Category Archive

For the fourth time in barely a year, and in the face of intense student protests, the trustees of the California State University voted to raise that system’s tuition rates.

But this vote was different than the ones that went before.

On November 10, 2010, the trustees approved a mid-year tuition hike of five percent and a 2011-12 increase of ten percent on top of that. This July they increased Fall 2011 tuition an additional 12 percent beyond what they’d already agreed to. Today’s vote increases 2012-13 tuition by another nine percent on top of that.

In all, that comes to an aggregate increase of 41% in just three semesters.

But here’s the interesting part: The November 10 mid-year increase was approved by a vote of 14-2, with the only two dissents coming from the state’s lieutenant governor and the board’s student trustee. The first 2011-12 hike was approved by a 13-3 vote, and the July increase passed by a 13-2 margin.

Today’s vote? Nine to six.

Four trustees flipped from yes to no since the board’s last tuition vote. If just two of the remaining nine had joined them, this hike would have been rejected.

Yesterday morning Duarte Square seemed like a perfect backup for Zuccotti Park’s displaced Occupy Wall Street occupiers. It’s a roomy open space just a mile from Zuccotti, with good access to public transit, local shops, and City Hall. Best of all, half of the empty square is owned by Trinity Church, an Episcopalian congregation that’s been supportive of OWS in the past. (The other half is city property.)

So when OWS organizers gathered at Foley Plaza after the late-night raid on the Zuccotti Park encampment and proposed a march to Duarte, it made a hell of a lot of sense. Several hundred people, including myself, made that march. We arrived not long after nine o’clock and gathered in the city-owned half of the plaza, on the other side of a locked fence from the Trinity-owned area.

Before the march left Foley Square word had gone out that a judge had ordered the police to allow OWS back into Zuccotti, though, and there had already been some sentiment in favor of marching back there. That sentiment grew after we arrived at Duarte, but organizers told the group that a delegation of interfaith leaders was on their way to meet us, and that prospects were good for Trinity Church to give permission to occupy. A significant part of the crowd peeled off to head back to Zuccotti to test the court order, but most of the group remained.

After a while the interfaith group arrived, and one of their members reiterated that discussions with Trinity were underway. He gave no indication of how those talks were going, though, or when they were likely to end.

At about eleven o’clock I left to recharge my phone, and while I was gone a gate in the fence was broken open. It’s not clear whether the folks who breached the fence knew that they were crossing from city-owned land into Trinity’s property — that distinction had not been made clear in any of the announcements I heard — or exactly how the decision came about, though a report in the New York Times suggests that it was an extemporaneous decision by a few people acting on their own initiative.

By the time I returned to Duarte a little while later cops were massing and a few dozen people were on Trinity property. Far more remained on the outside of the fence, or straddling it. Confusion persisted as to the status of the church negotiations, with some reports on twitter suggesting that permission to occupy had already been granted.

Ultimately police announced that permission had been denied, and moved in to make arrests in the enclosed space. Some occupiers scrambled over the fence to safety, while a dozen or so (and a few journalists) did not. Even as the arrests were beginning, OWS people were still attempting to secure a reprieve from Trinity.

So what happened here, and why?

It’s not at all clear. Trinity Church has released two statements saying that they never granted OWS permission to enter their property, but neither of those statements specifies whether arrests were made at their request. It is possible that Trinity informed the NYPD that OWS was on their property without authorization, and NYPD conducted the arrests on their own initiative.

But it also remains unclear why OWS was in Duarte Square at all yesterday morning.

If the hope was to convince Trinity Church to agree, on a friendly basis, to allow OWS to set up camp, the breaching of the fence couldn’t have helped that process along. And once we were in Duarte, the breaching of the fence was a predictable event — you put a bunch of bored OWS folks next to a chained-off open space for long enough, and someone’s going to make a move to liberate it.

If, on the other hand, the plan was to establish the occupation of Duarte as a fact on the ground in hope that Trinity would assent … well, that just doesn’t seem likely. The vast majority of the crowd stayed outside the fence yesterday, including all of the interfaith dignitaries. Only one gate was opened up by the occupying group, and their actions gave very little evidence of a coordinated plan.

Right now Zuccotti is open to demonstrators, a magnet for public gatherings, but hostile to permanent encampments. If it stays that way in the coming weeks and months, the occupation of a space like Duarte Square would be a huge boon to OWS. Duarte, or someplace like it, could serve as a home, a kitchen, a retreat, a staging area — as infrastructure for the front-of-the-house setup at Zuccotti. But for that to happen, for a private entity to allow OWS to set up camp, they’ll have to be wooed. And wooing involves building mutual confidence, establishing trustworthiness.

Which is why yesterday leaves me so confused.

November 26 Update | This piece from Josh Harkinson clarifies things a bit. Harkinson says that OWS had been negotiating with Trinity for use of the space, but that those negotiations had broken down. The hope was that Trinity would, faced with the fact of an occupation, reconsider its objections.

