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Continuing my liveblogging today — Thursday — on the second day of Occupy Cal. Newest updates at the top of the page.
9:30 am | An odd quote from Berkeley Dean of Social Sciences Carla Hesse in the Daily Cal, apparently from comments she made yesterday:
“‘I’d like [the activists] to think about what they’re doing,’ she said. ‘I’m worried if they destroy property, the public isn’t going to be very sympathetic.'”
But the group’s only formal statement, distributed earlier that day, said “We will remain peaceful and non-violent. We will do everything to ensure the campus is a safe space and will not engage in vandalism. We will take care of each other and the space we create.” There had been no indication of any plans for vandalism or property destruction.
The campus administration, however, had at the time Hesse spoke already made it clear that even peaceful, nonviolent, nondestructive protest would not be tolerated on the Berkeley campus if it did not conform to the university’s restrictions in every detail. UC police have for the last two years shown repeatedly that they are willing to engage in physical violence against peaceful protesters, and they did so again yesterday afternoon, not long after Hesse spoke.
9:25 am | Word on Twitter is that all 39 of yesterday’s arrestees have been released. Professor Celeste Langam reportedly sent out an email to friends on the faculty saying that she will make a public statement on her arrest at a later time. Meanwhile, a small group of activists spent the night in Sproul Plaza, apparently keeping one small tent up overnight. Next meeting scheduled for ten o’clock.
6:05 am | Yesterday the Berkeley administration made Occupy Cal an offer they had to know would be flatly rejected — the students and others could stay on Sproul Plaza, but with no tents. And no sleeping bags. Also no sleeping. And they would have to leave in a week. This wasn’t a good faith negotiation or an attempt to reach an accommodation that would — as Birgenau suggested he was hoping to — control “costly and avoidable expenses.” It was a piece of theater, a prelude to the use of police violence against peacefully demonstrating students on an American public university campus.
5:50 am| Lots to cover this morning, including the arrests of 39 people on the Berkeley campus, but I guess this is as good a place to start as any: Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgenau yesterday justified the bust of Occupy Cal with the following statement: “We simply cannot afford to spend our precious resources and, in particular, student tuition, on costly and avoidable expenses associated with violence or vandalism.”
Wow. That’s just … breathtaking.
5:46 am Pacific Time Thursday | I continued to track the events of last night (both Cal and Penn State) on Twitter yesterday evening, but didn’t manage to get back here for an overview post before literally falling asleep at my keyboard. It was a long day. Resuming coverage now.
5:59 pm Wednesday | Good roundup of the day up to now is here.
5:58 pm | Done with dinner. While I was gone the police retreated. Six arrests, apparently dozens of student injuries. All but two tents confiscated, but those two tents are still standing. Activists are requesting that the Berkeley administration explicitly — and publicly — declare that the police will not be directed to roust the encampment.
3:47 pm | Cops in riot gear are wading into the crowd with batons drawn, breaking the student line defending the tents. Activists are chanting “stop beating students” and “what law are we breaking?”
3:45 pm | Okay, I’m going to be late for dinner.
3:30 pm | I’m on the East Coast, and I’ve got dinner plans I can’t break. Back in a bit. I’ll be on twitter at @studentactivism as much as politeness allows.
3:20 pm | Latest tweet: “Police issuing a dispersal order. Against students. At a rally. On campus. At 3:15 on a Wednesday. That’s fucked up. #OccupyCal”
3:08 pm | As I just tweeted, it’s a hell of a lot easier to take down a tent with nobody in it. And a hell of a lot harder to bust someone who’s in a tent. If Occupy Cal succeeds in setting up an encampment, the UCPD situation changes dramatically.
3:05 pm | Have been tweeting rather than liveblogging for the last little while because so much is in flux, but it appears that Occupy Cal students moved immediately to set up tents after the GA vote, and that UCPD immediately swept in to take them down. But then students locked arms in a semi-enclosed part of the lawn to protect their friends, and tents got set up behind their line.
2:49 pm | The vote on the encampment at the GA was 456-1 with 12 abstentions.
