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The post below is from Thursday morning, before the walkout began. For reports from the walkout itself, go here, and for a campus-by-campus wrapup of the day’s events, go here.
Students, faculty, and staff at all ten campuses of the University of California will be walking out today in protest of rising fees, pay cuts, enrollment restrictions, and the defunding of the UC system. This post provides an overview of what’s going on at each University of California campus today.
I’ll be updating as the day progresses, and I encourage visitors to add additional info in comments. Follow the @studentactivism Twitter feed and the #UCwalkout Twitter hashtag for real-time updates. (Update: Lots of tweets on the walkout aren’t using the hashtag, so search uc walkout for a fuller picture.)
The statewide walkout is scheduled for noon, with each campus holding a rally at that time. Other events will be taking place before and after. The University Professional and Technical Employees union has called a one-day strike in coordination with the walkout, and will be mounting picket lines on the various campuses over the course of the day.
Berkeley
A teach-in on the walkout was held yesterday evening, and half a dozen “teach-outs” on various topics are scheduled for this morning. A noon rally is planned for Upper Sproul Plaza, and there will be a General Assembly at Sproul Plaza at 6 pm.
More info:
- Your Guide to the Walkout Festivities, from the Daily Californian’s Daily Clog.
- The Facebook page for the Berkeley walkout.
- The website of the Berkeley Alliance Against the Cuts.
Davis
Participants in the UC Davis walkout are encouraged to join the campus picket lines at any time during the day. There will be a noon rally on the campus quad.
More info:
- A walkout factsheet from the UC Davis Graduate Student Association.
- The Facebook page for the Davis walkout.
Irvine
There will be an “interactive drama” in the Arts Plaza from 9 to 10 am, and teach-ins throughout the morning. The noon rally will take place at the flagpoles, and there will be another rally from 2 to 3 pm in the Social Science Plaza. From 5 to 7 pm there will be more teach-ins at Humanities Gateway 1010.
More info:
- A list of the day’s scheduled activities from a KUCI blog.
UCLA
Rally set-up at Bruin Plaza begins at 10:30, with a graduate student picnic at Meyerhoff Park at 11 am. The noon rally will begin at Bruin Plaza, and will march to Murphy Hall at 1 pm or a little later. From there, the marchers will head to Ronald Reagan Medical. There will be additional picketing and leafleting at UCLA Freud Theater from 6 to 8 pm.
More info:
- A list of events from the Saving UCLA blog. (login required)
Merced
There will be petitioning throughout campus, and tabling in front of the Koiligian Library from 10 am to 3 pm.
More info:
- The Facebook page for the Merced walkout and teach-in.
Riverside
There will be a teach-in at the corner of Canyon Crest and University Drive from 10 am to 3 pm. Events will include speakers, hip-hop theater, and rallies.
More info:
- A page on the UCR walkout from a student blog.
San Diego
There was a teach-in last night, and there will be another at the Pepper Canyon Building courtyard at 12:30 pm today.
More info:
- The Facebook page of the UCSD walkout.
- Saving UCSD website.
San Francisco
I haven’t found any online sources for information on the UCSF walkout yet.
Santa Barbara
There will be a variety of events going on all day, including tabling at the Davidson Library and an “open art studio” with lectures and hands-on workshops at Building 434. The rally at the Arbor (in front of the library’s main entrance) will begin with poems and songs at 11:30, and will continue with speakers from noon until 1 pm.
UCSB is also planning a teach-in on October 14 from 3 pm to midnight.
More info:
- Schedule of events from Saving UCSB
Santa Cruz
A friend writes that there will be a rally at noon, a general assembly at 3 pm, and picketing until 8 pm. Locations coming…
More info:
- News story on UCSC walkout plans.
Students, faculty and staff of the University of California, facing an unprecedented assault on their system’s funding, will be walking out of classes tomorrow, September 24. I’ll be posting more about the walkout soon, and updating during the day tomorrow, but here’s a quick intro:
Last fall’s economic collapse hit American higher education hard, and as the new academic year gets underway its effects are being felt all over the country, but the California budget crisis is in a class by itself.
