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Nice piece Monday in the Daytona News-Journal (of all places) about a successful student protest campaign at the University of Denver to save the campus library from being emptied of books. The whole thing is worth reading, but this introductory graf is a fascinating little tidbit:
“Activism at DU has a rich history, including the anti-war protest in 1970 known as Woodstock West, and the earlier Coffee Break Riot of 1965. In the 1965 incident, passion was roused after the administration ended the morning coffee break, a 50-minute period during which no classes were conducted. Students blocked traffic, lit fires and battled with police, but failed to win back their caffeine privileges. It was an era when everything was a Big Deal, and the mood on many campuses was volatile.”
That “Coffee Break Riot” is exactly the kind of thing that gets pooh-poohed as unsubstantial in student protest. But if you squint just a little you can see it’s about student culture, campus environment, and the question of who is going to set the rules under which students will live. None of those are trivial matters, and all of them are worth thinking seriously about.
Also worth noting in that vignette is the year: 1965. That’s well before the widespread protests of the sixties got underway. As see over and over again in student history, huge campus movements often begin in small, strange ways. As I said in a keynote address once, the student past is far weirder, far more interesting, than we imagine.
Students launched an occupation of the gardens outside the offices of the president of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews early this morning, protesting skyrocketing tuition fees.
Scottish tuition rates aren’t just high, they’re also bizarrely structured. Scotland’s universities are free for Scottish students, and free for European Union residents under EU rules that say that member state universities can’t charge more for other EU nationals than they do for locals.
But the rest of Britain isn’t subject to those rules, weirdly, so English, Welsh, and Northern Irish students, falling between the “free for Glaswegians” category and the “free for Latvians” categories, are charged high fees.
At St. Andrews those fees amount to £9,000 a year, which is $14,000 in American money. According to the organizers of today’s protest, that makes the university the most expensive in all of Europe — for those students who pay anything at all.
The high fees for “RUK” (rest of UK) students in Scotland were introduced this summer in reaction to massive fee hikes in English universities. The Scottish government defended the move as an effort to keep Scotland’s universities from being swamped with “fee refugees” from the rest of Britain.
The occupiers intend to stay for 36 hours, symbolizing the full four-year £36,000 fee. They have a Twitter account and a website if you want to learn more.
Last week a campus walkout in support of Occupy Wall Street, originally called for New York City, mushroomed in a matter of days to include dozens of campuses across the country. The Wednesday actions drew numbers ranging from hundreds to — on at least five campuses — single students, starting from scratch and organizing on their own.
And this week they’re doing it again.
After a frenzy of discussion and several straw polls on Facebook, the folks at Occupy Colleges have announced this Thursday, October 13, as their next day of action. They’re presenting this as a day of protest rather than a walkout, and they say they already have forty campuses on board. (They’ve also produced a handy-dandy guide to mounting an action.)
More to come…
Last week six UC Berkeley students went on trial on charges stemming from a March occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Unlike the Irvine 11, their fate was decided by a judge, not a jury. And unlike the Irvine 11, they were found not guilty.
The acquittals of these six students, however, were followed just two days later by the arrests of two more, at the campus’s “Day 1” protests marking the start of the fall semester throughout the UC system.
Police say that protesters on September 22 threw chairs, bottles, and chunks of concrete at cops, and that members of the group used oversized book-cover props as shields and offensive weapons. But one officer’s claim that “we respect people’s right to protest, but we ask that they do it safely and peacefully” rings hollow in light of UC’s recent history with nonviolent protest.
As I noted earlier this week, hundreds of student activists have been arrested on UC campuses in the last two years, many in situations in which no protester violence was even alleged. (In the most egregious case, sixty-six students were woken from their sleep and arrested in the unlocked building they were peacefully and non-disruptively occupying, just hours before that occupation’s scheduled end.) One student journalist was not only put through the wringer of the campus judicial system — in an incident I’ll be writing about tomorrow — but forced to pay court costs when a legal challenge to the university’s procedures failed.
Berkeley, and the UC system generally, have systematically criminalized nonviolent confrontational protest over the course of the last two years. The result has been a wave of questionable arrests and prosecutions, a ratcheting up of student tactics, and a dramatic increase in police violence. With students chaining themselves together on high ledges and police officers pointing guns at angry crowds, the whole situation is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Something’s got to give.
UC Berkeley’s chapter of the College Republicans plan to host a bake sale on campus this morning as a commentary on affirmative action policies under consideration in the state legislature. (The idea is to critique affirmative action by offering food for sale to some groups for less than others.)
The “affirmative action bake sale” is a bit of a relic in conservative organizing — it had its heyday in the early 2000s. But it always provokes, and Berkeley is no exception. Some of the institutional reactions, however, have been fascinating.
Sunday, a group calling itself the Multicultural Coalition for Affirmative Action released a list of demands in response to the planned sale, calling on the Berkeley administration to — among other things — add clear anti-discrimination statements to the university’s Principles of Community, and to add those principles to the Berkeley code of student conduct.
On Sunday night ASUC — Berkeley’s student government — unanimously passed a resolution that, after a page of careful laying out of the various jurisdictional issues and imperatives involved, “condemn[ed] the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or seriousness by any student group.”
And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”
Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.)
I wrote yesterday about the hundreds of non-violent protesters who have been arrested at UC campuses in the last three years, and I’ll be writing more about those events as this week rolls on. Seen in that light, the failure of ASUC and Chancellor Birgenau to do more than merely place themselves on the side of sensitivity and civility rings hollow.
As an act of political theater, the affirmative action bake sale is a pretty paltry one. It offers a weak and overplayed analogy to the admissions debate, rehashing claims that have been batted around for ages. What makes it provocative isn’t its form but its message: that affirmative action is an immoral act of discrimination.
That’s what the College Republicans of Berkeley believe, and that is the message they are attempting to convey with their sale. They believe that affirmative action is racist and sexist against against whites and men, and there’s no polite way to call someone a bigot.
Birgenau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.
That’s what’s under discussion. That’s what’s at stake.
Update | Zunguzungu has provided a report from the scene in comments, and there’s a lot more info to be had at the Twitter hashtag #theaffirmation. All in all, it sounds like student supporters of affirmative action responded cogently and soberly to the bake sale. And it’s worth noting that a list of demands released today by “The Coalition,” an anti-bakesale group, pretty much ignores the bake sale, and the College Republicans, altogether.
The coalition demand the passage and implementation of California’s Senate Bill 185, which would allow race and ethnicity to be taken into consideration in UC admissions, and Assembly Bill 540, which addresses admissions and tuition issues for undocumented students. They demand new funding and staffing for support services for students of color at Berkeley. They demand a restructuring of the school’s American culture course requirement to center scholarship on race, ethnicity, and gender, and the inclusion of the university’s “Principles of Community” on course syllabi. They demand representation of underrepresented campus communities in admissions hiring.
Each of these demands is addressed to the functioning of the University of California as an institution. None of them have the College Republicans or those who share their views as their target. Crucially absent from the list are demands that appeared in a draft version that appeared on Friday, calling on the university to bolster its code of conduct with new restrictions on bigoted student behavior.
As I said above, Berkeley’s chancellor Birgenau is seeking to frame this conflict as a dispute between students over standards of civility. Berkeley’s campus activists have rejected that framing, and are properly centering the government and the university itself in their response.
studentactivism.net 
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