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Students at Berkeley staged an occupation of the campus anthropology library last week, winning a rollback of planned cuts to library hours and a reversal of a planned staff reduction. This is the second time a Berkeley library occupation has ended in victory in the last two years.
Those two victories stand out — both at Berkeley, where the administration has often responded to peaceful protest with police violence and mass arrests, and as a national model, as library occupations have been among the most successful actions mounted in the current wave of student mobilizing.
It’s tempting to argue that such victories hold lessons for future organizing, and in some ways they clearly to — the fact that something is working is a pretty good reason to keep doing it. But it’s not a reason to stop doing other things with less immediate payoff, as one library occupier writes at Reclaim UC.
I’ll let her take it from here:
One lesson we may take from this is that direct action works. In fact, in the case of the Anthropology Library, it has consistently worked. And we should take this moment to celebrate the significant manner in which direct action has restored part of the basic functioning of the university and—at least in this one case—reversed the terribly damaging policy of an increasingly profit-oriented administration. […]
In the nearly three years of student uprisings, the library occupations have earned us our only concrete, measurable successes. But the wrong lesson would be that by keeping our demands small, and by staying “reasonable,” we may achieve our goals. What we have won here is a band-aid for a university system suffering from hemophilia. Don’t get me wrong: we need band-aids—we need lots of them—but our small, reasonable, achievable demands will fail to produce either the university or the society for which we fight. They will simply bandage up the tools of class reproduction.
Our greatest successes over the last three years have been neither concrete nor measurable. And although a good deal of thought must be put into what “Occupy” is and represents, there can be no doubt that at the beginning of 2012, we stand on an entirely different ground from where we were a year ago. This shift has been effected not by policy enacted or reversed, but by on-the-ground organizing and a growing consciousness of and a willingness to act—to take direct action—against the structures of domination of which we have become a part.
This victory is only a victory if we use it as a springboard for further escalation and further growth.
I couldn’t agree more. Go read the whole thing.
Nineteen states cut higher education spending by more than ten percent last year, and total state funding to higher ed dropped by 7.6% nationwide, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
A quarter of the cuts came in California, which slashed its higher ed budget by 13.4%, but in percentage terms, ten states cut more. Three states’ cuts topped 20%, with New Hampshire clocking in at an incredible 41.3% decline.
And though the budget crunch bore the blame for a lot of cuts in 2009 and 2010, the latest round is taking place in an environment of growing state revenue — according to the Chronicle, aggregate state tax revenue has risen nationally in each of the last seven quarters. Meanwhile, higher ed spending is now 4% lower than it was in 2007, and still dropping.
And of course the brunt of these cuts are being felt by students, in many cases by those least able to pay.
In the last few weeks Ivy League students have mounted Occupy actions aimed at recruiting sessions for major financial institutions on their campuses — the 1% occupying the 1%. Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article up on the phenomenon, complete with (full disclosure) a couple of thoughts from me.
Louisiana State University has one reason to be pleased about yesterday’s 21-0 loss to Alabama in the BCS championship game — the defeat saved the school from a six million dollar outlay.
LSU football coach Les Miles made $3.75 million in salary this year, plus another $400,000 in bonuses for winning the SEC championship and qualifying for the BCS. But he missed a huge payday by losing yesterday, since his contract has a clause guaranteeing him an automatic salary hike to $1,000 more than the highest-paid public university coach in the SEC if he ever wins a national championship.
That highest paid coach happens to be Alabama’s Nick Saban, who made $4.7 million this year (plus $400,000 for beating LSU yesterday). Over the six years remaining on Miles’s contract, that bump would have worked out to exactly $5,706,000.
The LSU system raised tuition some $14 million this year, with plans for another $38 million in 2012-13. Miles’s salary hike would have amounted to $40 per student per year.
Whew.
This fall’s wave of “Occupy” actions centered on the Occupy Wall Street encampment in NYC has drawn on many recent movements for inspiration, from the Arab Spring to the mass uprisings of Greece and Spain to the last few years’ campus occupations and street protests in Britain and the occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison.
But to anyone who has been focused on American student organizing in the recent past, “Occupy ________” has until recently meant one thing above all: California.
Since the fall of 2009, student activists in the University of California and Cal State systems have staged dozens of demonstrations and actions, many of them culminating in occupations of campus buildings. Well over two hundred students have been arrested.
The OccupyCA movement has evolved over time, and has tended to differ in some significant ways from its Occupy Wall Street successors, but it has provided a spark to American student organizing from the early days of the current economic crisis and has offered a clear example to OWS.
And now it’s getting rolling again.
This Wednesday, November 9, students and staff at UC Berkeley will be launching a two-day walkout and establishing an OWS-style encampment on the Berkeley campus. Berkeley has been the epicenter of the OccupyCA movement, and Wednesday’s action marks a milestone in the development of OWS — particularly given the importance of Occupy Oakland, just down the road, to the movement in recent weeks.
More soon.
studentactivism.net 
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