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It’s four o’clock in the afternoon (ET), I’m back from teaching, and I’m picking up my liveblog of today’s national day of student action where I left off two hours ago. So far today we’ve seen one campus (UC Santa Cruz) essentially shut down by student protest, significant citywide marches several places, students rallying inside the Massachusetts statehouse, and other actions of various kinds at dozens of campuses from coast to coast.
The day is young, and there’s clearly a lot more to come. Stay tuned.
Friday Update: I’ve put together a summary/synthesis post on the day’s events here.
• • •
11:00 pm | That’ll do it for me for tonight. More thoughts tomorrow.
9:54 pm | UC Santa Cruz activists have re-opened one of the two UCSC entrances to vehicular traffic.
9:43 pm | Some of the Berkeley/Oakland activists have been occupying a state building in San Francisco. They’re currently being removed from the building, issued citations, and released.
9:34 pm | The DePaul occupation has ended, with the occupiers regrouping for new actions tomorrow.
8:38 pm | Having dinner. DePaul occupation still ongoing, reports of occupation of chancellor’s office at UC San Diego. More in a bit.
7:31 pm | Reports coming in of police presence at the DePaul occupation. Situation still unclear, but one tweeter says the occupation was “partially broken up by cops.”
7:22 pm | Two big non-#M1 campus stories today. In Arizona, a state legislator withdrew his proposal to require (nearly) all students to pay at least $2000 a year in tuition out-of-pocket, regardless of financial need. And in Virginia, more than a dozen UVA students ended a 13-day hunger strike after the university administration acceded to many of their living wage demands.
6:58 pm | There’s now a livestream of the Berkeley/Oakland demonstration out front of the Morgan Stanley offices.
6:44 pm | Tweet from inside the DePaul occupation: “We’re staying. Come to 55 e jackson right away-we need your support!!!!”
6:37 pm | The Oakland marchers who aren’t going to Sacramento are heading to Morgan Stanley.
6:30 pm | The Student Labor Action Project is in the early stages of compiling a photo album of today’s actions. Check it out.
6:28 pm | Marchers are setting out from Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, heading for … Sacramento, 99 miles away. Background here.
6:13 pm | DePaul admin building occupation is settling in. Occupier reports that they “just voted unanimously to stay in this room until we get a date and time for a public forum with the entire student body.” He says there are about 45 people there at the moment, and that the university’s president met with them, rejected their demands, and left.
6:09 pm |Via Twitter comes word of a Seattle march on the Gates Foundation headquarters. That’s the seventh city march (along with NYC, Philly, Boston, Oakland/Berkeley, DC, Montgomery) I’ve learned of today.
6:05 pm | The DC marchers delivered a statement of grievances and demands to an official at the Department of Education, who promised a response by a week from tomorrow. That action is apparently now over for the day.
5:49 pm | Students and supporters from around the Bay area have congregated in Oscar Grant Park, the longtime home of the Occupy Oakland encampment.
5:22 pm | We apparently have our first campus occupation of the afternoon. According to tweeter Brad Hamilton (who posted a photo), students at DePaul University in Chicago have occupied administrative offices there, demanding a tuition freeze at the Catholic institution.
5:01 pm | Actions today aren’t confined to the campuses and regions you’d expect, as this photo of a sizable rally at the Alabama state capitol demonstrates.
4:58 pm | Six tents and the shell of a geodesic dome are up on the UCSC campus, but it’s not clear whether an occupation is planned.
4:42 pm | DC marchers have arrived at the Department of Education, where they have been denied entry by police.
4:37 pm | Bad weather appears to have depressed turnout on both coasts earlier today, but rain seems to be ending both in Northern California and the NYC area at this hour.
4:33 pm | UC Santa Cruz remains almost entirely shut down as a result of students’ blockade of the campus’s two entrances. A motorist who drove through a crowd of protesters earlier today was “briefly detained” but apparently not arrested.
