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A crowd of students from California State University Stanislaus that the Modesto Bee estimated at “several dozen” spent a chunk of Saturday afternoon at the home of CSUS president Hamid Shirvani.
To be precise, they were on his front lawn.
One member of the group knocked on Shirvani’s door and got no answer, so the crowd spent an hour chanting and talking to reporters.
The protest was conceived after a meeting of student activists from a number of CSU campuses. It represents the latest step in the expansion of California budget protests, which for most of the semester were concentrated primarily in the University of California, to the Cal State system.
Asked about university reports that someone rang Shirvani’s door “multiple times” the following morning, protester Barbara Olave said, “that’s not us.”
I’ve thrown together an index of last week’s Campus Progress panel on college affordability and the UC student movement, which featured myself (Angus Johnston), Victor Sanchez of the University of California Student Association, University of California professor Bruce Cain, and Pedro de la Torre and Erica Williams of Campus Progress.
“Student movements are signs of realities greater than themselves.”
–Mir Hossein Mousavi, statement commemorating Iran’s Student Day, December 7, 2009.
It’s 10:30 on Sunday night in New York, which means that it’s seven o’clock Monday morning in Tehran.
Monday, December 7. Student Day.
In August 1953 Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh was deposed in a CIA-backed coup. Four months later, US vice president Richard Nixon paid a diplomatic visit to the Shah of Iran, who had implemented Mossadegh’s removal from office. On 16 Azar by the Iranian calendar — December 6 — government troops opened fire on Tehran University students demonstrating against Nixon’s visit. Three were killed. Since then, 16 Azar has been commemorated as Student Day in Iran.
As I type this, the sun is rising on the morning of 16 Azar.
Media reports indicate that Iran’s government is doing everything it can to prevent protests from developing today. Campuses have been shuttered. Internet access has been cut. Student leaders have been arrested, as have the mothers of slain demonstrators. Press credentials for foreign media have been revoked.
The sun is rising.
9:30 am Tehran time | “Student movements are signs of realities greater than themselves.” – Mir Hossein Mousavi, statement commemorating Iran’s Student Day, December 7, 2009.
10:00 am Tehran time | Follow the hashtag #16Azar for news of the day, but remember to approach uncorroborated reports with skepticism.
3:30 pm Tehran time | An interesting insight from Iran News Now and the BBC: “We don’t hear ‘Where is my vote?’ anymore. The chants are mostly directed at the regime and its leaders in general.”
3:45 pm Tehran time | Media reports are still fragmentary, but video and photographs coming out of Iran show large-scale demonstrations on university campuses and beyond. Government forces are doing their best to clamp down, but it’s not yet clear how successful they’ve been.
Tuesday | Protests are continuing into a second day. Here’s a good news roundup from the New York Times.
Thousands of students and others rioted in Athens and throughout Greece today on the one-year anniversary of the police murder of 16 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
The 2008 killing sparked weeks of rioting that caused millions of Euros in damage.
Police and demonstrators have provided very different accounts of the events of the day, but both sides appear to agree that as of Sunday evening, several hundred demonstrators are holed up in the University of Athens, which is under blockade.
In Greece, as in a number of other countries, police are forbidden by law to enter university grounds. There are reports from demonstrators that this ban has been violated in the vicinity of the campus gates, but a full-scale raid would likely provoke a major escalation in the crisis.
More news when I get it…
10:00 pm | Here’s a link to a post I put up last year on the roots of the Greek riots, and a set of links to the rest of my coverage of last year’s rioting: One, two, three, four. Also, the Twitter hashtag for the current disturbances is #griots.
7:30 am New York time | Greek police claim that 150 of the protesters are foreign anarchists who came to Greece for the riots, and the list of those arrested reportedly includes a handful of Italians, Spaniards, and Albanians. No reports of Americans yet. More marches and rioting are expected this afternoon.
10:30 am New York time | This Agence France-Presse article (in French) says that a group of hundreds of adolescents, some as young as twelve, threw stones at Athens police this afternoon. It also says that the occupation of the president’s office at the University of Athens has ended, and that the protesters arrested so far include several Italians and Albanians as well as Canadian, Turkish, Spanish and French citizens.
studentactivism.net 
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