2:44 pm | A Daily Cal reporter is tweeting that there are no votes in opposition to the encampment proposal and only a handful of abstentions.
2:40 pm | The initial UC occupations in the wave of student action that began a little over two years ago tended to be “closed,” meaning that students (and others) took over buildings and barricaded themselves inside, shutting them down. As the movement developed, it evolved in the direction of “open” occupations, in which folks occupied spaces but left them accessible to others while the occupation was going on. That shift was not accompanied by a corresponding shift in UC administrative tolerance of the occupations — notably, 66 people were arrested on December 11, 2009 in an early-morning police raid on an open, peaceful occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall.
It’s now looking like a new occupation strategy is being adopted at Berkeley — the open-air encampment. My hunch is that the administration will find mass arrests of such a group hard to justify, but they’ve never backed down before.
This is going to be interesting.
2:33 pm | Twitter reports say the proposal for an encampment is receiving serious discussion and debate at the Berkeley general assembly. One report from a reliable observer not long ago put the size of the GA at something like 1000 people. The Berkeley administration has said it won’t tolerate an encampment, but it’s hard to imagine them going through with arrests on anything like that scale, particularly if — as I assume it will — this occupation is of a lawn rather than a building.
2:25 pm | From the draft statement: “We will remain peaceful and non-violent. We will do everything to ensure the campus is a safe space and will not engage in vandalism. We will take care of each other and the space we create. We will organize. We will have fun. We will not end our encampment until we are ready.”
2:15 pm | The Daily Cal has the text of a draft statement from #OccupyCal establishing a UC Berkeley encampment.
1:50 pm | The Sproul rally marched to the Bank of America branch and back. Next up: A General Assembly meeting.
1:09 pm | Not much of a surprise, but now it’s official: Occupy Cal will be setting up an encampment today.
1:08 pm | Word on Twitter is that the Berkeley demonstrators will be marching on a Bank of America branch at Telegraph and Durant, just a block off campus right by the Sproul Plaza entrance.
1:00 pm | Just tweeted this: “UC admin has quieted student protest since 2009 with mass arrests. Now there’s 1000s out at Berkeley. What next? #OccupyCal”
12:50 pm | On Twitter @jpanzar says there are a lot of faculty at today’s rally. Given the way that UC profs have distanced themselves from UC student protest in the last year or so, that’s a big deal.
12:47 pm | Sign: “Arab Spring, Chilean Winter: Meet the American Fall.”
12:43 pm | The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper, has an #OccupyCal liveblog up here.
12:40 pm | Today’s Berkeley rally began a little over half an hour ago. According to multiple on-the-scene observers, the crowd already numbers in the thousands.
12:27 pm Pacific Time | Today the Occupy movement is coming home to Berkeley, and early reports suggest this is already the biggest action to hit the Berkeley campus since the September 2009 walkout that launched the contemporary student movement nationwide.
See updates at bottom of post.
In 1998 Jerry Sandusky, a prominent assistant coach on Penn State’s top-ranked football team — and a possible successor to Joe Paterno as the team’s head coach — groped an 11-year-old boy in the team’s showers. The boy’s mother learned of this incident, she reported it to Penn State police. Sandusky later admitted to police that he had hugged the boy naked in the showers.
No charges were brought, and Sandusky retired the following year, retaining emeritus status at Penn State, an office in the university’s football building, and full access to the team’s facilities.
In 2000 Penn State janitors witnessed Sandusky performing oral sex on a male child in the football team’s showers. They reported the incident to their supervisor, who took no action. The janitors, fearing that they would lose their jobs if they took the matter forward, made no formal complaint about the incident.
In 2002 a Penn State graduate coaching assistant witnessed Sandusky anally raping a ten-year-old boy in the team’s showers. He told coach Joe Paterno, and then Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, the latter of whom had authority over the university’s police. None of these officials reported the allegations to any police agency, nor did Penn State president Graham B. Spanier when he was notified.
