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The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an umbrella group representing faculty bodies throughout the UC system, has released a statement “in solidarity with and in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement now underway in our city and elsewhere” and is urging UC faculty to endorse that statement on an individual and collective basis.
OWS, they say, “aims to bring attention to the various forms of inequality – economic, political, and social – that characterize our times, that block opportunities for the young and strangle the hopes for better futures for the majority while generating vast profits for a very few.” The statement ends with a call for “all members of the University of California community to lend their support to the peaceful and potentially transformative movement.”
Good stuff. But it stands in stark contrast to CUCFA’s silence on the student protests that have been sweeping the UC system for more than two years, and its timidity in addressing the root causes of those protests.
The current wave of UC student agitation began in earnest in the fall of 2009, sparked by plans for huge tuition hikes in the system. In November of that year, one week before the Regents’ fee hike vote, CUCFA called for a “postponement” of the vote to ensure “transparency, accountability, and fair consideration of other options” in the decision-making process. They did not oppose the hike itself.
CUCFA was silent the following month when sixty-six Berkeley students were arrested in the course of a peaceful, non-disruptive occupation on campus, and they remained silent throughout the wave of protest and repression that followed. In November 2010 they expressed “concern” about an incident in which a UC police officer drew a gun on student protesters and the UC system lied about why, but they released no statement condemning the incident and took no action in opposition to it. They remained silent as well as student activists’ due process rights were violated in campus judicial proceedings
The University of California has engaged in a massive campaign of intimidation, disruption, and physical violence against student activists since 2009, and CUCFA has — as far as can be determined from their own website’s archive of their public statements — never once stood up in support of the students’ protests or in opposition to those protests’ suppression.
Is this OWS endorsement a first step toward a new CUCFA policy?
One can only hope.
The Daily Show has been on vacation since Occupy Wall Street broke big in the media, so last night’s show was their chance to play catch-up. And they made some … well … odd choices.
Stewart led off the four-minute segment by calling OWS “the Hard Rock Cafe of leftist movements” before doing a gag about OWS’s fundraising prowess and another snarking on Mitt Romney’s opportunism. But the segment’s last — and longest — bit was this one:
“Of course it hasn’t been all good news for the movement. For all their popularity, for all the participants with thoughtful critiques of our power structure, there’s also this: A guy taking a shit [bleeped] on a police car.
“You know what? Guy shitting [bleeped] on a police car? Meet me at camera three.
“NO! NO! BAD! [mimes spraying with water bottle, whacking with rolled up newspaper] NO! NAUGHTY! NAUGHTY!
” ‘Cause here’s the problem. Unfortunately, protests are often as much about optics as they are about substance. And you do not want this [photoshopped photo of Chinese democracy protester shitting on row of tanks] to be your Tiananmen Square. You have tapped into a real injustice that people feel about the global financial markets. Nothing can derail your movement faster than someone who is unable to derail their movements.”
Now, I get it. It’s hard to resist a poop joke. I get that.
But here’s the thing.
In a grassroots movement like this, individual people are going to do stupid things on occasion. It’s unfortunate, but there’s no way to stop it. And as long as everyone recognizes that fact, and is attentive to the distinction between bad acts that reflect movement culture and bad acts that don’t, the those occasional moments of jackassery aren’t a huge deal.
Which is to say that no, Jon Stewart, some idiot taking a dump on a cop car (ten days ago!) isn’t going to “derail the movement.”
No. What derails movements isn’t random acts of jackassery. What derails movements is the disproportionate attention such acts sometimes draw, and the endless hand-wringing that sometimes ensues.
Luckily, that hasn’t happened here. A Google search on the cop car story returns nearly half a million hits, but that’s less than a tenth of a percent of the half a billion hits that “occupy wall street” gets on its own. The incident got a bit of attention when it happened, then mostly sank under the waves as actual news kept happening and folks moved on.
But not everyone is able to resist a poop joke, and not everyone is able to resist an opportunity to lecture activists about “optics.”
And so last night Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers pulled down their pants and squatted.
Naughty, naughty.
Last Wedenesday students from dozens of campuses across the country participated in walkouts in support of Occupy Wall Street. After a hurried set of discussions over the weekend, organizers of those events called a second day of action for today.
Some 144 colleges in thirty states have announced plans for actions on the Occupy Colleges website, with more than fifty of them providing links to their protests’ Facebook pages. This may not be, as one widely-circulated prediction called it, “biggest student protest on US soil since 1970,” but it’s looking pretty big.
The official call to action slated 4:30 ET as the kickoff for today’s events, but a number of campuses are planning to start earlier. Check back here for updates as the day rolls on.
The Student Labor Action Project, a joint effort of the United States Student Association and Jobs With Justice, has posted a set of OWS reports from student activists at U Mass Amherst, George Washington University, the University of Oregon, the University of Central Florida, and Brandeis.
From the introduction by SLAP coordinator Chris Hicks:
“What the mainstream media has failed to understand is that what the youth, the workers, and the unemployed want is justice. This is a justice that has been denied to many of us in our lifetimes – an idea that we once heard of but have never known. The issues that so many of us fight for can all be traced back to the same small group of people: it’s the corporate lobbyists that have prevented any meaningful change to immigration laws; it has been the corporations that have scaled back workers rights; it has been the corporations that have drowned college graduates in debt. For the first time in my life, we have been able to step back from our single issues and collectively look at who is responsible for the injustice we face daily and say, ‘It’s time to make Wall Street pay.’
“We are not demanding reform. We are not demanding that the current system left to us be improved. We are demanding transformative and fundamental change. We are acknowledging that the current system has not worked for us, and that we need something new if we are to going to create a sustainable future.
“When we look back a year from now and ask, ‘What happened at Wall Street?’ it’ll be very clear. We stood against those that oppress and said ‘Enough.'”
Nice piece Monday in the Daytona News-Journal (of all places) about a successful student protest campaign at the University of Denver to save the campus library from being emptied of books. The whole thing is worth reading, but this introductory graf is a fascinating little tidbit:
“Activism at DU has a rich history, including the anti-war protest in 1970 known as Woodstock West, and the earlier Coffee Break Riot of 1965. In the 1965 incident, passion was roused after the administration ended the morning coffee break, a 50-minute period during which no classes were conducted. Students blocked traffic, lit fires and battled with police, but failed to win back their caffeine privileges. It was an era when everything was a Big Deal, and the mood on many campuses was volatile.”
That “Coffee Break Riot” is exactly the kind of thing that gets pooh-poohed as unsubstantial in student protest. But if you squint just a little you can see it’s about student culture, campus environment, and the question of who is going to set the rules under which students will live. None of those are trivial matters, and all of them are worth thinking seriously about.
Also worth noting in that vignette is the year: 1965. That’s well before the widespread protests of the sixties got underway. As see over and over again in student history, huge campus movements often begin in small, strange ways. As I said in a keynote address once, the student past is far weirder, far more interesting, than we imagine.
studentactivism.net 
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