Author Archive

“If you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. Amazing things will happen.”

–Conan O’Brien

A report in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle says that widely-despised University of California chancellor Mark Yudof plans to join California students in an upcoming march on Sacramento. The march, scheduled for March 4, has been billed as a Day of Action in Defense of Public Education, and will include rallies, lobbying, and labor actions.

Correction: The Chronicle’s claim that Yudof and the regents would be participating in the March 4 Day of Action was incorrect. See this follow-up post for details.

Students around the country have been watching events in California unfold since September, and the March 4 action, originally planned as a California event, has begun to draw interest from coast to coast. Concrete planning is still spotty, but I’m hearing a growing buzz, and I’ll be tracking information as I receive it.

Update | Here’s a good concise statement of the argument that the regents’ participation in the Day of Action is “a cynical publicity stunt.”

Second Update | I’ll be tracking groups’ participation in the day of action here…

• The original national call for a day of action came from these California folks.
• A separate national call came from this “ad-hoc body” two days later.
• The New School Reoccupied, in New York City, is on board.
• Here’s a national Facebook group.
• A listserve out of Massachusetts.

The story of student activism in California last semester was a story of growing student inventiveness met with escalating administrative aggressiveness, so it’s not surprising that the state’s first major action of the new year is both inventive and cautious.

The Kroeber Makeover is a four-day event modeled on last December’s Live Week at Wheeler Hall. Like the Wheeler event, the Kroeber event features a rolling lineup of events ranging from free meals and art exhibits to activist workshops and planning sessions. Unlike Wheeler, the Kroeber students aren’t staying in the building overnight at all — it’s a makeover, not a takeover.

Kroeber Hall is the home of Berkeley’s anthropology department, and the anthro students behind this action have been careful not to give the administration any pretext for a repeat of the mass arrests that ended Live Week one day early. They’ve been formally reserving rooms, for instance, and scheduling their events to end well before the building closes each night.

Despite  the Kroeber makeover-ers’ conscientiousness, however, the Berkeley administration has taken an aggressive, confrontational stance toward the action. Yesterday they sent out an email to all members of the campus community saying that they expect “full compliance” with regulations limiting speech and organizing on campus, and one student I spoke with said admins have been warning profs sympathetic to the makeover that they’ll be held responsible “if anything happens.”

The Kroeber Makeover is scheduled to continue through tomorrow evening.

“I believe in holding out my hand to other women BEFORE it’s asked for, and keeping it out past the point it is self-effacingly rejected, or bitchily refused. I know that for most women, the only thing harder than asking for help is staying around to offer it after it’s been rebuffed.”

–Terri Senft, Ten Statements from a ‘New Woman’ in the Tech Sector

Eight new items in the current Monday Map update, which was delayed a day because of the MLK holiday. Four new states — Tennessee, New Mexico, Utah, and North Carolina — have been added to the map this week, bringing the total for the academic year to twenty-seven.

January 17: Weeks after local high school students staged a protest at Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s offices, the city’s Public Library Board announced that a new public library would be established in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex. Altgeld had been without a library since a pipe burst in the old facility nearly a year ago.

January 15: The state student association serving North Carolina’s seventeen public colleges and universities has launched a petition drive aimed at stopping a planned $200 statewide tuition hike.

January 14: A dozen students at the university of New Mexico took a petition bearing more then 400 names to the offices of the UNM president. The students were asking that a ban on smoking near UNM’s dorms be delayed for two years.

January 14: Students from a high school located at Bronx Community College marched across the BCC campus to protest the planned relocation of their school. BCC, which has seen a dramatic increase in enrollment since the 2008 economic crisis, says it no longer has room for the high school.

January 13: Students at the University of Tennessee staged a protest that threatened to erupt into riot after football coach Lane Kiffin announced his resignation. Kiffin had been in his position for just fourteen months.

January 13: Fifty students at Georgia’s Albany State University demonstrated outside university president Everette Freeman’s office, calling for his resignation after the forced resignation of a popular student affairs administrator.

January 12: Students protested at a Hamden, Connecticut school board meeting, calling for the reinstatement of teacher Bai Haiyan. Haiyan, a Chinese national, faces deportation as a result of her dismissal.

January 12: The student government of Utah State University announced plans to launch a classroom campaign against budget cuts planned for the 2010-11 academic year.