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Students at California State University Fresno staged a walkout and teach-in on Wednesday, protesting the massive fee increases and budget cuts that are underway at California’s public universities.
An estimated four hundred Fresno State students participated in the walkout, which built steam over the course of the morning and included a march around campus.
At two o’clock that afternoon, one hundred students climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the campus library, which houses the offices of Fresno State president John D. Welty.
The students sat in outside his suite for two hours before Welty arrived, and secured an agreement that Welty will participate in a public meeting one week from Tuesday to discuss students’ demands.
This was the fifth sit-in of the fall semester at a California public university, following actions at UCLA and Berkeley, and two at UC Santa Cruz. This weekend, students from across California will gather at Berkeley for a statewide activist conference on the budget crisis.
Two weeks after their occupation of a graduate student union building ended, UCSC student activists staged another campus takeover last night.
Details are still sketchy on the current occupation, but here’s what I have so far:
Sometime yesterday, apparently yesterday evening, students began an occupation at the University of California Santa Cruz.
According to this post at Santa Cruz Indymedia, the occupation is of UCSC’s “Humanities 2” building, which houses classrooms and offices, including the office of the Dean of Social Sciences. A comment there says that one student was maced and arrested early in the occupation, but that as of one o’clock this morning, other students remained barricaded inside, controlling the entire building.
This statement from UCSC activists, dated yesterday, indicates that more than one student was arrested and maced, and charges that students were not given proper warning before police moved in.
2:30 pm update | New details from Twitterer @creativecstasy, a UCSC student who was on the scene last night (and who took the photo posted above). She says the activists who conducted the takeover “knew what they were doing,” and that they “moved swiftly,” using “furniture/benches/trash [cans] to barricade doors.”
Once the occupiers were inside, supporters of the takeover massed for a dance party in front of the building, while the occupation’s manifesto was read aloud and projected with scrolling text on an outside wall. The occupation was still going on when she left late last night, @creativecstasy says, and as far as she knows the students are still inside now.
4:00 pm update | UC Santa Cruz has released a statement on the events of last night. By that account, three students were pepper-sprayed while attempting to barricade the building with a table. One of the three was arrested, and the other two avoided capture.
The UCSC statement also says that students took over the building “for several hours last night,” but gives no details about when and how the occupation ended. A cryptic note posted moments ago on the Occupy CA website, however, seems to suggest that the students left the building voluntarily.
morning update | Two responses to the UCSC administration’s statement have been posted on the Occupy CA website.
Britain’s Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, seem likely to sweep into power in Britain next spring, and today a London newspaper is reporting that they may bring with them a doubling of tuition fees for British university students.
Undergraduate fees in Britain are currently capped at £3,225 a year, about $5,100, but the Tories’ chief higher education official was quoted this morning as saying that he’s open to raising that cap to as much as £7,000 — more than $11,000. Such an increase would dwarf even the massive hikes that are currently being proposed in the University of California system here in the United States.
The center-left Labour Party has led Britain’s government since 1997, but recent polling has shown a strong and relatively stable lead for the Conservatives. By law, new parliamentary elections must be held by June of next year.
Nearly three hundred Berkeley students kept the campus’s Anthropology library open from its scheduled closing time on Friday afternoon until 24 hours later, in protest of a new policy closing campus libraries on Saturdays.
Eighty students stayed overnight in the library, and they were joined by others in the morning. Some of the group studied, while others held teach-ins on the campus budget during the day on Saturday.
There are more than twenty libraries on the Berkeley campus, and administrators have eliminated weekend hours for at but two of them as a cost-saving measure.
October 13 update: Good on-the-scene report on the library takeover from Alternet. Here’s a taste:
What characterizes this movement (or maybe, what characterizes this as a movement), is the readiness of students, staff, and faculty to mobilize, as well as a diversity of tactics and strategies, coming from a myriad of organizations, bodies, coalitions, and mutually interested individuals who may be involved in none of those at all. This is the face of a new student movement, a movement invested in our spaces of learning, and one which demands to control the terms and conditions of our education.
Here’s a story with a happy ending.
Two weeks ago, Jacob Miller, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, was arrested on campus. His crime? Chalking.
Miller, along with a number of other students, had been writing slogans and drawings on the university’s sidewalks in chalk to promote a rally protesting the commercialization of higher education. A university employee called the police, and Miller was arrested for criminal damage and disturbing an educational institution.
The two charges were each class one misdemeanors, and carried a combined maximum penalty of a year in prison and $5,000 in fines. Miller had been identified through video surveillance footage.
The arrest sparked a huge uproar on campus. The following weekend a group of students began buying sidewalk chalk in bulk and handing it out by the bucketful on campus. Early on Monday morning a Poli Sci major named Evan Lisull was was arrested for writing the slogans “Chalk is Speech” and “Freedom of Expression” on campus sidewalks.
Lisull’s arrest seemed likely to escalate the situation further, but instead it brought the university to its senses. On Monday afternoon UA president Robert Shelton instructed campus police to drop all charges against the two students, and declared that the university would no longer treat chalking as a criminal matter.
UA said at the time that it would in the future handle chalking complaints “as possible Code of Conduct violations through the Dean of Students Office,” but soon it was in full retreat, announcing this week that chalkers would not face disciplinary consequences of any kind.
Chalk one up for … well, you know.
studentactivism.net 
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