Category Archive

“When people talk about “the sixties,” what they are thinking of is about two years. You know, 1968, 1969, roughly. A little bit before, a little bit later. And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years. But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements. I mean, they’re from the seventies. Take the International Solidarity Movement — that’s from the eighties. Take the Global Justice Movement, which just had another huge meeting in Brazil. That’s from this century. Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.

“Elite sectors and centers of power want students to be passive and apathetic. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students. You know, if you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re gonna have to work it off. I mean, you’re gonna have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism. The students of the sixties could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, ‘Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on.’ Now, that’s much harder today. And not by accident. These are disciplinary techniques.”

Happy birthday, Noam Chomsky.

The Cooper Union occupation in support of good university governance and a continuation of the college’s century-plus history of free tuition is now in its fifth day, and it shows no sign of fizzling out.

Eleven students barricaded themselves inside the top floor of Cooper Union’s iconic Foundation Building in New York’s East Village on Monday, calling for reforms in the running of the college, a commitment to keep tuition free, and the resignation of Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha. Campus security made an effort to drill or saw through their doors that afternoon, but soon relented and haven’t again tried to dislodge them.

Since then, students have staged a series of support actions outside the building. They’ve also hoisted pizza up to the occupiers with a balloon-launched pulley.

On Wednesday supporters of the occupation disrupted a meeting of the Cooper Union board of trustees, which went on to give its unanimous approval to president Bharucha — even as a growing list of faculty members have publicly affirmed their support for the college’s free education mission.

Despite several scares — police helicopters overhead a few days ago, NYPD in the Foundation Building earlier this afternoon — there have been no arrests or threats of arrest. Cooper Union administration statements have been critical of the occupation, but non-threatening, saying most recently that their “primary concern is for the safety of all students and to ensure that the actions of a few do not disrupt classes and final exams” while also expressing “concern” about “actions and conditions that could affect the safety of the public.”

For their part, the occupiers tweeted just moments ago that they remain “safe, secure, and in good health.”

Tomorrow there’s another day of action planned, starting with a Washington Square Park rally and culminating in a pots-and-pans march to Cooper Union and an “after party” at four.

Monday Update | The occupation has ended peacefully.

Twenty-three years ago today 14 women — 13 students and a staff member — were murdered on the campus of the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Their killer, Marc Lepine, targeted female students in an engineering class and claimed to be “fighting feminism.”

The fourteen who died were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznick-Widajewicz.

The 20th anniversary of the killings drew a lot of attention in the Canadian media and blogosphere, and I collected a number of links then:

• A look back at the shootings, their aftermath, and the larger struggle against misogynist violence.
• A survivor of the massacre — then an engineering student, now a government official and a mother of four — comes to terms with her feminism.
• An essay on the impact of the killings on Canadian society.
• Another collection of links from the blog Spare Candy.

This academic year has been a slow one for campus building occupations in the US so far, but it looks like something’s going down at Berkeley this evening. Reports from multiple sources on Twitter suggest that a smallish group of students have occupied Eshleman Hall.

Still getting up to speed on this story. Will update as I gather data, and livetweet at @studentactivism.

Eshleman Hall was previously the home of a number of student organizations. It’s been slated for demolition as part of a renovation project in Berkeley’s Lower Sproul area, and has been vacant since the start of the fall semester. Student groups previously housed in Eshleman include the student government and student newspaper.

The website Occupy California reports that there are about six occupiers on the sixth floor of Eshleman, and that the occupiers’ demands are

amnesty to demonstrators, the restoration of the Multicultural Student Development (MSD) to its former structure, increase the MSD budget, increase funding for recruitment and retention services.

It’s been reported on Twitter that Berkeley’s dean of students and provost entered Eshleman Hall in an attempt to negotiate with occupiers, but that the negotiations produced no positive results.

At least some of the Eshleman occupiers have reportedly chained themselves by their necks to inside doors in Eshleman, risking serious injury if the police force the doors open.

6:30 pm Pacific Time update | Berkeley student newspaper The Daily Cal has a story up on the occupation. They say there are a hundred students outside the building, and “at least two” chained by the neck inside. They say the administration “has secured the building,” but have no immediate plans to retake it. Also, “The protesters inside are purportedly from Raza Recruitment and Retention Center, a campus group that aims to increase Hispanic enrollment in higher education, and REACH!, which aims to serve Asians and Pacific Islanders on campus.”

6:40 pm | There’s a livestream of a stairwell in Eshleman Hall going on here.

6:45 pm | Hallway livestream seems to have concluded. The reclaimuc website has the occupation’s demands:

We Demand that the Multicultural Student Development Offices be restored to their former structure by Vice Chancellor Gibor Basri.  Countless students and the ASUC as an entity have voiced this opinion and received no changes.

We demand that the budget allocation of the multicultural student development offices be increased to meet the needs of their work.

We demand that none of the peaceful protesters in this occupation receive any punishment or repercussions for this activity.

We demand an increase in funding for the Recruitment and Retention Center to assist in their mission of increasing the enrollment of underrepresented minorities on campus.

6:55 pm | Reports from the scene that first round of negotiations over, reps of occupiers caucusing on admin offer.

7:20 pm | There are reportedly about a hundred students outside Eshleman Hall right now, and perhaps half a dozen inside. Some reports say that two students have chained themselves to stairwell doors on the sixth floor of the building, blocking access from the outside and risking injury to do so.

Wednesday | The occupiers left voluntarily at about 9:40 on Tuesday night after receiving assurances that they would not be brought up on criminal or disciplinary charges. Administrators further agreed to establish a “transitional review team” to address the future of the multicultural student center.

Students have held demonstrations in connection with the Israeli assault on Gaza at more than a dozen campuses — some in support of the Palestinians, some in support of Israel. What follows is a list of the demonstrations I’ve been able to learn of through the media. Presumably many more have occurred that haven’t received press coverage.

Monday

• Cornell
• Florida State
  
• Purdue
• University of California Davis
• University of Massachusetts
• University of North Carolina
• University of Oklahoma
• University of South Florida

Friday

• University of Alabama at Birmingham
• University of Miami
• University of Minnesota
• University of Southern California
• University of Wisconsin Madison

Thursday

• University of Florida
• University of Michigan