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As the spring semester gets underway, I’ll be launching a major new project — a national database of campus Occupy projects. The database will include links to each occupation’s social media presence, as well as to press coverage of their work.
To start with, I’ll be concentrating on Occupy groups that have established campus occupations lasting for at least one overnight, though I’m interested in hearing about all other groups as well. So far, I’ve compiled a list of seventeen campus occupations in twelve states from the fall semester, though I know I’m missing more.
If you have Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or blog info for any of the campus occupations listed below, or if you know of occupations not on this list, please let me know. The database will be going live within a week.
California: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, Humboldt State, San Francisco State
Idaho: Idaho State
Illinois: Illinois State
Iowa: Iowa State
Massachusetts: Harvard, Boston University
New Hampshire: Dartmouth
New Mexico: University of New Mexico
New York: SUNY Fredonia
North Carolina: Duke
Rhode Island: Brown
Texas: University of North Texas
Washington: Seattle Central Community College
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.
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.
The Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park has been under strain recently, with growing numbers of visitors putting new demands on OWS’s ad-hoc infrastructure. Now some are charging that the New York Police Department is intentionally adding to the stress in an attempt to bring the occupation down.
Zuccotti’s activists and agitators have been joined by an increasingly visible contingent of folks drawn by the plaza’s free food and other attractions, a group that Harry Siegel in the New York Daily News described yesterday as “a fast-growing contingent of lawbreakers and lowlifes, many of whom seem to have come to Zuccotti in the last week with the cynical encouragement of the NYPD.” The Daily News describes a growing division in the park between an activist east and a “non-participant” west, the latter representing “a shady mélange of crusty punks, angry drunks, drug dealers and the city’s many varieties of park denizens.” (Tabloid editorializing aside, this characterization of the park’s split is supported by other observers.)
This new dynamic, Siegel says, is a result of police action:
“The NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals.”
The NYPD’s press office, Seigel reports, “declined to comment on the record about any such policy,” though police behavior in the park seems to lend it credence:
“‘He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,’ I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene with troublemakers inside the park, including a clearly disturbed man screaming and singing wildly at 3 a.m. for the second straight night.”
The question of how to address the problems posed by Zuccotti Park’s changing composition has been the subject of increasing debate in recent days, but that question has so far been framed primarily in terms of challenges arising organically out of the plaza’s identity as a source of resources and amenities. If the NYPD is in fact actively seeding the space with addicts and street people — if their goal is to turn Zuccotti Park into Hamsterdam — that debate may take a new turn.
A recent CBS poll found that 43% of Americans agree with the views of Occupy Wall Street, with only 27% disagreeing. (Other polls have found similar sentiments.) But what do these numbers mean?
Here’s some historical context:
- In 1959, five years after Brown v. Board of Ed, a 53-37 majority of Americans thought the decision had “caused a lot more trouble than it was worth.”
- In 1961, Americans believed by a 57-28 margin that civil rights demonstrations were doing more harm than good to the cause of integration.
- In October 1964, some 57% of Americans thought racial integration was moving “too fast,” and only 18% thought it wasn’t moving fast enough.
- In 1971, a national poll found only 39% percent of Americans “sympathetic … with efforts of the women’s liberation groups,” with 47% unsympathetic.
That’s right. More Americans support Occupy Wall Street than supported Brown v. Board of Ed in 1959, the civil rights movement in 1961, desegregation in 1964, or feminism in 1971.
Oh, and here’s one more: In 1948, Americans disapproved of “women of any age wearing slacks in public” by a 39-34 margin.
Yep. OWS is more popular today than pants on women was 63 years ago.
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