Sandusky continued to have access to Penn State facilities, and to travel with the team, until his arrest Saturday on 40 counts of sexual abuse, allegations involving eight victims and incidents stretching from 1994 to 2009. Curley and Schultz have been indicted on perjury and failure to report charges stemming from the 2002 incident. Schultz has retired, and Curley has been placed on administrative leave, while Spanier and Paterno remain in their positions.
Spanier has said he has “complete confidence in how” Curley and Schultz “handled the allegations.” The university is paying the two men’s legal bills.
Paterno has more victories than any football coach in NCAA Division I history. His salary stands in excess of one million dollars a year, making him the highest-paid employee at Penn State.
Update | A statement from NCAA president Mark Emmert Monday evening condemned the sexual abuse of children but made no reference to the alleged Penn State coverup of Sandusky’s behavior.
Second Update | Paterno just canceled his weekly press conference, less than an hour before it was to begin.
Third Update, 12:20 pm | The New York Times is reporting that Penn State officials have decided that Paterno will not remain at Penn State, and that his departure could come “within days or weeks.”
Fourth Update, 1:25 pm | Now the Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that support for Paterno and Spanier is “eroding” on the Penn State Board of Trustees, and that the board could vote to remove both as soon as Thursday.
Fourth Update, Wednesday 9:30 am | A thousand Penn State students marched in response to the ongoing crisis last night, many of them supporters of Coach Paterno. Some called for the resignation of President Spanier, while others simply declared their support for Penn State itself.
Fifth Update, Wednesday 10:10 am | The Associated Press is now reporting that Paterno will retire at the end of this season. Penn State’s trustees met last night by phone and will meet again this evening — they are expected to announce the formation of a committee to investigate the scandal on Friday.
If you enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley this fall, and you weren’t a California resident, you paid more than you would have if you had gone to Harvard.
That’s not a joke, or a misprint. Berkeley, a public university, now charges its out-of-state attendees more than Harvard does. Choose Harvard instead of Berkeley, and you’ll save enough to buy a top-of-the-line iPad. With a data plan.
“But that’s just out-of-state students!” I hear you cry. “The University of California is a state university, serving the people of the state of California! Out-of-state students should pay more!”
Well, yeah. Fair enough. But in-state tuition at Berkeley is now brushing up against fifteen grand, and even at that price it’s available to fewer and fewer Californians every year. Why? Because those higher-than-Harvard fees are really hard to pass up.
Berkeley’s out-of-state enrollment historically hovered around ten percent. But it rose to 15% two years ago as the current financial crisis hit, then jumped to 23% last year. For the fall of 2011, it skyrocketed to 29.8%. Even with increased enrollment overall, that translates to a loss of more than one thousand places for California residents in just two years.
Education activists talk about “privatization” of higher education a lot, and there’s a danger of that word losing its meaning through repetition. But here it is — privatization in action in the most concrete way. First Berkeley raises its out-of-state pricing to private university levels, and then it starts jacking up out-of-school enrollments to squeeze the most revenue out of its new policy. The public university withers, replaced by something very very different.
And this process is just getting underway. It’s going to get far worse before it gets better.
Update | An eagle-eyed commenter noticed that the webpage I used as my original source for Harvard’s rates omitted two apparently mandatory fees. Once those are taken into account, Harvard’s tuition costs remain slightly higher than Berkeley’s, for now at least. Once you factor in room and board, however, Berkeley takes the lead again — and by a slightly wider margin than I reported in the original version of this post. Full details in comments.
Last week six UC Berkeley students went on trial on charges stemming from a March occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Unlike the Irvine 11, their fate was decided by a judge, not a jury. And unlike the Irvine 11, they were found not guilty.
The acquittals of these six students, however, were followed just two days later by the arrests of two more, at the campus’s “Day 1” protests marking the start of the fall semester throughout the UC system.
Police say that protesters on September 22 threw chairs, bottles, and chunks of concrete at cops, and that members of the group used oversized book-cover props as shields and offensive weapons. But one officer’s claim that “we respect people’s right to protest, but we ask that they do it safely and peacefully” rings hollow in light of UC’s recent history with nonviolent protest.
