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UC Berkeley spokesperson has Dan Mogulof responded to some of the questions raised about last Friday’s Wheeler Hall arrests.

In a story in yesterday’s Berkeley Daily Planet, Mogulof said that the final decision to conduct mass arrests was made on Thursday afternoon, about twelve hours before the arrests actually took place. He argued that it was not possible to give warning of the decision to arrest because “in this day of texting and Twitter and Facebook, a warning would have served as an invitation for all kinds of people to come running to the scene.”

This makes a certain amount of sense, as an answer to one narrow question. It’s likely that if the administration had announced on Thursday afternoon that Wheeler Hall would be cleared that night, some students would have joined the protest in solidarity. But it should be noted that there would have been other consequences of such a warning, too. Hard questions would have been asked about the decision to conduct arrests, particularly in light of the previous three days’ tacit acceptance of the occupation. Faculty would have criticized the administration’s plans, and urged them to reverse course. Media would have been on hand when the arrests finally happened.

Yes, the decision to arrest without warning made the process of carrying out those arrests logistically simpler. But it did so in significant part by allowing the university — as Berkeley’s Student Advocate’s Office said this week — to evade responsibility for its actions.

And Mogulof’s comments to the Daily Planet do nothing to answer the crucial question of why there was no order to disperse given when police entered Wheeler Hall before dawn on Friday. Such an order — given at four thirty in the morning — would hardly have spurred a mad rush to Wheeler. His comments also fail to explain why students who were barefoot and in their pyjamas were not given the opportunity to dress before being arrested, or why those students were transported thirty miles across county lines for booking and held for an entire day before being released.

The Google Map of American student activism that I launched at the end of November is creeping up toward a hundred pins in about half the states. (For an explanation of the map and its rationale, see this lovely piece from The Nation‘s blog.) There’s obviously a huge amount of organizing happening on American campuses right now, and I’m having a great time tracking it.

At the same time, though, all that activity means that I’ve got a huge amount to write about here on the main site, and it’s easy to put off adding to the map, since it’s not as visible and not as time-sensitive. I’d been trying to update the map daily, but once you miss a day — and it’s impossible not to miss a day every once in a while — it’s easy for that day to turn into two, and three, and so on.

So. New plan.

Every Monday, starting December 29, is going to be Map Monday at studentactivism.net. I’ll post a copy of the map, along with a list of all the actions — new and back-dated — that I’ve added in the past week. I’ll still try to update the map during the week, but I’ll plan on holding most of the additions for the weekend.

In addition to making map updates more predictable and more visible on the site, this’ll also give me a prominent place to post about the actions that don’t wind up getting their own posts. It’ll provide a snapshot of the week’s campus organizing, and a review of some of the stories that may be getting bigger over the course of the week. Last but not least, it’ll give all of you a regular place to post suggestions for the map, while giving you a quick and easy way to check if I’ve missed something.

I’m excited about this — I think it’s going to work well. Check back on Monday, December 29 for the first new map, and feel free to post a comment here if you’ve got anything for me to add to it.

The Berkeley Student Advocate’s office released their report on the Wheeler Hall occupation yesterday, two days after a draft version of the report leaked on the internet. The official version of the report drops some of the draft’s most tweet-worthy adjectives, but its substance is pretty much unchanged, and its portrait of the university administration is no more flattering.

UC Berkeley’s initial press release on the Wheeler Hall arrests conceded that the occupation of the building had been “largely non-disruptive,” and that the occupiers had initially taken steps “to ensure that their activities would not conflict with classroom review sessions.” It claimed, however, that as the week wore on the nature of the occupation shifted. “Things began to change the last couple of nights,” said university spokesman Dan Mogulof. Students began “breaking into locked classrooms and things like that,” and started to plan a hip-hop concert and dance party for Friday night. “Once the group refused to reconsider plans to hold an unauthorized all-night concert in an academic building,” said Mogulof, “we had to take steps to ensure that finals could go forward.”

But Mogulof conceded that there had been no property damage in Wheeler Hall, and provided no details regarding the nature or adverse consequences of the supposed classroom break-ins. On the subject of the concert, one member of the occupation told the Berkeley Daily Planet that the students had been ready to “guarantee that Wheeler would be clean and functional by 6 am, well before final exams on Saturday morning.” But Mogulof denied that any promises to that effect had been made, saying — in the Daily Planet‘s paraphrase — that “had there been such a guarantee, things might have had a different outcome.”

According to the SAO, however, the outcome was predetermined.

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The official report of the Berkeley Student Advocate’s office on last week’s Wheeler Hall occupation and arrests (a draft version of which I discussed in this post) has been released. I just received it by email, and I’m reposting it here for wider distribution.

Thursday update: I’ve posted some thoughts on the implications of this report.

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Eight people were arrested on Friday night at UC Berkeley after a group of several dozen marched on the on-campus residence of chancellor Robert Birgeneau. Photographs taken at the home the following day showed that lights and heavy planters had been smashed, and that two windows had been shattered. Police and UC officials said that members of the crowd had thrown flaming torches at police, police cars, and the home itself.

Early reports from both the university and activists described the attack on the chancellor’s home as a unified group action. An official Berkeley statement said that “a group of about 40 to 70 protesters” had “stormed” the residence, “smashing planters, windows and lights while shouting, ‘No justice, no peace.'” An account posted at the activist website Occupy California said that “the march quickly turned into a small riot” en route to the residence, and that “the crowd … began smashing lights, damaging windows, and breaking pots” once they arrived there.

But in the days that followed, information has surfaced that calls this version of events into question. A professor of education who was working in his office less than a hundred yards from the residence that night says that the crowd scattered only moments after arriving at the scene — his impression was that the property destruction that took place was “remarkably brief and perhaps spontaneous.” It “did not and does not strike me as sustained,” he wrote.

The character of the march to the residence is also in dispute. It was reported early on that protesters had dragged trash cans and newspaper boxes into the street while marching, for instance, but one eyewitness says that other march participants dragged them back to the sidewalk again before the police arrived.

The developing story of the eight arrests carried out that night reflects the ambiguity of the situation. Initial reports described six of the eight as non-students, but it has since emerged that four of the eight are students at either Berkeley or UC Davis, and that the remainder include a local journalist and a visiting doctoral student from New York. The journalist said in a statement yesterday that he was arrested while covering the protest, not participating in it, and that the first officer to approach him demanded his camera.

When the eight arrestees were taken into custody, they were booked for rioting, threatening an education official, attempted burglary, attempted arson, felony vandalism and assault. Bail was set at $132,000 — three of the eight paid non-refundable bonds of $13,000, and the other five were held in jail for four days. But on Tuesday the DA’s office declined to bring charges against any of them, and the five who were still jailed were released.

Charges may still be brought in the future, but for now, no charges are pending against any participants in the Friday night demonstration.

Asked about the DA’s decision yesterday, UC Berkeley officials declined to comment.

Update | UC Davis professor Bob Ostertag has a piece up at Huffington Post about the week’s Berkeley events, and much of it is relevant to the arguments I make here. Ostertag, calls the two arrested Davis students “wonderful students: thoughtful, inquisitive, respectful, and supportive of their peers,” says that people present at the demonstration have told him that the vandalism committed that night was perpetrated “by a small splinter group, and that the cops arrested the wrong people.”