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I’ve just put up a short think piece about the events of the last few days at the University of California, but those events are worth describing in detail — particularly since they’re a long way from over. Here’s what happened yesterday:
The UC Regents, as expected, voted to impose huge fee increase on undergraduate and graduate students in the university. These new fees represent a tripling of undergraduate costs in the last decade, and a 50% jump since 2007.
After the vote students at UCLA surrounded Covel Hall, where the meeting had taken place, trapping the regents inside. When a group of regents tried to leave campus students surrounded their van, forcing them to retreat to a nearby building. It would be nearly three hours before they, and UC president Mark Yudof, were able to make their escape.
Even before the vote students had occupied two buildings in the UC system, and the afternoon saw two more takeovers.
Fifty-two students were arrested Thursday night at Mrak Hall, the UC Davis administration building, after they defied police orders to clear the building. One local media source said this morning that “dozens” of those arrested were held overnight.
Students at UC Santa Cruz had occupied Kresge Town Hall, an auditorium, on Wednesday evening, and on Thursday they expanded their action to include Kerr Hall, an administration building. Students in Kerr released a 35-point list of demands on Thursday night, and both occupations were apparently still ongoing as of early this morning.
At UCLA itself an occupation generated some controversy, as activists took over Campbell Hall, a building that houses tutoring facilities and services for students of color on campus, in the early morning hours before the regents’ vote. An article in the Daily Bruin suggested that the takeover was initiated primarily by non-UCLA students, and that local and non-local activists disagreed about the wisdom of occupying that building. The Campbell occupation ended peacefully last night with no arrests.
Afternoon update: The Campbell Hall occupiers have issued a response to their critics, and it’s well worth reading. You can find it here.
Yesterday’s events broke through into the national media in a way that student protests rarely do, gaining major coverage at CNN, the New York Times, and USA Today.
8:00 am | Several dozen students have apparently barricaded themselves inside Wheeler Hall in Berkeley, making that the fifth building occupation in the UC system in the last two days.
There is always more activism happening on the American campus than outside observers can see. Even during quiet times, students organize day in and day out on all sorts of issues in all sorts of campaigns, changing their universities and the society in all sorts of ways.
And these are not quiet times.
The University of California Regents’ decision to raise student fees was made long ago, and no student organizing effort was ever going to alter it. But the amount of student protest on display yesterday — the depth and breadth of students’ commitment to their cause — must have come as a shock. The reverberations of that explosion of passion and power are being felt this morning in Sacramento, in Washington DC, and on campuses and in government offices from coast to coast.
Even if California had been quiet for the last few days, this week would still have been a dramatic one for American student activists. On Tuesday United Students Against Sweatshops won a stunning victory in their yearlong campaign for worker justice at campus apparel manufacturer Russell Athletic, even as research assistants and teaching assistants at the University of Illinois Chicago concluded a two-day strike that guaranteed the preservation of tuition waivers for graduate student workers there — a major win on tuition policy in a year that has until now been marked by defeats.
Each of these victories is significant on its own merits, and each reflects the growing strength and savvy of American student organizing in our time of national crisis. Either would have been the lead story at this site in an ordinary week.
This was no ordinary week.
Saturday morning update: The UCSC occupations are still going on, and the occupiers have trimmed down their list of demands.
The students occupying Campbell Hall at UCLA have declined to present any demands to the administration. The students occupying Kerr Hall and Kresge Town Hall at UC Santa Cruz have … well, they’ve gone in another direction.
Twenty-four short-term demands, ranging from a repeal of today’s fee increases to a total disarming of all UC police. Eleven more long-term demands, including the abolition of the regents and a tripling of state support for the UC system.
Good stuff. Here’s the list:
Demands:
1. Repeal the 32% fee increase
2. Stop all current construction on campus
3. UC funds and budget are made transparent
4. Verbal and written commitment to Master Plan
5. Total amnesty to all people occupying buildings and involved in student protest concerning budget cuts including: Doug G., and Brian Glasscock and Olivia Egan Rudolph
6. Keep all resource centers open: engaging education, women’s resource center, and all other diversity centers
7. Keep the campus child-care center open
8. Repeal cuts to the Community Studies Field Program
9. Re-funding the CMMU field studies coordinator positions
10. Get verbal and written agreement from admins to shut-down campus for one day for the purpose of educating students on the budget cuts
11. Said support for AB656
12. Said commitment to work-study for all who are eligible
13. Making UC Santa Cruz a safe campus for all undocumented (AB540) students and workers
14. Keeping LALS professors Guillermo Delgado & Susan Jonas
15. Repeal all furloughs to all campus employees, renege the 15% cut in labor time for custodians
16. Stop the gutting of funding for fellowships and TAships and the re-instatement of TAs who lost their jobs due the budget cuts from this quarter
17. Re-prioritizing funding so that essential student services i.e. the library get adequate funding to ensure regular library hours
18. Censure Mark Yudof
19. Un-arming UC police of all weapons including tasers
20. NO SCPD police allowed on campus
21. An apology from the regents and the state
22. Creating a free and permanent organizing space on campus for student activists and organizers (first options: Kresge Town Hall)
23. Due process for students:
a. trial by peers
b. constitutional rights for students tried under the UC judicial system
24. Making rent affordable for Family Student Housing, ensuring that the price does not exceed that of operating costs
Long Term:
1. no student fees
2. return to master plan
3. abolition of regents’ positions
4. abolition of all student debts
5. tripling of funds from the state to public universities
6. all eligible students get work-study
7. highest UC salaries are tied proportionally to the lowest waged workers
8. Impeach Mark Yudof
9. Representation of students and faculty equal to UCOP/UC Regents
10. All UCSC tuition fees stay at UCSC
11. UC Money is only invested to education
a. cut ties with Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos & Livermore National Labs
Yesterday saw a committee of the University of California’s board of regents meet on the UCLA campus to approve huge student fee increases. Hundreds of students protested outside the building, and fourteen were arrested in the meeting itself. UC police used tasers and batons on the crowd while helicopters circled above.
Today will likely be bigger.
Yesterday students across California staged local campus demonstrations in opposition to the regents. A thousand rallied and marched at Berkeley, briefly occupying a building on campus. At Santa Cruz, hundreds sat down in the street to block the campus’s two entrances. Members of several UC labor unions initiated a strike in protest against the regents actions.
Last night students from across California started making their way to Los Angeles.
Yesterday’s protests were local. Today students from around the state are gathering at UCLA for one centralized action. Protesters created a tent city in the center of campus, where students listened to bands and speakers, painted signs, and prepared for this morning’s protests.
It’s a little before six o’clock in the morning in California, but the first news of the day has already broken: about five hours ago, activists occupied Campbell Hall, a building a few hundred yards from the tent city.
8:20 am | The students occupying Campbell Hall have released a statement. They say they will be issuing no demands: “We have to learn not to tip toe through a space which ought by right to belong to everyone.” A post on Indymedia says that thirty-five students are participating in the occupation, and that the occupiers have renamed the building Carter-Huggins Hall, after two Black Panthers who were murdered there in 1969. One report on Twitter says that students from five California campuses are participating in the Campbell Hall occupation.
8:40 am | Reports from yesterday evening suggest that students at UC Santa Cruz were gearing up for an overnight occupation of the Kresge Town Hall on that campus. I haven’t yet seen any updates from UCSC this morning.
8:50 am | The Los Angeles Times has posted photos from the Campbell occupation, including one of a banner declaring it Carter-Huggins Hall. UCLA’s chancellor has released a statement announcing that Campbell Hall will be closed for the day, and asking university community members to “please stay away” from there and Covel Commons.
1:15 pm | The regents approved the fee increases a few minutes ago. Occupations continue at UCLA and UCSC. Updates continue here.
Note | This post is from Wednesday, November 18. For news of the events of the 19th, including the student takeover of a building on the UCLA campus, click here. For news on the November 20th occupation of a building on the Berkeley campus, click here.
A little before noon today, University of California Students Association president Victor Sanchez posted on Twitter that campus police had used Tasers and batons on student protesters at the UCLA meeting of the UC regents. Sanchez’s post was retweeted more than forty times over the course of the afternoon, but he provided no details then or later.
It wasn’t clear from Sanchez’s post whether he was an eyewitness to the events, and early media reports provided no corroboration. About an hour later, in fact, the UCLA Daily Bruin used Twitter to post a flat denial from Lynn Tierney, director of communications for the UC president, that any student had been Tasered at the protest. The Bruin soon expanded upon that denial in an article, saying Tierney had told them that “police [had] not used tear gas, Tasers or rubber bullets” on the crowd, and that there had been no injuries to student demonstrators.
Within a few hours, however, it had become clear that Tierney’s denial was false, and that Sanchez’s post was accurate.
In a mid-afternoon press release, UCLA admitted that two campus police officers had used tasers “in light stun mode” against student protesters, and that two students had been injured in the protests — though it claimed that those injuries had not been caused by tasers.
Sanchez’s claim that cops had used batons on protesters was confirmed more directly. In a video posted to YouTube this evening, a police officer angrily lashed students with a baton before being restrained by a colleague.
Photos posted at the Daily Bruin website also show campus cops’ aggressive stance on campus. One showed an officer pointing a pellet weapon at protesters, while another showed a different officer threatening a student with a Taser.
Police use of Tasers in non-emergency situations has become far too common in recent years, and such casual violence has at times had tragic results. The students of UCLA deserve an honest accounting of today’s events.
November 20 | A post at LAist notes that UCLA recently settled a lawsuit with a student who was wrongly Tasered on campus in 2006. They wound up paying the guy $220,000.
The blog also posts a photo of a UCLA protester being Tasered in the chest, and notes that just last month the Taser company warned customers that if you Taser someone in the chest, “a lawsuit likely will follow.”
Oops.
studentactivism.net 
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