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Ten Muslim students from the University of California were found guilty of misdemeanor charges Friday after a 2010 incident in which they disrupted and delayed a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States on the UC Irvine campus. The students, who could have faced jail time, were sentenced to probation and community service.
The university had previously suspended the Irvine Muslim Student Union in connection with the incident, and many observers — including Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Irvine law school — criticized the decision to bring criminal charges.
I agree with those who are dismayed by the verdict. The interruptions of Ambassador Oren were brief and non-violent, the students didn’t resist ejection, and the ambassador was eventually able to give his speech in full. Clearly the students were disruptive, but they did not have the intent nor the effect of preventing Oren from speaking.
As a person who speaks on campuses with some regularity, I’d certainly be appalled if such an incident ever led to criminal charges against someone who was critical of anything I had to say — the idea that the disruption of a campus speaker would leave a student with a criminal record, and relying on the forbearance of a judge to avoid jail time, is astonishing.
But as I told the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the most important thing to underscore here is that this prosecution stands as part of a larger recent pattern of criminalization of non-violent student protest throughout California, and in the UC system in particular.
Again and again over the last few years, university officials in California have directed law enforcement to end protests by arresting students, including in circumstances in which those protests were neither violent nor substantially interfering with the functioning of the university. In many cases those arrests led (as here) to overreaching prosecutions, while in others the arrests themselves had a disruptive effect on legitimate protest.
It’s the university’s prerogative to set limits on student protest (subject to their First Amendment obligations to permit free speech and assembly), but those powers should be used with restraint and discretion. When the university finds itself deploying mass arrests of non-violent student protesters as a matter of course, as the University of California has in the last several years, something is seriously out of whack.
By contributing to the criminalization low-level non-violent protest as they have, UC administrators, police, and prosecutors have cowed some student activists while radicalizing others. They’ve fostered a charged, tense atmosphere in which students have chained themselves together on the high ledge of a Berkeley campus building and in which a UC San Francisco police officer pulled a gun on a group of protesters, all within the last twelve months.
The Irvine 11 were among some 250 California student activists arrested during the course of protests during the 2009-2010 academic year. That’s a mind-boggling number, and evidence that student-administration relations have gone profoundly off the rails.
Today is the first day of classes for most of the University of California system, and student activists at UC Berkeley are marking the day with their first student protests of 2011-12.
UC generally, and Berkeley in particular, have been a center of American student organizing in the last few years, though administrative crackdowns have quieted the campuses somewhat in the last twelve months. With the summer announcement of new tuition hike proposals that could nearly double UC fees in the next four years, however, things may be due to heat up again.
The organizers of today’s protest announced their agenda in a Daily Cal op-ed earlier this week, and the paper is planning a liveblog of the day’s events. Activists have already started livetweeting the day at the #Day1 hashtag.
I’ll be away from my computer for most of the afternoon (Eastern Time), but I’ll try to update as events warrant, either here or on Twitter. And with UC back in session, I’ll be posting updates on several big stories from the summer in the very near future, so stay tuned.
Four Egyptian university presidents with ties to the overthrown Mubarak regime resigned yesterday, clearing the way for campus elections to choose their successors.
Students, faculty and staff have been engaging in ongoing protests against Mubarak-era holdovers in university administration, protests that have intensified after the new government reneged on promised to oust all top university leaders this summer. These new resignations come just weeks before the scheduled start of the new Egyptian academic year.
Only faculty members are eligible to vote in these elections for university administrators, but students are asserting newfound power in the university system as well. Student activists have been at the center of recent campus demonstrations, and a weeklong sit-in at American University in Cairo ended on Monday in victory for student activists. Meanwhile, Egypt’s national union of students held its first leadership elections since the 1970s last month.
Today is Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday, which seems like as good a reason as any to tell this story.
Mandela’s first experience in political organizing didn’t come in the anti-apartheid movement. It came in student government at his undergraduate college, the University of Fort Hare.
In his senior year, Mandela was nominated for Fort Hare’s Student Representative Council, a six-member student government. But in a mass meeting shortly before the elections, the student body of the college voted to boycott, citing the poor quality of the food on campus and the weakness of the SRC itself.
Twenty-five students out of the campus of 150 broke the boycott and voted in the election, and Mandela was elected. He and the rest of the SRC-elect refused to take their seats. Another election was held, a similar number of students voted, and Mandela again refused to serve. Mandela again refused to serve, and was expelled for his protest. He would go on to finish his undergraduate education by correspondence at another university.
Heading down to Washington today for tomorrow’s Campus Progress national conference. I’ll be moderating a panel on students and youth in social justice movements in the United States with Carmen Berkeley of Choice USA (a former US Student Association president), John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, and Evangeline Weiss of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
It should be a really good panel. If you’re going to be at the conference, stop by and say hi!
NOTE: The conference schedule has changed to accommodate Bill Clinton’s schedule (he’s keynoting). Our panel starts at 11:00 now.
studentactivism.net 
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