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I consider myself a pretty committed anti-racist, and I consider myself a pretty committed First Amendment guy. I love free speech, and I hate racist speech. There are times when these two principles are in tension, as principles often are, but I don’t think they’re in contradiction, and I firmly believe it’s possible to take them both seriously.

Which brings us to FIRE.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education loves the First Amendment as much as I do, but they’re not particularly anti-racist. Which is not to say that they’re pro-racist, or that they’re racist, just that their writings tend not to take anti-racism particularly seriously as a principle.

Here. Let me show you what I mean.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I posted previously, yesterday’s administration-sponsored “teach-in” on the campus’s recent racial troubles took an unusual twist about halfway through. A group of students affiliated with UCSD’s Black Student Union, declaring that the administration’s response wasn’t meeting student needs, staged a walkout. They would, they said, reconvene for a student-led session outside the building.

This “teach-out” was by all accounts amazingly effective, but there’s one detail in the press coverage of the incident that caught my eye. It’s been reported that as many as 1200 people were present at the administration teach-in before the walkout, and participation in the teach-out has been put as high as three thousand. But check this passage from a local television station’s coverage out:

Saying the university was doing little to address racism on campus, the pair urged their fellow students in the packed auditorium and overflow room to march out of the event, and the vast majority complied. … The students then gathered en masse outside. … The teach-in continued in the auditorium, but only with about 100 to 150 people, including a handful of students.

This is only one version of what happened, of course, and crowd estimates are notoriously imprecise. It may be a complete misrepresentation, and if it is, I’d love to have it corrected. But if it’s an accurate account of yesterday’s events, I find it fascinating.

The UCSD holds a teach-in to discuss a campus student crisis — an event for students, held in response to student anger at students’ actions. A group of student leaders reject that even as it’s happening, and abandon it it in favor of their own. Virtually all of the students — all but “a handful” — join the walkout, choosing the student-led event over the administration’s.

And more than a hundred faculty and administrators stay behind in the now-empty room?

I don’t get it. Your campus is in crisis. Your students are in crisis. And your students are taking the lead in forging a response to that crisis. They’re voting with their voices and with their feet, saying that they want to discuss the situation in their own venue, on their own terms. They’re having that discussion right now, right outside the room in which you’re sitting. And you don’t follow them? You don’t join them? You don’t seize this extraordinary opportunity to watch and listen and learn?

That’s just so incredibly weird to me.

Update | Since posting this, I’m hearing perspectives on the event that complicate and/or contradict the report I quoted. If you were there, free to leave your perspective in comments — I’ll be editing and updating more later.

February 26 | I’ve been told by a participant that the article quoted above isn’t particularly accurate. The students who marched out of the teach-in hadn’t been there from the beginning — they’d been participating in the BSU’s press conference and rally for much of the teach-in. The people who stayed after the walkout were mostly people who had been in the room before the BSU supporters arrived, and as many as half of them were students.

11:30 am | According to Twitter reports from @OccupyCA, there is a sit-in going on at the office of the chancellor of the University of California at Irvine at this hour. The feed reported two hours ago — around 9:30 in the morning, California time — that twenty students were sitting in.

A few minutes after 11 am it reported that arrests were imminent, but accorting to the most tweet, at 11:24 am, students outside the sit-in were barricading the building to prevent police from making arrests.

More as I get it.

11:40 am | A post at the Occupy CA blog says the sit-in at Aldrich Hall, the UCI administration building, began at 9:30. It reports that it’s a budget protest (not a response to the Irvine 11 arrests or today’s UCSD anti-racism day of action).

11:45 am | An update to the Occupy CA post links to a fifteen-point list of demands from the occupation. Most of the demands are budget-related, but the list also calls for an end to the outfitting of campus police with Tasers, the creation of gender-neutral bathrooms at UCI, and amnesty for the Irvine 11.

11:50 am | A new update at Occupy CA says that “police, administrators, and sit-in participants are barricaded inside” the administration building. A tweet from @kellyramsey says that at least two of the building’s entrances have been barricaded with dumpsters.

By the way, Irvine has seen a lot of action already this semester. In addition to the Irvine 11 arrests mentioned earlier, there was a library study-in on campus just last weekend.