As I noted earlier this week, hundreds of student activists have been arrested on UC campuses in the last two years, many in situations in which no protester violence was even alleged. (In the most egregious case, sixty-six students were woken from their sleep and arrested in the unlocked building they were peacefully and non-disruptively occupying, just hours before that occupation’s scheduled end.) One student journalist was not only put through the wringer of the campus judicial system — in an incident I’ll be writing about tomorrow — but forced to pay court costs when a legal challenge to the university’s procedures failed.
Berkeley, and the UC system generally, have systematically criminalized nonviolent confrontational protest over the course of the last two years. The result has been a wave of questionable arrests and prosecutions, a ratcheting up of student tactics, and a dramatic increase in police violence. With students chaining themselves together on high ledges and police officers pointing guns at angry crowds, the whole situation is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Something’s got to give.
UC Berkeley’s chapter of the College Republicans plan to host a bake sale on campus this morning as a commentary on affirmative action policies under consideration in the state legislature. (The idea is to critique affirmative action by offering food for sale to some groups for less than others.)
The “affirmative action bake sale” is a bit of a relic in conservative organizing — it had its heyday in the early 2000s. But it always provokes, and Berkeley is no exception. Some of the institutional reactions, however, have been fascinating.
Sunday, a group calling itself the Multicultural Coalition for Affirmative Action released a list of demands in response to the planned sale, calling on the Berkeley administration to — among other things — add clear anti-discrimination statements to the university’s Principles of Community, and to add those principles to the Berkeley code of student conduct.
On Sunday night ASUC — Berkeley’s student government — unanimously passed a resolution that, after a page of careful laying out of the various jurisdictional issues and imperatives involved, “condemn[ed] the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or seriousness by any student group.”
And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”
Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.)
I wrote yesterday about the hundreds of non-violent protesters who have been arrested at UC campuses in the last three years, and I’ll be writing more about those events as this week rolls on. Seen in that light, the failure of ASUC and Chancellor Birgenau to do more than merely place themselves on the side of sensitivity and civility rings hollow.
As an act of political theater, the affirmative action bake sale is a pretty paltry one. It offers a weak and overplayed analogy to the admissions debate, rehashing claims that have been batted around for ages. What makes it provocative isn’t its form but its message: that affirmative action is an immoral act of discrimination.
That’s what the College Republicans of Berkeley believe, and that is the message they are attempting to convey with their sale. They believe that affirmative action is racist and sexist against against whites and men, and there’s no polite way to call someone a bigot.
Birgenau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.
That’s what’s under discussion. That’s what’s at stake.
Update | Zunguzungu has provided a report from the scene in comments, and there’s a lot more info to be had at the Twitter hashtag #theaffirmation. All in all, it sounds like student supporters of affirmative action responded cogently and soberly to the bake sale. And it’s worth noting that a list of demands released today by “The Coalition,” an anti-bakesale group, pretty much ignores the bake sale, and the College Republicans, altogether.
The coalition demand the passage and implementation of California’s Senate Bill 185, which would allow race and ethnicity to be taken into consideration in UC admissions, and Assembly Bill 540, which addresses admissions and tuition issues for undocumented students. They demand new funding and staffing for support services for students of color at Berkeley. They demand a restructuring of the school’s American culture course requirement to center scholarship on race, ethnicity, and gender, and the inclusion of the university’s “Principles of Community” on course syllabi. They demand representation of underrepresented campus communities in admissions hiring.
Each of these demands is addressed to the functioning of the University of California as an institution. None of them have the College Republicans or those who share their views as their target. Crucially absent from the list are demands that appeared in a draft version that appeared on Friday, calling on the university to bolster its code of conduct with new restrictions on bigoted student behavior.
As I said above, Berkeley’s chancellor Birgenau is seeking to frame this conflict as a dispute between students over standards of civility. Berkeley’s campus activists have rejected that framing, and are properly centering the government and the university itself in their response.
studentactivism.net 
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