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What you see below is the first step toward a comprehensive interactive map of all American campus occupations during the 2011-12 academic year. It’s not close to done — I’ve got a lot more data to add, for starters — but it’s a beginning.
Fall 2011 occupations are marked in yellow. Spring 2012 (most of which aren’t on the map yet) are in blue. Occupations that saw arrests or other police violence are in red.
Each marker contains at least one link to the occupiers’ blog/Twitter/Facebook info and/or to media coverage of the action. Click here for the full map with a complete explanation and chronological list of occupations.
If you have info about occupations not listed here, or more data about occupations that ARE listed, please share. Include links if you can.
The faculty of the University of California at Davis has condemned the use of police in response to non-violent student protests, but overwhelmingly rejected a resolution expressing no confidence in the chancellor whose deployment of police in such circumstances led to the use of pepper spray against campus activists last November.
About a thousand of the university’s 2,700 eligible faculty members voted online on three resolutions addressing the question of their confidence in Chancellor Linda Katehi’s leadership. They rejected a no-confidence resolution by a 697-312 margin, while approving two — one more critical than the other — that endorsed her continued leadership of the university.
The resolution which garnered the most votes among the faculty condemned “both the dispatch of police in response to non-violent protests and the use of excessive force that led to the deplorable pepper-spraying” and opposed “all violent police responses to non-violent protests on campus.” The deployment of police against student protesters, it said should only be “considered” after other “efforts to bridge differences” had been “exhausted,” and only in “direct consultation with the leadership of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.”
It went on, however, to say that Katehi’s decision to deploy the police under inappropriate circumstances did not “outweigh” her “impeccable performance of all her other duties.” That resolution was approved 635 to 343.
A second resolution of support for Katehi, less critical than the first, passed by a narrower 586 to 408 margin. That resolution withheld direct criticism of the chancellor’s actions in connection with the pepper spray incident, which it described obliquely as “the horrific events of November 18, 2011.” Sidestepping the widespread criticism of Katehi’s orders to the police and her initial public embrace of their actions, it praised her for moving “expeditiously to to replace the flawed communications in the two days following the events with a campus-wide dialogue.”
The rejected resolution declared that the faculty “lack[ed] confidence” in the chancellor
“In light of the events on the quadrangle of the UC Davis campus on the afternoon of Friday November 18, 2011, in light of Chancellor Linda Katehi’s email to faculty of November 18 in which she admitted that she had ordered the police to take action against the students who were demonstrating on the quadrangle and said that she had had “no option” but to proceed in this way, and in light of the failure of Chancellor Katehi to act effectively to resolve the resulting crisis in the intervening days.”
The main takeaway from these series of votes is, of course, Katehi’s support among the faculty — or at least among the 65% of the 37% of the eligible faculty who voted for the most popular resolution. But it’s also worth noting that the most popular idea among all of those put forward in the three resolutions was the proposition that police force should not be used to break up nonviolent student protests.
Such a policy, if implemented, would represent a dramatic and welcome change from UC practice both before and after the November 18 pepper spray incident, and sustained faculty pressure would go a long way toward making such a policy a reality. Let’s hope that these resolutions represent a first step toward a more engaged faculty commitment to civil liberties on campus, and to the well-being of their students.
In a post titled “We’re Breaking Up,” the Student Labor Action Project announced today that three major student activist organizations have cut ties with banks implicated in predatory lending, student loan profiteering, and right-wing political activity:
- The United States Student Association has voted to close its accounts at Wells Fargo, the nation’s second largest private student lender (and the only major US bank to engage in predatory “payday loan” activity.) Wells Fargo’s student loan interest rates range as high as 14.21%.
- The United Council of University of Wisconsin Students has pulled its money from M&I Bank, which contributed more than $46,000 to the campaign of Wisconsin’s notorious governor, Scott Walker.
- And the University of California Student Association has broken ties with major student lender US Bank in the wake of its “lack of willingness to engage in good-faith efforts to negotiate sustainable permanent mortgage modifications.”
That’s three major student organizations in just a few weeks. More to come?
Students at Berkeley staged an occupation of the campus anthropology library last week, winning a rollback of planned cuts to library hours and a reversal of a planned staff reduction. This is the second time a Berkeley library occupation has ended in victory in the last two years.
Those two victories stand out — both at Berkeley, where the administration has often responded to peaceful protest with police violence and mass arrests, and as a national model, as library occupations have been among the most successful actions mounted in the current wave of student mobilizing.
It’s tempting to argue that such victories hold lessons for future organizing, and in some ways they clearly to — the fact that something is working is a pretty good reason to keep doing it. But it’s not a reason to stop doing other things with less immediate payoff, as one library occupier writes at Reclaim UC.
I’ll let her take it from here:
One lesson we may take from this is that direct action works. In fact, in the case of the Anthropology Library, it has consistently worked. And we should take this moment to celebrate the significant manner in which direct action has restored part of the basic functioning of the university and—at least in this one case—reversed the terribly damaging policy of an increasingly profit-oriented administration. […]
In the nearly three years of student uprisings, the library occupations have earned us our only concrete, measurable successes. But the wrong lesson would be that by keeping our demands small, and by staying “reasonable,” we may achieve our goals. What we have won here is a band-aid for a university system suffering from hemophilia. Don’t get me wrong: we need band-aids—we need lots of them—but our small, reasonable, achievable demands will fail to produce either the university or the society for which we fight. They will simply bandage up the tools of class reproduction.
Our greatest successes over the last three years have been neither concrete nor measurable. And although a good deal of thought must be put into what “Occupy” is and represents, there can be no doubt that at the beginning of 2012, we stand on an entirely different ground from where we were a year ago. This shift has been effected not by policy enacted or reversed, but by on-the-ground organizing and a growing consciousness of and a willingness to act—to take direct action—against the structures of domination of which we have become a part.
This victory is only a victory if we use it as a springboard for further escalation and further growth.
I couldn’t agree more. Go read the whole thing.
It’s been clear for a while — since well before the Occupy Wall Street movement arose this fall — that something new was happening on American campuses. The surge of activism that swept California in the fall of 2009 went national by the spring of 2010, and though there have been peaks and valleys since, a shift in mood, a sense of possibility, has been apparent throughout.
And of course that “something new” was itself part of what created OWS. Students occupied NYU and the New School in 2008, UC and CSU in 2009, and those actions, those occupations, formed a part of the history that the folks who occupied Zuccotti Park drew on last fall. (Student Activism is Back, Micah White declared on the Adbusters blog three years ago, reporting on a wave of occupations in the UK and the US.)
Today’s New York Times picks up the story where it stands now, with a thorough, thoughtful article on the present state of the Occupy movement on American campuses. Occupy, it says, is “turning on its head the widespread characterization of today’s young people as entitled and apathetic,” creating “a giddying sense of possibility” for a new generation of activists.
Sounds about right.
studentactivism.net 
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