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I’m in the middle of an incredibly busy stretch, but I don’t want to let the one-week anniversary of UCSC’s current situation go by without marking the occasion.
Last Thursday, on the first day of classes for most of the University of California, UCSC’s students joined those at the system’s other nine campuses in staging a walkout and rally in protest of moves to defund the University and raise new barriers to financial accessibility. Unlike the activists at the other nine campuses, the UCSC crowd took over a building and held it … and that occupation is still going on today.
There’s a lot to be said about the UCSC action, which is in some ways modeled on a pattern set at colleges in New York City and Britain last year, but my own thoughts will have to wait. In the meantime, here are some links:
- The occupation’s website, and that site’s news page.
- A statement from the occupiers about why they chose the building they’re occupying.
- The Santa Cruz Indymedia site.
- Two flyers from the occupation.
- An interview with one of the occupiers.
October 16 update | The occupation discussed in this post ended two weeks ago, but another takeover began last night at UCSC.
Evening update: Pitt’s chapter of the ACLU is co-sponsoring an Oakland Unites for First Amendment Rights rally on campus tomorrow at 5:30 pm. A four-point petition will be circulating at the rally — we’ll post the text as soon as we get it.
Last week’s G-20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies drew massive protests in and around the University of Pittsburgh, and now police and campus administrators are facing heavy criticism for their handling of the incidents.
Over the course of the two-day meeting, police used sonic cannons, tear gas, pepper spray, bean-bag projectiles, smoke canisters, stun grenades, and rubber bullets on demonstrators, making hundreds of arrests. Innocent students, including some student journalists, were caught up in police sweeps on the Pitt campus.
Police arrested nearly two hundred people during the course of the G-20 demonstrations, including more than fifty students. The Allegheny County district attorney has already announced that charges against four students will be dropped, and more dismissals are expected.
Update: In a reversal of a policy announced yesterday, Pitt will allow students seeking dismissal of charges to bring attorneys to their meetings with campus police officials. The university has also confirmed that no campus judicial proceedings will be brought against students whose criminal charges are dismissed.
Dozens of videos from the protests have surfaced online, ranging from the hilarious (three burly cops in face masks attempt to pass as protesters, and failing spectacularly) to the chilling (students trapped on a stairway between two sets of cops, each trying to force them to go the other way).
Two student journalists for the Pitt News were arrested while covering the Friday night protests, and eight more were tear gassed, pepper sprayed, or maced. Stories have also emerged of students being locked out of their dorms, then arrested for failing to return to their rooms.
One student has posted a lengthy account online of how she was arrested for “failing to disperse” while helping students to disperse by holding open the locked doors of one dorm building. She describes students being arrested as they entered the dorms, and other reports suggest that students were arrested while waiting in line at local restaurants, or studying in the campus library.
Violations of students’ rights on campus were not limited to arrests. One video posted online shows police lobbing a tear gas canister onto the balcony of a dorm from which a group of students were quietly watching the protest in the street below. (The canister is thrown just after the two-minute mark in the video.)
The question of what limits should have been set on the actions of municipal police on the Pitt campus is being raised over and over again in the aftermath of the G-20, and evidence is emerging that it was a subject of dispute among police at the time. Police scanner recordings obtained by the Pitt News show that a high-ranking Pitt university police officer intervened personally on Friday night to prevent a non-university police “attack team” from storming the Towers, a campus dorm.
Adding to the confusion, and contributing to the police overreaction, is the fact that Pitt’s campus is an urban one, with no clear boundaries, and and the fact that thepolice were brought in for the G-20 protests from as far away as Tucson, Arizona. Many of the cops present were unfamiliar with the location.
Pitt’s university police have also been criticized, however. The university’s text message based Emergency Notification System was not used at all on Thursday, and only two messages were sent out on Friday — one encouraging them to “be careful” and “exercise good judgment,” and the other advising them to “remain near their residences.” As noted above, a number of students were ultimately arrested at or near their dorms that night.
Pressure on the police and the Pitt administration has been building since the meeting ended, with many claiming that, as one online petition puts it, “the right of citizens — students, professors, families, community members, and media — to assemble and gather peacefully in public was not only denied and violated but suppressed with unnecessary and excessive force.”
Note: Check out What Happened At Pitt?!?! for a huge collection of links and resources.
Yesterday was the first day of classes at Iran’s Tehran University, an occasion traditionally marked by a presidential visit. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad kept clear of the campus yesterday as a thousand students marched in protest against his government.
The protesters carried green balloons and ribbons, symbols of the democratic opposition to the Iranian regime, as they condemned the theft of the country’s June 12 presidential election and demanded the release of the estimated one hundred democracy protesters currently jailed in Iran.
Iranian news agencies reported that at least two of yesterday’s protesters were detained by police.
Student protests continued today, as hundreds marched at Sharif University, two miles away.
Iranian Science and Education Minister Kamran Daneshjou was at Sharif to dedicate a new campus library, and some of today’s protesters carried copies of a recent Nature article that accused Daneshjou of plagiarism. Daneshjou, an engineer, served as an election official in Iran’s interior ministry in June, and was appointed to the science and education ministry earlier this month.
Update: A New York Times article on today’s protest puts the number of marchers at more than a thousand, and reports that university security tried and failed to disperse the crowd as it gathered. It also notes that Iranian student websites have reported that “dozens of student activists were jailed or barred from attending classes this month” in a government attempt to tamp down campus protest at the start of the new year.
As many as ten thousand students, faculty, and staff of the University of California participated in public protests against the defunding of the university yesterday, and untold thousands more walked out of classes, held teach-ins, and walked picket lines. Students at two campuses occupied university buildings, and observers of the Berkeley rally said it was that school’s biggest protest in a generation.
