW without a condom when she had only consented to intercourse if a condom was present, and second that he penetrated her while she slept. “It is difficult to see,” they said, “how a person could reasonably have believed in consent if the complainant alleges a state of sleep or half sleep,” and “there is nothing in the statement from which it could be inferred that he reasonably expected that she would have consented to sex without a condom.”
One important note as to that last charge. Assange’s attorneys contended that SW’s consent to the continuation of unprotected intercourse after she awoke to find Assange penetrating her rendered the entire encounter consensual. The judges rejected that argument, declaring that “the fact that she allowed it to continue once she was aware of what was happening cannot go to his state of mind or its reasonableness when he initially penetrated her.” It was his alleged initial penetration, they ruled, that constituted rape, and consent to non-consensual intercourse cannot be obtained retroactively.
Today’s ruling is not Assange’s final appeal, and it is not a finding of fact by the court. But it is a wholesale rejection of the Assange legal team’s contention that the behavior alleged, even if proven, would not be unlawful in England. As such, it stands as a powerful endorsement of a robust and common-sensical approach to the question of consent in the law of rape and sexual assault.
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.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments