Category Archive

I’ve devoted a lot of attention in recent days to the extraordinary uprising of Britain’s students, but there’s a new student movement growing in Italy that’s at least as spectacular.

Last week Italian students occupied the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Colloseum in Rome, as well as Turin’s Mole Antonelliano (symbol of the 2006 Winter Olympics) and other national monuments. Today they are blocking roads, public squares, and railway tracks throughout the nation.

Italy’s government is looking to increase student fees and cut aid to higher education, as many other governments currently are, but the current Italian protests aim to block a much broader and deeper intervention into the nation’s higher education system.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is seeking a radical overhaul of Italy’s higher education system — transforming campus governance and faculty recruitment while adopting a new funding structure that could lead to the closing of many institutions. In protest, many “ricercatori” — entry-level lecturers who teach some forty percent of Italian college courses — have refused to present their assigned courses, throwing many universities into disarray.

Berlusconi hopes to pass his higher education reform proposal, known as the Gelmini plan, before the end of the year, but his government, wracked by scandal, is on the verge of collapse.

Afternoon update | Some three thousand student protesters clashed with police in Rome’s city center today, throwing tomatoes, eggs, and smoke bombs. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, who were attempting to reach the Chamber of Deputies where the vote is scheduled to take place.

Second update | The Gelmini plan passed the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 307-252. It now goes to the Senate for consideration there.

The third national day of action in as many weeks against the British government’s plans for massive student fee increases and higher education cuts is underway. The BBC has an overview of the day’s plans up here, while The Guardian is liveblogging. Twitter hashtags include #solidarity, #demo2010, and #dayx2.

A number of university occupations started last week are still ongoing, and one new one — at Nottingham University — was launched this morning. Their blog is here.

At last week’s London demonstration police used a tactic called “kettling” to bottle up demonstrators in confined spaces, often holding them for hours without charge. Journalist and blogger Laurie Penny, tweeting from the scene as @PennyRed, says today’s demonstrators are on the move — “running at full pelt” without leaders or direction, flummoxing the cops: “These kids just want to run, police can’t keep up.”

I’ll be liveblogging events as they unfold.

2:30 pm UK time | The Guardian is reporting that London’s protesters seem to be scattered throughout the city center, while it raises questions about the legality of the police kettling tactic.

2:50 pm | Tweeter @reallyopenuni reports from the University of Leeds that the campus’s Ziff Building — which houses “student administrative services” — was occupied about half an hour ago. A factional dispute appears to have arisen among the occupiers, with Socialist Workers Party representatives on one side and “everyday students” — including local schoolkids — on the other.

3:20 pm | A new BBC roundup page reports on demonstrations in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool. Reports on Twitter of additional demonstrations in Newcastle, Brighton, Nottingham, Bristol, Oxford, Exeter, others.

3:30 pm | Huge kettle reported at Trafalgar Square.

3:50 pm | Protests at Belfast, Edinburgh, Warwick as well.

4:30 pm | The Welsh government has announced that it will be absorbing the costs of any tuition increases for all Welsh students next year, wherever they study in the UK. Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews says that with the new policy, Wales is “preserving the principle that the state will subsidise higher education and maintain opportunities for all.”

4:50 pm | Word from Twitter is that the kettle at Trafalgar has ended, and the crowd has mostly dispersed.

In the ranks of the most asinine, pointless, downright goofy acts of administrative censorship ever perpetrated against students in the twenty-first century, this one has got to be right up near the top of the list.

The administration at Cal State Long Beach is refusing to allow a graduate student production of “Night of the Tribades,” a 1975 historical drama about Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) to be advertised on campus property.

Why? Because “tribade,” an archaic term meaning “lesbian,” is also a reference to a sexual act.

Tribadism, a type of frottage, is — thank you, Wikipedia! — “a form of non-penetrative sex in which a woman rubs her vulva against her partner’s body for sexual stimulation.” Nowadays, it’s more often referred to as “scissoring” or “tribbing.”

A tribade, then, is one who engages in tribadism. And according to CSULB theatre arts major Courtney Knight, because someone in the university’s administration did a Google image search on “tribade” and didn’t like what they saw (or liked it more than they’d anticipated), the play’s name got banned from the school theater’s marquee.