This was big.
And it was even more impressive because yesterday was the first day of classes for the year at every UC campus except for Berkeley and Merced. At UC’s other eight universities, organizers brought hundreds, even thousands, of people into the streets and quads despite the lack of time and facilities for organizing in advance.
Yesterday, then, was just the beginning. UCLA protesters won a commitment from their chancellor to hold a public forum on the budget crisis on October 6, and they’re already organizing to keep the pressure up over the next twelve days. UC Santa Barbara has scheduled a series of teach-ins for October 11. In the coming weeks and months, activists will be building on what was achieved yesterday, growing the movement that will restore the University of California’s health, strength, and accessibility.
Over the course of this afternoon, I’ll be posting detailed reports on yesterday’s events at each of UC’s ten campuses — Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles (UCLA), Merced, Riverside, San Diego (UCSD), San Francisco (UCSF), Santa Barbara (UCSB), and Santa Cruz (UCSB). Check back in to get the whole story!
Note: Josh from Santa Cruz (@alittlefishy on Twitter) has put together the best roundup I’ve seen of media coverage of the UC walkout. The reports below rely heavily on the sources he compiled.
Berkeley
Five thousand was the official police estimate of the size of the crowd, and UC sources called it the largest Berkeley rally in decades. After two hours of speeches and chants, the protest went mobile, streaming off the campus and shutting down traffic for several blocks. A mass meeting later drew hundreds of participants, who voted to meet again next Wednesday to plan strategy for a possible statewide conference October 24.
Davis
A crowd that the UC Davis student newspaper said numbered in the thousands rallied on the campus quad, then staged an impromptu march to — and into — the Mrak administration building. Hundreds of sign-toting protesters occupied the public areas of the building briefly before, as grad student @AMYCHAMP put it on Twitter, deciding “to keep it peaceful, and take it outside.”
Irvine
Morning and evening teach-ins bracketed the day at Irvine, where a crowd estimated at about five hundred attended the noon rally. One source said that 150 Irvine faculty walked out of their classes.
UCLA
The noon rally at Bruin Plaza drew about seven hundred participants, and like those at Berkeley and Davis, it eventually turned into a march. Police blocked protesters when they arrived at the front entrance of Murphy Hall, the site of UCLA’s administrative offices, but a group of about sixty students were able to find alternate routes inside and make their way to the doors to the chancellor’s offices, where they staged a sit-in.
UCLA’s chancellor was not in the building at the time, but a campus official met with sit-in leaders and agreed to their two demands — that he set up a meeting with representatives of the university’s undergrads, grad students, faculty and staff, and that he schedule a town-hall campus forum on the budget crisis. The sit-in ended without any arrests or university judicial action.
Merced
Merced is the newest UC campus — it’s just four years old — and one of the smallest. Their rally was the smallest as well, but the walkout had significant participation, and students and faculty conducted flyering and tabling during the day as well.
Riverside
Hundreds of students participated in the noon rally, with more attending teach-ins before and after.
San Diego
Teach-ins were held on Wednesday and Thursday, and a two-hour rally drew hundreds of participants. At the end of the rally, some protesters marched into classes to urge students and faculty to join the walkout.
A campus-wide planning meeting for future organizing is scheduled for Wednesday.
San Francisco
Hundreds attended a rally at the UCSF Medical Center, where State Senator Leland Yee addressed the crowd. Students at San Francisco State and the City College of San Francisco also held demonstrations in support of the UC walkout.
Santa Barbara
There was a full day of walkout events at UCSB, where more than 125 faculty members signed the walkout pledge. Four hundred university community members attended the noon rally.
There will be a budget teach-in at Santa Barbara on October 14 from 3 pm to midnight.
Santa Cruz
Two rallies were held — one at noon and the second at 3:30 pm. The first drew hundreds of participants, and the second led to a building takeover that (as of Tuesday morning, five days after the walkout) is still ongoing. More on that in a new post soon.
2 pm Pacific time: This was a big protest.
I’ve posted photos from Berkeley, Irvine, UCSB, Davis, and UCLA at the @studentactivism Twitter feed. (The photo at right is from Berkeley.)
2:10 pm: According to @AMYCHAMP on Twitter, UC Davis students briefly occupied the Davis administration building about half an hour ago before deciding “to keep it peaceful, and take it outside.”
2:20 pm: Reports coming in that UCLA students are holding a sit-in at the chancellor’s office, demanding a public forum on the budget crisis.
2:50 pm: The UC Berkeley rally went mobile a while ago, and eventually into a traffic-blocking sit-in/march through the streets of Berkeley. Waiting for word on further developments.
3:40 pm: The San Francisco Chronicle says the Berkeley rally drew five thousand participants.
5:40 pm: Local news says that several hundred students participated in the UC Santa Cruz walkout. Reports on Twitter suggest that there may have been a building takover there too.
5:50 pm: The UCLA Daily Bruin confirms that between 60 and 70 students are staging a sit-in at the campus’s Murphy Hall, demanding that the UCLA chancellor agree to hold a public forum.
6:30 pm: The UC Berkeley Daily Cal’s walkout blog says that Berkeley protesters shut down traffic near the campus for close to two hours this afternoon.
6:50 pm: It’s confirmed — UC Santa Cruz students are occupying the UCSC Graduate Student Commons, a student union building on campus … and the occupation has a blog.
7:30 pm: Odd that neither the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed has updated their coverage of the walkout since this morning. I guess we’ll see what they have to say tomorrow.
Friday: I’ve compiled a campus-by-campus wrapup, posted here.
studentactivism.net 
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