4:30 pm | Bay area march now heading from Berkeley to Oakland. Students who had been at the Boston state capitol are marching to Harvard.
4:25 pm | The American Association of University Professors has been tweeting about #M1 events all day, mentioning chapter support for actions at Hofstra, the U of Akron, Indiana U, Stetson U, Lincoln U, Delaware State, Marymount Manhattan, Bowie State, the U of Delaware, St. Catherine U, and the U of Rhode Island.
4:21 pm | Tweet of the afternoon, from San Francisco State: “Stuck in class and can’t walkout? Tweet out and #occupysfsu will come save you.”
4:18 pm | The Washington DC action is currently outside the offices of student loan corporation Sallie Mae. The founder of http://occupystudentdebt.com/ is speaking to the crowd.
4:15 pm | The New York City march has been on the move for several hours. Size is estimated at several hundred.
4:06 pm | In addition to the Boston march which has ended in the statehouse, there are citywide marches confirmed in New York, Philadelphia, the Bay area, and Washington DC so far.
4:02 pm | Students are inside the Massachusetts state capitol in Boston, hanging banners.
Today is a national day of action on American college campuses, a day of coordinated student protests, teach-ins, and occupations from coast to coast. I’ll be keeping tabs on the day’s events as they occur — scroll down to read everything from the beginning.
Note: Liveblogging continues here.
• • •
4:05 pm | I’ve resumed liveblogging in a new post.
1:23 pm | Very quickly, before I go: about two hours ago, a man driving a Ford Mustang accelerated through a crowd of students and others who were blocking access to the UCSC campus, striking several of them. The driver and a passenger were removed from the scene by police, but it is not yet clear whether either has been arrested. An hour later, a heckler at the protest took a swing at a student.
1:17 pm | Actions are heating up across the nation, but I have to go up to campus to teach. Follow #M1 for all the latest, and I’ll tweet as I can from @studentactivism. Liveblogging will resume by about four o’clock Eastern, and continue through the afternoon and evening.
1:04 pm | As noted at the 10:43 am update, President Obama is scheduled to speak at a New Hampshire community college within the hour.
1:00 pm | PA banner drop reads “KEEPING STATE IN PENN STATE.”
12:41 pm | Hashtags for the day’s actions are proliferating, but #M1 is drawing an ever-growing share of the total traffic. That’s the tag to use, and follow.
12:30 pm | Students from New York City campuses are holding a roving rally on and around the campus of NYU. Journalist Allison Kilkenny is tweeting from the march.
12:04 pm | The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that UCSC student activists are setting up a “Tent University” not far from about a hundred students are participating in a blockade of the campus’s two entrances. University officials and police have not yet interfered with either the blockade or the tents.
11:44 am | Update on Berkeley admin building: Daily Cal reporter Chloe Hunt tweets that one of two entrances has been locked from the inside, but the other is still in use.
11:34 am | UC Berkeley has apparently shut down its administration building preemptively this morning. Activists have wrapped the building in crime-scene tape.
11:19 am | Inside Higher Ed’s Allie Grasgreen has a piece up on today’s actions, and it’s a solid one. One place of disagreement: Grasgreen says 2012 has been a “down time” so far, but in fact there have been nine campus occupations since the start of the spring semester, and that’s not counting such actions as the UVA hunger strike for a living wage, which began thirteen days ago and is still going on.
11:06 am | UCSC has shut down several campus cafes for the day, and administrators are urging faculty “to make accommodations, as appropriate, for students who are unable, through no fault of their own, to attend class.” No move yet to shut down the campus completely.
10:48 am | Rain is expected in the Northeast, Northwest, and parts of the Deep South today. But Northern California and the NYC region should be clearing up by early afternoon.
10:43 am | As it happens, President Obama is going to be speaking on a college campus today — he’s scheduled to give a speech at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire at 1:40 pm.
