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Three days after police broke up an administration building occupation at Sacramento State, students at another CSU campus have launched their own sit-in.
Some twenty students at Cal State Fullerton began the sit-in last night at around nine o’clock, and they were joined by students from CSU Dominguez Hills later that evening. A newspaper report early this morning said that a group of UCLA CSU Los Angeles students were expected to join the protest today.
The action began after Fullerton’s president, Milton Gordon, refused to sign a student statement in support of public higher education or join with them in drafting an alternative statement for joint release.
Update | Either I misread that news report linked above or they’ve changed it, but it’s CSU Los Angeles students, not UCLA students, who have joined the occupation.
Second Update | Fullerton students are using the #reclaimCSU hashtag on Twitter. This is apparently the statement that CSUF’s president refused to sign.
Wednesday Update | The occupation is still ongoing … and they’ve got a blog!
Often student activists are criticized for not proposing concrete solutions to the problems that others have identified. “Sure, you’re against our plan,” administrators and politicians ask, “but what alternative can you offer?”
Sometimes the “problem” is invented, of course, and sometimes students have detailed proposals at the ready, but not always. When the problem is real and students are offering no solution of their own, “what do you suggest we do?” is a legitimate question.
It’s a legitimate question. But “not this” is a legitimate answer.
Consider Mario Savio’s speech to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 — probably the most famous speech ever given by an American student activist:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Faced with a university that was breaking his heart, Savio said “no.” He said “stop.” He didn’t say “here’s an alternative.” He said “not this.”
Sometimes students, organizing against an act or a decision or a proposal or an administration, have an alternative at hand. Sometimes they have a suggestion as to what should happen next, what should take the place of the current plan or the status quo. Sometimes they have many such suggestions.
But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes what they have is “not this.” Sometimes what they have is “no.” Sometimes what they have is “stop.”
And sometimes that “stop” is the most radical, most cogent, most effective, most reasonable intervention there is.
Students occupying the administrations building at Sacramento State were rousted by police at three o’clock this morning, halfway through the third night of their action.
Activists staged sit-ins on eleven CSU campuses on Wednesday (and attempted a twelfth, though Long Beach officials closed the administration building before they arrived). Though most of those occupations ended voluntarily within a few hours, the Sac State students decided to stay put.
Relations between students and administrators at the Sac State occupation were mostly amicable until Friday evening, when police arrived to lock down the building. Activists who were already inside were permitted to stay, but no new people — and no new supplies — were allowed entry.
At 3:24 am, according to tweets from the occupiers, campus police in riot gear appeared at the building’s back entrance. They told the group that they had already called for backup from the SFPD, and that students had five minutes to clear the building. “Students made it out safely,” according to the final tweet of the series, “and no arrests were made.”
The folks behind the occupation will be meeting this afternoon to plan their next steps. Follow their blog for more.
A few years back, columnist David Brooks (who will, as it happens, be the commencement speaker at Brandeis University this year) wrote a piece about campus rape in which he suggested that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took prior to the sexual revolution.
Back in the good old days, Brooks wrote,
educators … understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this, starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address as a historian of American higher education.
As it happens, I recently acquired a copy of the Berry College Handbook for Women, published by the college’s women’s student government in 1956. Berry was (and is) a co-ed private college in rural Georgia, exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to find Brooks’ “formula for character building” in action.
And what does that handbook say about dating? It says this:
DATES — Girls may have dates on Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 5:00 PM, at parties, movies, and other social events and also at the college store between classes. When girls are coming from the college campus, boys do not escort them farther than the ‘parting of the ways’ which is on the road between the Recitation Hall and Mother’s Building. There must be no dating in out of the way places. Petting is not permitted.
Self-imposed restraints? Hardly. This was a world of strict gender segregation. At Berry College in the fifties, male and female students weren’t permitted to be alone together. Ever.
On today’s campus, students are given near-total freedom to socialize in private. That freedom is grounded in the belief that college students have sufficient character to use that freedom responsibly. It is also grounded in the belief that people best learn how to regulate their behavior when they are given the opportunity to regulate their behavior.
On the typical American campus of the fifties, students were not taught self-restraint — they were restrained, and they were punished when they were caught circumventing those restraints. If they learned anything about how to behave behind closed doors, it was at great risk, and in defiance of the mechanisms employed to keep them apart. If a female student at Berry College in 1956 consented to be alone with a guy in circumstances that made sex possible, she was in violation of school rules. She was in danger of expulsion. Every man on campus knew this, and that knowledge gave the worst of them great power.
If a woman was treated badly in such circumstances — if she was raped, if she was coerced, if she was abused, if she was humiliated — she was vanishingly unlikely to speak out. And there wasn’t even any way to have an open discussion about what it meant to be “treated badly” — the campus rules permitted no public dialogue about sexual ethics, no opportunity to arrive at communal understanding about how to behave and how to expect your partner to behave, no space in which to forthrightly compare expectations and experiences.
This world that Brooks pines for is a world of stifling rules and unequal punishments. It’s a world of shame and exploitation. It’s a world of ignorance and silence.
It is a world that generations of students heroically fought to be freed from.
Students are conducting administration building occupations in at least seven eleven of the 23 campuses of the California State University system. The student activists are protesting budget cuts and demanding the resignation of the Cal State chancellor, Charles B. Reed.
Reports on Twitter show that occupations are currently underway at San Francisco State, Northridge, Sacramento, Monterey Bay, East Bay, Pomona, and San Jose. Activists are tweeting live from the scene of the various occupations using the #Apr13 hashtag.
I’ll be liveblogging as the situation develops, so be sure to check back in over the course of the afternoon and evening.
Update: 4 pm Pacific Time | The occupations currently underway are part of a statewide day of protest throughout the CSU system. According to this article, student/faculty demonstrations were planned for all of the Cal State campuses today.
4:10 pm | CSU Fresno students held an occupation this afternoon, bringing the total to eight campuses. According to a report from @alexandrasaras on Twitter, about eighty students participated, shutting down at least part of the building for about two hours. The CSUF president wasn’t on campus today, but protesters have been promised a meeting with her tomorrow.
4:50 pm | Looks like most of the occupations are winding down, with students making plans for future actions in coming days and weeks. Reports on Twitter suggest that there have been occupations at as many as eleven CSU campuses this afternoon, with a twelfth — Long Beach — seeing the admin building shut down to keep students out. More soon.
5:40 pm | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says eight hundred students marched on the administration building at CSU Long Beach. News reports are also coming in from San Jose, Bakersfield, San Francisco, and Stanislaus, among others.
6:00 am | Although almost all of yesterday’s occupations ended voluntarily after a few hours, students at Sacramento State kept their occupation going overnight. They’re still there, and are gearing up for a Day Two rally when the administration building officially re-opens at seven o’clock. Local media are apparently on their way.
studentactivism.net 
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