1:10 pm | There are reports from two sources that between fifteen and seventeen people have been arrested inside the building, but as of about half an hour ago Occupy CA was saying that the presence of supporters outside had prevented the police from removing anyone from inside. The reports of arrests suggest that three or four of those arrested are service workers at the university — one of the protest’s demands is the rehiring of one hundred and fifty workers whose jobs were recently outsourced.

1:20 pm | Multiple reports indicate that protesters have blocked a street near the administration building with dumpsters. Latest tweet from Occupy CA says police have given order to disperse.

4:30 pm | Eighteen people cited and released at the scene. Given that protesters occupied and barricaded an administration building, forcing its evacuation, defying police attempts to remove barricades, and shutting down a nearby street, the fact that nobody was jailed is striking. Coming eight days before March 4, it seems quite significant. More on the implications later, but between this and the events at UCSD, this was a very interesting day at the University of California.

Today is the day that the UC San Diego administration set aside for a campus-wide discussion of the racist Compton Cookout party hosted by UCSD students on the weekend of February 13, but in the eight days since the administration announced today’s teach-in, events on campus have spiraled far out of the university’s control.

Tensions surrounding the aftermath of the party, high from the moment that reports about it first surfaced, rose dramatically last Thursday, when students on UCSD’s campus television station broadcast a show that mocked the protests and black students in general. No recording of the broadcast has yet surfaced, but one student was quoted in the San Diego Union Tribune saying that the participants in the broadcast had “called us niggers, and called us ungrateful, and ghetto and dumb.”

The station that ran the show is run by the UCSD student government, and the broadcast implicated other student media as well — the students who made the bigoted on-air comments were staffers for The Koala, a campus humor magazine with a history of racist speech. In response to the broadcast, UCSD’s student government president, Utsav Gupta, pulled the station off the air and implemented an immediate freeze on outlays to all student media. Gupta called the freeze a temporary “time out” while student government re-assessed its policies.

In the meantime the UCSD BSU has presented a list of demands to the campus administration, while students have called on other California campuses to stage solidarity actions today. A rally at UC Irvine is going on at this hour, with much more to come over the course of the day. Stay tuned…

1:30 pm California time | The situation is rapidly evolving, but here’s what I’ve learned so far. The UCSD BSU held a press conference before the administration’s “teach-in,” and that press conference was followed by a rally that turned into a march. When the official teach-in began, students staged a walkout, urging attendees to leave the administration-controlled space and join a student-led teach-in outside on the lawn. Reports from Twitter suggest that everyone left the official event to join the student one, and photos suggest that the student event, still going on now, is huge. Search “UCSD” on Twitter for a high volume of powerful tweets from many many participants in today’s events, and check back here later for my full report.

5:00 pm | Gathering news coverage and on-the-scene reports. More soon.

Thursday morning | So many things to say about this event, and its implications for the future of student organizing. Here’s one of them.

Thursday afternoon | Here’s my take on the free speech issues involved in the current UCSD crisis.

The regular Monday Map will be back soon, but today I’m introducing a new feature on the site — a Google Map of planned March 4 Day of Action activities.

The March 4 Day of Action to Defend Education is a national campaign that’s grown out of the last few months’ organizing in California. The folks at Defend Education and the California Faculty Association have identified hundreds of planned actions in dozens of states, but as far as I know nobody’s put together a graphic representation of what’s going on yet. So here it is:

I only started this map this morning, and I’ve got a huge amount of stuff left to add. I’ve plugged in several actions I’ve found out about directly, and I’ve made my way about halfway through the Defend Education list, but I haven’t even touched the CFA list, and I’ve largely skipped over California and New York, since each of those states has such a huge amount going on.

My plan is to compile a full list of planned actions by next Monday, and then to update the map with real-time news from the ground as things get underway next week. (“Day of Action” is a bit of a misnomer, by the way — associated actions are going to be starting as early as Monday.)

I’ll add more to the map as I get the chance, so keep checking back. If you know of an action that’s not listed, don’t assume I’ve got it in my queue — leave a comment here or at the map itself. I’ll be adding stuff I get directly more quickly than stuff I cull from outside lists.

One last thing — the goal here is to have information on organizers’ websites, blogs, Facebook groups, Google groups, etc for every action, so if you’ve got that data, be sure to send it along. Help me help folks find you!

Tuesday | Keep those additions coming! I added some this afternoon, and I’ll put up another bunch tonight.

Wednesday morning | Nearly fifty entries in the map, across twenty states. Many many more to come.