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Ten Muslim students from the University of California were found guilty of misdemeanor charges Friday after a 2010 incident in which they disrupted and delayed a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States on the UC Irvine campus. The students, who could have faced jail time, were sentenced to probation and community service.
The university had previously suspended the Irvine Muslim Student Union in connection with the incident, and many observers — including Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Irvine law school — criticized the decision to bring criminal charges.
I agree with those who are dismayed by the verdict. The interruptions of Ambassador Oren were brief and non-violent, the students didn’t resist ejection, and the ambassador was eventually able to give his speech in full. Clearly the students were disruptive, but they did not have the intent nor the effect of preventing Oren from speaking.
As a person who speaks on campuses with some regularity, I’d certainly be appalled if such an incident ever led to criminal charges against someone who was critical of anything I had to say — the idea that the disruption of a campus speaker would leave a student with a criminal record, and relying on the forbearance of a judge to avoid jail time, is astonishing.
But as I told the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the most important thing to underscore here is that this prosecution stands as part of a larger recent pattern of criminalization of non-violent student protest throughout California, and in the UC system in particular.
Again and again over the last few years, university officials in California have directed law enforcement to end protests by arresting students, including in circumstances in which those protests were neither violent nor substantially interfering with the functioning of the university. In many cases those arrests led (as here) to overreaching prosecutions, while in others the arrests themselves had a disruptive effect on legitimate protest.
It’s the university’s prerogative to set limits on student protest (subject to their First Amendment obligations to permit free speech and assembly), but those powers should be used with restraint and discretion. When the university finds itself deploying mass arrests of non-violent student protesters as a matter of course, as the University of California has in the last several years, something is seriously out of whack.
By contributing to the criminalization low-level non-violent protest as they have, UC administrators, police, and prosecutors have cowed some student activists while radicalizing others. They’ve fostered a charged, tense atmosphere in which students have chained themselves together on the high ledge of a Berkeley campus building and in which a UC San Francisco police officer pulled a gun on a group of protesters, all within the last twelve months.
The Irvine 11 were among some 250 California student activists arrested during the course of protests during the 2009-2010 academic year. That’s a mind-boggling number, and evidence that student-administration relations have gone profoundly off the rails.
Last night a group of at least fifty Greek student activists stormed the studios of their country’s state television network, taking over the room where the evening news was broadcasting live.
The students were leaders in a national wave of student protest that is sweeping Greece in opposition to fiscal austerity measures and proposals to privatize higher education in the country. Student protest has also been swelled by the recent repeal of Greece’s academic asylum law, which until last month barred police from setting foot onto the nation’s campuses.
Network officials pulled the broadcast from the air abruptly, switching over to a travel documentary after a short break, but home viewers were able to tell that something was happening in the studio before the feed went dark.
The students demanded airtime to read a statement on the current student protests in Greece, a demand that was rejected. But after several hours of negotiations the network agreed to allow the group to record a statement for broadcast later that evening. The statement was shown on the network at midnight and the students left the station without incident (Google translation).
In December 2008 a group of Greek student activists succeeded in unfurling a protest banner on live television during a news broadcast after police shot and killed a fifteen-year-old protester.
Today is the first day of classes for most of the University of California system, and student activists at UC Berkeley are marking the day with their first student protests of 2011-12.
UC generally, and Berkeley in particular, have been a center of American student organizing in the last few years, though administrative crackdowns have quieted the campuses somewhat in the last twelve months. With the summer announcement of new tuition hike proposals that could nearly double UC fees in the next four years, however, things may be due to heat up again.
The organizers of today’s protest announced their agenda in a Daily Cal op-ed earlier this week, and the paper is planning a liveblog of the day’s events. Activists have already started livetweeting the day at the #Day1 hashtag.
I’ll be away from my computer for most of the afternoon (Eastern Time), but I’ll try to update as events warrant, either here or on Twitter. And with UC back in session, I’ll be posting updates on several big stories from the summer in the very near future, so stay tuned.
Four Egyptian university presidents with ties to the overthrown Mubarak regime resigned yesterday, clearing the way for campus elections to choose their successors.
Students, faculty and staff have been engaging in ongoing protests against Mubarak-era holdovers in university administration, protests that have intensified after the new government reneged on promised to oust all top university leaders this summer. These new resignations come just weeks before the scheduled start of the new Egyptian academic year.
Only faculty members are eligible to vote in these elections for university administrators, but students are asserting newfound power in the university system as well. Student activists have been at the center of recent campus demonstrations, and a weeklong sit-in at American University in Cairo ended on Monday in victory for student activists. Meanwhile, Egypt’s national union of students held its first leadership elections since the 1970s last month.
The Education Optimists blog takes on ten myths about affirmative action in college admissions:
“As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America’s top schools are white students who failed to meet their university’s minimum standards for admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. These kids are ‘people with a long-standing relationship with the university,’ or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy alumni and politicians. According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited from affirmative action.”
New census data show the devastating effect of the current recession on young adults:
“‘Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade,’ Sum said. Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, added, ‘These people will be scarred, and they will be called the ‘lost generation’ – in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster.'”
Campus police at UC Irvine held a mock protest drill last week, complete with a SWAT team deployment:
“I am on campus today and I am currently witnessing a protest simulation complete with UC Irvine SWAT teams, police, fake protesters, and the fire department. It looks like a really strange farce. They are ‘protesting’ outside of Gateway in a closed off area around the library. The protesters are simulating what ‘protesters’ act like, confronting officers, yelling, and running around the building with picket signs and megaphones. There are also photographers and camera men ‘capturing’ the event . . . . There were a lot of SWAT on campus and I thought they had a real emergency going on. It seems it has been going on for over an hour. The protesters even have fake ‘speeches’ and chants.”
Cuts to public higher ed are causing disproportionate pain to community colleges:
“‘Budget cuts might mean larger classes, fewer full-time faculty, shorter hours in the library, or it might be less frequent cutting of the grass,’ he says. ‘But community colleges are pretty bare bones. The vast majority of money they receive goes to academics,’ not to prettifying the grounds, sports teams, or other extracurriculars.”
studentactivism.net 
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