Again, this is a 1975 Swedish play about a Swedish playwright who died in 1912. (The play itself is a “metatheatrical drama” about tensions between Strindberg, his estranged wife, and a female friend of hers — it takes place at a Copenhagen theater during rehearsals for one of Strindberg’s plays, and incorporates considerable actual dialogue from that production.) It’s got nothing to do with scissoring, in other words. There’s no tribbing, actual or implied, in it. The title is a reference to two characters’ ostensible lesbian relationship, not to any particular sexual act.

But of course protesting the administration’s silliness by dressing up as affronted 19th century Swedes wouldn’t have been any fun at all, so CSULB’s students took a more obvious and more gratifying tack — they staged a scissor-in.

Some two dozen theater students gathered on campus, some with shirts reading “tribade” or duct-tape over their mouths … and tribbed. Or mock-tribbed.

The university has to date not commented on the brouhaha, though the production itself got good reviews. It’s playing — marqueeless — through December 11.

Student protests over the British government’s plans for massive university tuition hikes and budget cuts reached new heights last Wednesday, as activists in two dozen cities staged simultaneous demonstrations. Police in London trapped demonstrators inside a cordon for hours in a widely-condemned tactic known as “kettling,” while students staged occupations at a long and growing list of universities. (This essay from the London Review of Books remains the best introduction I’ve yet seen to the current crisis in British higher education.)

And while most American students took the long weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving, protests in the UK rolled on. Here’s the latest:

BBC News put out a major new story out on the protests yesterday, reporting that occupations are ongoing at a dozen universities as the government plans a parliamentary vote on tuition increases by Christmas. Not a lot of breaking news here, but a pretty good introduction to the topic.

One of the more startling developments of the weekend was the reversal of course on direct action by Aaron Porter, president of Britain’s National Union of Students, which I discuss in this post. The Guardian leads its comprehensive morning roundup on the protests with the Porter story, but goes on to discuss plans for a flashmob today and another national day of action tomorrow, while providing a roundup of the current status of the various university occupations.

I’m still collecting links and info from student media, and I’ll have more of that soon. For now, here’s a list of university occupations from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.

When Britain’s new wave of student protest began with a massive demonstration in London three weeks ago, the president of the country’s National Union of Students should have been flying high. The NUS had called the November 10 march, whose participation wildly exceeded their expectations.

But when a large group of students broke off from the main march route to storm the national headquarters of Britain’s governing Conservative Party, NUS president Aaron Porter was caught flat-footed. As protesters smashed windows and clashed with police, Porter scrambled to distance himself from their actions. Even as live television cameras showed thousands of students on the scene at the party HQ, Porter took to the television to describe them as an insignificant and counter-productive splinter group. On Twitter he referred to the group as “a minority of idiots.”

In The Guardian the next day, Porter went further, claiming that those who had stormed the Conservative Party building were most likely “not even students,” and that their “indefensible” and “mindless” actions had the goal of “undermining” the larger protest.

In reality, though a few acts of violence against persons had been committed at the party HQ, the group of activists who were present there was a large and diverse one. The vast majority of them did not intend or cause any harm to other individuals, and indeed the group on more than one occasion acted collectively to restrain or shame those who did — chanting “stop throwing shit,” for instance, when a handful of protesters on the roof began lobbing things at the police below.

Porter’s comments were widely criticized by student activists, putting him in an awkward relationship to the growing movement. When students marched again throughout Britain last Wednesday, Porter neither participated nor endorsed the action.

Over the weekend, as occupations at British universities grew, Porter found himself a target of the protesters himself, as they called on him to support the new wave of action or step down.

And in a Sunday appearance at a student occupation at University College London, he took the former course, declaring himself in solidarity with the protests — while apologizing for his, and his organization’s, past inaction:

For too long NUS has perhaps been too cautious and spineless about being committed to supporting this kind of student activism … I’ve spent too long over the last few days doing the same. Wherever there is non-violent student supported action, NUS should and NUS will absolutely support that, because what we are facing is utterly disgraceful and I am not going to allow an internal civil war between students as that is what our opponents would want.

There is another national day of student action planned for tomorrow, and in a blog post this morning, Porter encouraged the broadest possible participation in those protests.