California’s initiative system, and a state law that bars the legislature from raising taxes without a two-thirds vote, make it almost impossible to fund ordinary expenses in a recession. The state is in a financial free-fall, and political leaders are looking to higher education for revenue.
In the face of this assault, top administrators at the University of California are rolling over.
Last week, UC official released a proposal that would increase the cost of attendance by 15% for the winter term and another 15% in the spring — coming on top of a 9.3% increase approved in May, this would bring in-state fees to more than $11,000 a year.
As UC Berkeley’s student government president has said, “not even during the depression of the 1930’s did student fees rise as suddenly and as much as they are now proposed to rise.” And the attack on higher education isn’t limited to fee increases. California politicians and UC administrators are laying off faculty and staff and cutting employees’ pay while reducing enrollment and increasing class sizes.
Tomorrow’s walkout began as a faculty initiative, and more than a thousand UC professors have signed on, but the protest has been picking up steam among students and non-teaching staff as well. The statewide University of California Student Association has unanimously passed a resolution of support for the walkout, there are two student websites up spreading the word, and folks are sharing news via the #UCWalkout hashtag on Twitter as well.
More to come…
The country’s ongoing financial crisis is hitting university budgets hard as the new year gets underway, and students across the United States are mobilizing to respond. Four recent reports from the National Student News Service paint the picture:
Students at UC Berkeley demonstrated last week in support of an upcoming faculty walkout. Faculty plan to stage the action on September 24, a week from this Thursday, in protest against state-mandated furloughs that will cut faculty pay for the current year without reducing their workload. Elsewhere in California, students at USC are scrambling in the wake of drastic last-minute reductions to their financial aid packages.
In Michigan, the MSU student government has appointed a Director of University Budgets to conduct an independent study of the university’s financial condition. The student government is meeting with university administrators to advocate for students’ interests in the budgeting process, and the DUB’s analysis will give them an independent student perspective on the numbers they receive from administrators.
Students also tried to roll back cuts at the University of Southern Mississippi, where administrators announced plans in August to dissolve the university’s Economics department and its technical and occupational education program next year, eliminating 12 tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. In that case, student and faculty protest led to a compromise in which five senior Economics faculty agreed to retire and four younger professors were found new homes in the university’s College of Arts and Letters. (The three affected profs in the technical education program were denied reappointment.)
The student fight for funding is shaping up to be the big campus activism story of the fall. More posts on the subject are in the pipeline, and if you’ve got news we may not have heard of, feel free to leave updates and links in comments.
Gabriel Matthew Schivone, a reporter for the University of Arizona at Tucson’s Daily Wildcat, snagged an interview with Noam Chomsky recently, and Chomsky had some interesting things to say about student activism in the sixties and today.
The whole thing — including Schivone’s analysis of the role of protest on the campus — is worth reading, but here are a couple of choice Chomsky quotes:
When people talk about “the sixties,” what they are thinking of is about two years. You know, 1968, 1969, roughly. A little bit before, a little bit later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements. I mean, they’re from the seventies. Take the International Solidarity Movement — that’s from the eighties. Take the Global Justice Movement, which just had another huge meeting in Brazil. That’s from this century. Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
Elite sectors and centers of power want students to be passive and apathetic. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students. You know, if you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re gonna have to work it off. I mean, you’re gonna have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism. The students of the sixties could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, ‘Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on.’ Now, that’s much harder today. And not by accident. These are disciplinary techniques.
Good stuff.
This is a very cool thing.
The Students for a Democratic Society wiki news archive that I posted about back in January was down for a while, but it’s back up with a huge amount of new information about local and national SDS activity.
There are eighteen links up for September already, along with a bunch of news from the summer. It’s great stuff. Go check it out.
studentactivism.net 
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