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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.
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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.
For the last three years, the first week of March has seen a national day of co-ordinated student action in support of accessible, democratic higher education.
The 2010 day of action came as the nation’s most active year of student protest in decades was in full swing. Building on the California protests and occupations of Fall 2009, March 4 saw more than 120 actions in thirty-three states, and drew a level of media attention that was, for its time, astonishing. A year and a half before Occupy Wall Street was launched, eleven months before the Wisconsin statehouse occupation began, #March4 was for many the first sign that something big and new was bubbling up from the campuses.
March 2, 2011 was a bit smaller than March 4, 2010, at least in part because of administrators’ success in quieting student protest in California the previous fall. But it did produce three campus occupations — again, this is well before Occupy Wall Street — including a feminist protest in Pennsylvania, a statehouse solidarity occupation in Wisconsin, and the audacious (and chilling) occupation of the ledge of a building on the Berkeley campus. A week later, high school students staged their first nationally co-ordinated day of protest in recent memory, and the momentum of the campus movement hasn’t subsided since.
So what can we expect to see tomorrow, in the first day of campus action of the OWS era? The Nation has a piece up offering a taste of what’s brewing, while the coordinating group Occupy Colleges lists 64 campuses that they expect to be acting up in one way or another. In California, March 1 is the kickoff of a planned week of action that’s slated to culminate in a state capitol occupation, and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in the pipeline.
Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.
Evening Update | As I reported last week, there have been 37 campus occupations in the US and Canada so far this academic year. (That’s not protests, occupations.) It’s safe to say that number will be higher by Friday. Huffington Post also has a good overview of what’s in store (posted yesterday).
March 1 Morning Update | I’ll be liveblogging the day’s events here.
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.
As the map below shows, students have staged more than three dozen campus occupations across the United States and Canada during the 2011-12 academic year. Starting with the University of New Orleans at the end of August, more than two weeks before Occupy Wall Street kicked off, the movement has grown to encompass at least thirteen states and one Canadian province.
Campuses hosting occupations have been public and private, urban and rural. They have included university centers and no fewer than four community colleges. Students have occupied indoors and outdoors. They have been rousted by police. They have been beaten. They have been arrested. They have been pepper-sprayed. And in many cases they have come back from such treatment to re-establish occupations larger and more lasting than those that were cut short.
Some occupations have won concrete victories, others have refused to articulate demands. Some have been mounted by students alone, others have been supported by faculty, staff, and community members. Together, these actions represent a new phase in American student organizing.
And it’s only February.
This map presently includes detailed information about all 37 campus occupations of which I’m aware. It will be updated on an ongoing basis for the rest of the academic year — please disseminate it widely and forward any additional data you may have.
I wrote yesterday about the lawsuit filed by 19 UC Davis students and recent graduates who were subject to pepper spraying, other police violence, and false arrest last November 18. The students are suing fifty-six university employees for violating their constitutional and statutory rights, but the list of defendants only has six names on it.
Why? Because only one of the dozens of police officers who participated in the attack on the protesters has been identified by the university.
It’s more than three months after the incident. Video of the day’s events has been shown over and over again throughout the planet. But UC Davis still won’t tell its students which of its campus police officers brutalized them.
In addition to the pepper-spraying, which was conducted by two officers, the lawsuit alleges that one student was thrown to the ground where his head struck a lawn sprinkler fixture. Another was pinned down after having been pepper sprayed. Another was dragged, handcuffed, to a police car. Another was “slammed to the ground,” kneed, and kneeled on, then denied medical assistance.
None of the officers who engaged in these acts, other than the two who were videotaped pepper-spraying students without cause, have been suspended. As far as is publicly known, all are still at UC Davis, working alongside the sixteen plaintiffs who are still students there.
And yet the faculty of the university, in a 645-343 vote, praised Chancellor Katehi last week as “a Chancellor who engages in a full and open dialogue with students, staff, and faculty,” saying that her resignation “would have devastating effects on the moral and academic standing of the campus.”
“It is time,” say the UC Davis faculty, “to promote a constructive healing process.” When will these professors call for transparency and accountability for the campus police?
studentactivism.net 
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