Category Archive

The Newark Star-Ledger is reporting that state investigators concluded recently that “some at the state university were not fully cooperating with [their] investigation” into Tyler Clementi’s suicide. As a result, they have filed subpoenas demanding that Rutgers turn over emails relating to a complaint that Clementi is believed to have filed within 24 hours of his death.

Dharun Ravi, Clementi’s roommate, is said to have secretly watched Clementi “making out” with a man in their dorm room via webcam hookup. Ravi is also alleged to have bragged about this spying on Twitter and attempted to stream video of a second encounter to friends.

Posts to a message board suggest that Clementi complained to his RA about Ravi’s invasion of his privacy hours before he took his own life on September 22, asking that either he or Ravi be transferred to another room.

1:40 pm Pacific Time | The rally at the University of California at Berkeley, estimated at more than a thousand participants, has culminated in a sit-in at the main reading room in Berkeley’s Doe Library. As many as six hundred students are said to be sitting in at Doe at this hour, and university police have shut the doors to the room to prevent more from entering.

2:00 pm | Photos from the Berkeley action are up at Occupy CA.

2:40 pm | Reports on Twitter now suggest that the doors to the reading room have been opened, and additional students are being allowed in.

3:00 pm | Occupy CA reports that Doe Library is scheduled to remain open until 9 pm tonight. Librarians have told students they’re “welcome to stay” until then.

3:35 pm | A general meeting of the Doe sit-in folks has been called for four o’clock. Before the sit-in began, activists presented administrators with a list of demands and a 5 pm deadline.

3:50 pm | The Berkeley Daily Cal (which has been liveblogging today’s events admirably) has posted the list of demands that were presented to Berkeley administration earlier today. The list of twenty-two demands emphasizes campus and state budget issues.

4:35 pm | Today’s sit-in marks the first major student protest action of the new year in the UC system, and it comes at a time when Berkeley’s handling of previous demonstrations is facing heavy scrutiny. Judicial proceedings against participants in last year’s campus protests continue to drag on this fall, amid charges of administrative heavy-handedness and due process violations.

Will Berkeley pursue a new approach to student protest in the new year? Tonight might be the night we find out.

4:50 pm | Berkeley administrators have distributed a letter to the students sitting in. Here’s the text as provided by the Daily Cal:

To those protesting today for public higher education, we want to acknowledge the concerns that you have expressed to preserve public education in California and make the opportunity of education fairly available to every qualified student. As you know, this goal is shared by the entire UC Berkeley community. We take great pride in the fact that this year we have the largest number of low income undergraduate students in UC Berkeley’s history with the lowest net cost in recent history. Although we cannot respond to all of the demands for which you are fighting, we do support the cause of continuing to raise your voices to inform the California public of the need to continue to invest in public higher education. The ability to provide excellent education that is accessible and affordable is in the interest of all of the people in the State of California and is fundamental to the mission of the University of California, Berkeley.

“We want to acknowledge the concerns … this goal is shared … we do support the cause of continuing to raise your voices.” That doesn’t much sound like an administration that’s planning to send in the cops in four hours and ten minutes, does it?

6:30 pm | The Daily Cal reports on Twitter that about a hundred demonstrators remain, and that they have voted to occupy the room “indefinitely.”

Friday morning | The sit-in broke up around seven o’clock or a little earlier. Neither the Occupy CA liveblog, the Daily Cal liveblog, nor the Daily Cal morning story say exactly why, but a Cal editorial suggests that logistical problems played a role: “With impossible acoustics in the library’s North Reading Room, nobody could effectively communicate to the group. The decision to leave the room and go downstairs, one that some protesters realized only after reading The Daily Californian’s update, ended the occupation when participants decided to disperse.”

I should also note, I guess, that yesterday’s 4:50 pm update wasn’t intended to suggest that the Berkeley administration was extending an honest hand to the protesters, or inclined to negotiate in good faith. I interpreted their letter as a tactical move, intended — clumsily — to co-opt the occupation. But in terms of public relations, it’s dangerous to praise people’s ethics one moment and then arrest them the next.

A roundup of what I’ve been able to glean so far. I’ll be updating this as we go. For an overview of the day’s events, check out the October 7 Google map, which currently lists nearly seventy actions in more than twenty states.

UC Berkeley

The Daily Cal is liveblogging. The crowd in front of Sproul Hall is estimated at 1000 or more. Berkeley folks are active on Twitter. Some fire alarms have been pulled in campus buildings.

4:40 ET | The Berkeley rally has turned into a sit-in. New post here.

UC System-Wide

Activists are staging an attempted DDOS — disributed denial of service — attack on the website of the offices of the UC president, attempting to crash the site.

UC San Diego

The @JusticeUCSD Twitter account is live-tweeting consistently. Claims 350-plus participants in rally and teach-out. Die-in at chancellor’s office shortly after noon Pacific time.

Yale University

Students from Yale University are staging a march on the New Haven Police Department today to file civil complaints after a raid on a downtown club last weekend in which students allege police punched and kicked a student for no reason.

UC Davis

A report on Twitter says that “about 80” students are staging a sit-in at Mrak Hall, the UC Davis administration building.

Today is a national day of action to defend public education, with events planned in campuses and communities across the country. I’ll be updating the map below all day as news and information comes in.

8:15 pm | I’ll have more reports later, but right now the biggest ongoing story is the Berkeley sit-in. I’m following that here.

5:05 pm | Reports and/or photos from six California campuses. Sit-ins at Berkeley and UC Davis. National tally now stands at 76 actions.

4:45 pm | Actions in Colorado, California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Washington bring the national tally to 74 actions in 25 states.

1:05 pm | A Kansas action brings the national total to 68 in 23 states. Check out the blue pins on the map for links to reports from the field.

11:40 am | Two new actions in Wisconsin received via Twitter, one in Illinois via the blog, one in Colorado via Facebook. The total now stands at 67 actions in 22 states and Washington DC.

10:00 am | Added eight new California actions from the UC Strike Facebook page and a Massachusetts rally from Twitter.

9:15 am | Added two new actions from the Student Labor Action Project site, bringing the total to 54 actions in 21 states plus the District of Columbia.

8:35 am | Fifty-two actions in twenty-one states. I’ve posted all the actions from the Defend Education website, now I’m branching out to other sources. If you’ve got info on an action not yet listed, leave the data as a comment to this post.

The Defend Education website now lists 36 demonstrations and other events for tomorrow’s National Day of Action, up from 28 earlier this week. Other sources around the net mention additional actions, and news is still coming in via Twitter and Facebook.

I’ll be updating this post as I get a handle on the scope of what’s in store. Stay tuned!

8:00 am, October 7 | I’m putting together a Google map of today’s actions. There’s a lot left to add, but it already includes thirty-two actions in eleven states, from a student strike in Minnesota and a documentary screening in Alabama to an art action in California and a jazz funeral for education in Louisiana.

11:45 am | The Google map now stands at 67 actions in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

6:00 pm | More than 75 actions in 25 states now recorded, including sit-ins at Berkeley and UC Davis. Check the main page for updates.