10:29 am | The UCSC blockade isn’t a new tactic. Santa Cruz students closed campus entrances to vehicles during the March 4 national protests in 2010, forcing the university to shut down the campus for the day.
10:23 am | UC Santa Cruz website confirms that “the campus is currently blocked to vehicular traffic,” and has been for nearly three hours. Buses are being rerouted to drop passengers at university entrances.
10:12 am | I’m compiling a Twitter list of folks who will likely be livetweeting M1 events. If you have suggestions for additions, let me know.
10:04 am | Tweet says activists will blockade UC Berkeley’s administration building, California Hall, at 7:30 am Pacific Time.
9:55 am | Twitter hashtags to follow today are #M1 and #OccupyEducation.
9:37 am ET | The day’s first major development comes from California, where students at UC Santa Cruz rose before dawn to shut down vehicular access to the campus. Activists say they will allow emergency services, childcare and health workers, and residents of on-campus housing through their barricades.
A tuition fee protest is gaining momentum in Quebec this week, with organizers claiming that more than fifty thousand students are now participating in an ongoing student strike. Students have taken to the streets of Montreal several times this week, with one group shutting down a major city bridge at the start of rush hour this afternoon. Riot police dispersed the protesters with pepper spray, re-opening the span after twenty minutes. The size of today’s main march has been estimated at five thousand.
The students are mobilizing against planned annual fee hikes that would raise annual tuition from $2168 to $3793 over the next five years.
The anti-hike protests are controversial in some quarters, as Quebec’s tuition rates are far below the national average. But as I noted on Twitter a few minutes ago, the idea that the average tuition rate is the right tuition rate is incredibly pernicious. If you start from the premise that every tuition rate below some “average” benchmark should properly be raised, then each tuition increase justifies the next one.
Or, to put it another way…
Quebec students protesting tuition hikes pay lowest tuition in Canada. BECAUSE THAT’S HOW YOU KEEP IT THAT WAY. *cough*
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) February 23, 2012
More on the Quebec protests soon.
In a post titled “We’re Breaking Up,” the Student Labor Action Project announced today that three major student activist organizations have cut ties with banks implicated in predatory lending, student loan profiteering, and right-wing political activity:
- The United States Student Association has voted to close its accounts at Wells Fargo, the nation’s second largest private student lender (and the only major US bank to engage in predatory “payday loan” activity.) Wells Fargo’s student loan interest rates range as high as 14.21%.
- The United Council of University of Wisconsin Students has pulled its money from M&I Bank, which contributed more than $46,000 to the campaign of Wisconsin’s notorious governor, Scott Walker.
- And the University of California Student Association has broken ties with major student lender US Bank in the wake of its “lack of willingness to engage in good-faith efforts to negotiate sustainable permanent mortgage modifications.”
That’s three major student organizations in just a few weeks. More to come?
A bill in the Arizona legislature would bar the state’s university system from providing scholarships that reduced out-of-pocket tuition to less than $2000 a year.
Republican John Kavanaugh says that keeping tuition low creates “perverse incentives” for students to enroll in college. His bill, which has 24 co-sponsors in Arizona’s 60-member House of Representatives, would restrict all grants, scholarships, and awards administered by the university, even those funded by private donors.
Students on full academic scholarships would be exempted from the regulation, as would those on athletic scholarships. Asked why athletes were exempt, Kavanaugh said “they contribute to school spirit, and those on football and basketball teams also generate a lot of extra revenue.”
The athletic and academic loopholes, of course, mean that the bill’s largest impact would be on need-based aid.
February 22 Update | The tuition bill, HB 2675, has just been approved by the Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives in what Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic described as a “narrow” vote. On Twitter, Ms. Ryman described exchanges between committeemembers and students testifying against the bill as “heated,” giving the following example:
University of Arizona student James Allen: “You’re making it harder to achieve a higher education degree.”
Representative Michelle Ugenti: “Welcome to life.”
Ouch.
studentactivism.net 
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