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If you thought the end of the school year meant no more grass-roots student agitation until fall, you thought wrong. Not gonna happen. Not this year. Yesterday students in California and Wisconsin, two of the country’s most active states, held targeted protests, and there’s more on the horizon.
In California, students at UCLA staged a campus march and sit-in to protest plans to suspend free tutoring services at the university’s Covel Commons. The group, who had timed their action to get noisy only during scheduled breaks between final exams, met with a vice chancellor and took steps to keep the pressure on in the weeks to come.
More on what’s happening in Wisconsin later today…
Nine activists, seven of them students, were arrested at Ohio State University yesterday afternoon at the offices of university president Gordon Gee. The nine were part of a group of more than a hundred who had gathered to protest OSU’s relationship with campus contractor Sodexo.
The activists were affiliated with the OSU chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, a national organization whose members have mounted nearly a dozen major campus protests across the country in recent weeks. USAS was spurred to action by reports of Sodexo worker rights abuses in at least five countries, as well as reports of mistreatment by Sodexo workers at OSU’s own sports stadium.
Western Washington University last week broke ties with Sodexo in the face of a USAS-led campaign, while administrators at Emory and the University of Washington have arrested students peacefully protesting against the company.
Jesse Cheng announced on Monday that he would be stepping down as Student Regent of the University of California system. The announcement came just days before the final Regents meeting of his term.
The student conduct office at UC Irvine, Cheng’s home campus, ruled in March that Cheng had sexually assaulted a former girlfriend the previous fall. He appealed the finding, stepping down only after his appeal was rejected. (Cheng had admitted to sexual assault in an email to the woman, but later claimed that the confession was false, and written under pressure from his accuser. He was arrested in connection with the incident a few weeks after it allegedly occurred, but released without charges.)
In an era in which the University of California has pursued student activists with the aggressive use of both criminal and campus judicial sanctions, the mild treatment of Cheng — who, though he now denies any wrongdoing, both admitted to and was found guilty of sexual assault — stands out. In particular, it contrasts dramatically with how the university and local prosecutors have treated the “Irvine 11,” a group of students who are currently facing trial for allegedly disrupting a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador to the US.
I’ll admit that I’m ambivalent about the charges against Jesse Cheng. I know Jesse, and I’d like to believe that he’s not capable of what he’s been accused of. But whatever my personal thoughts on his case, the fact is that he was found by a student conduct board to have committed a sexual assault, and given his confession, it’s difficult to argue that the board’s conclusion was egregiously in error.
That Cheng received probation, and was allowed to keep his seat on the UC Regents until he himself chose to give it up, while the Irvine 11 saw the student organization to which they belong suspended and now each face the possibility of six months in jail? That’s not right. That’s not proportionate. That’s not legitimate.
And that disproportion, that illegitimacy, casts the whole University of California judicial system, as well as the UC’s relationship with law enforcement, into question.
Update | Read this post from Reclaim UC for more on the university’s recent history of bungling sexual assault charges. Seriously. Go read it.
After more than a week of delays and disputes the votes from the just-ended UAW 2865 election have been completed, and AWDU, the insurgent slate allied with the recent University of California student uprising, have won a significant victory.
UAW 2865 represents the UC system’s student academic employees, this was both a student election and a union election. Both sides won some positions, and both sides are claiming a measure of vindication in the results, but incumbents USEJ were shut out in the most prominent officer races and took barely 40% of the seats on the local’s statewide council.
I’m still getting up to speed on this election’s long-term implications, but quite a few people in California who I’ve grown to like and trust over the last few years are very pleased by this news.
Here’s how AWDU is describing the road ahead:
Now it is time for us to bring this strength to our fight against the attacks on higher education. As a next step, we are calling on all graduate students and undergraduate tutors – no matter who they supported in the election – to come together for a statewide membership meeting of the union on May 21st to chart the way forward. We’ll get you more details soon. But high on the agenda is stepping up the fight against increasing class sizes, fee hikes, rising housing costs, new budget cuts, and UC management’s capping of funding for fee remissions and health benefits for graduate student employees.
We will stand together against the attacks on higher education, in real unity borne of fruitful discussion that includes disagreement. A grassroots, bottom-up union is strong when it provides space for open debate, and we hope that every member continues to express criticism when necessary. We also know that many members of the USEJ slate and many USEJ supporters never wanted to stop the vote count in the first place. We hope that the Elections Committee’s dismissal of the fabricated allegations by some of the outgoing union officers will help up us begin a more honest dialogue with each other.
The incredible diversity of our newly elected Joint Council and entire union is a vital strength that we must actively build upon. By working together, including with the new Joint Council members from USEJ, we will win historic advances for the rights of student-workers and the expansion of public education. We look forward to building a new kind of union together.
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