Harkinson also confirms that the Duarte Square occupation had been planned for that morning days in advance of the Zuccotti eviction, which explains some of the sense of confusion I picked up on that morning. An action that had been conceived in one context was executed in another, and though the new circumstances actually gave the the original idea new urgency, it also altered the situation enough that various elements of it had to be reassessed on the fly.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, just back from an weeklong trip abroad, has reviewed the video of last week’s police brutality on campus and declared them “very disturbing” and “unworthy of us as a university community.” He has further declared that

“We can best move forward by granting amnesty from action under the Student Code of Conduct to all Berkeley students who were arrested and cited solely for attempting to block the police in removing the Occupy Cal encampment on Wednesday, Nov. 9. We will do so immediately.”

While this sounds like good news, it raises a number of questions. First, and most pressing, is whether the criminal charges against those arrested last week will go forward. Second is how many of those cited were cited “solely for attempting to block the police in removing the Occupy Cal encampment.” And third is whether this marks a change in policy or just a tactical retreat.

More soon.

This week’s meeting of the Regents of the University of California, scheduled to begin in less than 48 hours, has been cancelled due to concerns about student protest.

In a joint statement this morning, the board’s chair and vice chair and the president of the UC system declared that they had “credible intelligence” that “rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting.”

A few notes on this extraordinary development.

First, we see again the conflation of “violence” and “confrontation” that I discussed this morning. There has, in the last 26 months of student protest in the UC system, been virtually no violence against persons perpetrated by activists. There has, however, been considerable confrontation. Given the notably mild character of this semester’s UC protests even in the face of startling police aggressiveness, the claim that violence was likely is difficult to credit. (Particularly galling is the statement’s claim that the meeting’s cancellation was undertaken out of concern for the safety of “students lawfully gathered to voice concerns over tuition levels and any other issues,” given the fact that the primary threat to such students’ safety in the last two years has been the UCPD itself.)

Second, the statement says that the meeting will be rescheduled for a later date “and, possibly, an alternate venue.” The cancelled meeting, like four of the last five UC Regents meetings — and like five of the six planned for 2012 — was scheduled to take place at UCSF Mission Bay. If the Regents now believe they can no longer hold meetings in their go-to location, where in the UC system are they likely to feel comfortable going?

Third, the joint statement declares that “a tuition increase was never a part of the agenda” for the cancelled meeting, but this is disingenuous at best. A proposal for annual 8-16% tuition increases was debated at the Regents’ last meeting in September, and that meeting was — according to the LA Times — originally slated for a vote this week. The likelihood of that vote occurring at the now-cancelled meeting dimmed as a result of opposition to the plan in September, but it remains on the Regents’ agenda for the current year.

Finally, there are three more meetings scheduled for this academic year, the next one in mid-January. Does UC really believe that the protest climate is likely to become dramatically more hospitable to the Regents in the next sixty days? Is there any realistic possibility that the student activists of California — and indeed the entire nation — will see this as anything other than a victory, anything other than an encouragement to ramp up their tactics in the future?

There’s been a lot of attention paid to a comment that Captain Margo Bennett of the University of California Police Department gave to a local newspaper late last week. “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” she said of the Berkeley protesters who were beaten by police on Wednesday. “Linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

This is, of course, ridiculous, and so it’s been widely ridiculed. Bennett has been the subject of appropriate mockery and outrage all weekend. But if we’re going to understand what’s happening at Berkeley right now, it’s important to see Bennett’s comments in context.

Three important pieces of that context follow.

First, Bennett’s statement reflects official UC Berkeley policy. Her quote, in fact, was a close paraphrase of a formal message to the university community from Berkeley’s chancellor Robert Birgeneau. “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents,” Birgeneau said. “This is not non-violent civil disobedience.” Birgeneau was cautious (and academic) enough to use an obfuscating double negative, but the content of Bennet’s statements is essentially identical to his.

Bennett isn’t a rogue cop. She was just repeating what her boss told the entire campus community the day before.

Second, This policy isn’t new. UC has seen a wave of student organizing over the last 26 months, and university administrators and police have responded to that organizing with over-the-top violence, beating and macing demonstrators, pulling guns in non-violent protests, conducting mass arrests of sleeping students. A few months ago activists took the heart-dropping step of occupying a ledge several stories above the ground in an attempted to find a way to protest that wouldn’t result in physical violence or arbitrary charges.

The situation at the University of California is bad, and it’s been bad for a long time.

And finally, Bennett’s justification of police violence is a lie. As bad as Bennett’s argument is, the true story of last week’s protests is far worse. Video of the action against the Berkeley tents shows police, again and again, assaulting activists who were not linking arms, not resisting in any way. Students were struck with batons just for standing on the wrong part of the grass — not once, but over and over.

Celeste Langan, a tenured professor of English, was one of those arrested on Wednesday. Here’s how she describes the incident:

When the student in front of me was forcibly removed, I held out my wrist and said “Arrest me! Arrest me!” But rather than take my wrist or arm, the police grabbed me by my hair and yanked me forward to the ground, where I was told to lie on my stomach and was handcuffed. The injuries I sustained were relatively minor — a fat lip, a few scrapes to the back of my palms, a sore scalp — but also unnecessary and unjustified.

It was not violence that provoked police to throw an English professor to the ground by her hair, not even the “violence” of linked arms. It was disobedience. It was the mere act of standing between a police officer and a tent, wrists extended, on a public lawn in a public university at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon.