The Occupy CA blog is reporting that hundreds of students swarmed an under-construction building on the UC Berkeley campus late last night, then moved out of the building and into the streets. As of three o’clock in the morning the blog was reporting that hundreds were still in the streets, that trash cans and a dumpster had been set on fire, and that there had been two arrests. Rioters were said to outnumber police ten to one.

An online article in the Daily Cal student newspaper says that the window of a Subway sandwich shop has been broken, and that rioters have thrown trash and other objects at police.

Update | Occupy CA and the Daily Cal are both reporting that the riot broke up at about three in the morning, apparently with minimal arrests.

Morning update | Occupy CA has posted a detailed narrative account of the riot, and the site Reclaim UC has the communique issued by the organizers of the Durant Hall occupation that set events in motion.

First there was the “Compton Cookout” party promising chicken and watermelon to students who came dressed as “ghetto bitches.”

Then representatives of a campus humor magazine went on student-run television and called people protesting the party “ungrateful niggers.”

Now a noose has been left hanging in the campus library.

This is Black History Month 2010 at the University of California San Diego.

There’s a debate rolling at the UC Regent Live blog about what the motivation behind of this latest incident is — whether it was an “act of bigotry” or just “an inflammatory action to goad the population.” Here’s my take: there’s no difference. There’s no difference between being a bigot and pretending to be a bigot to wind people up. There’s no difference between being an asshole and getting a kick out of acting like an asshole. Either way you’re a bigot. Either way you’re an asshole.

It’s now 3:30 in the morning in San Diego. The noose was found and reported just a few hours ago. There is a rally scheduled for 8 am at Library Walk on campus. More to come.

Update | A commenter at the UC Regent Live blog has posted a link showing that hanging “a noose, knowing it to be a symbol representing a threat to life, on [a] college campus … for the purpose of terrorizing any person who attends or works at the school” is a violation of California law carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail. The law took effect less than two months ago.

5 am California time | “ucsd noose” is currently the top search on Google, and when you type in “UCSD” to the search engine, its first suggestion for an autocomplete is “UCSD noose.” The university can’t be happy about that.

9:00 am | In an earlier version of this post, I wondered aloud whether Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education considered the noose incident “an actionable case of racial harassment or protected free expression,” given the vehemence of his denial that the Compton Cookout invitation might constitute such harassment. Kissel hasn’t answered the harassment question yet, but he has posted to the group’s website to say that the placement of the noose is not protected speech, and that he hopes the person who did it is “brought to justice.”

10:20 am | A UCSD staffer at today’s rally tweets that an administrator has announced that the perpetrator of the noose incident has been identified. More when I get it.

10:50 am | A local news website has new information on the noose incident: The noose was discovered at 10:30 last night, and at nine o’clock this morning a female student confessed to the act in a phone call. UCSD Vice Chancellor Gary Mattews characterized the student as “someone who didn’t think that leaving a noose was an issue.” Police are said to be questioning the student, who could face misdemeanor charges.

12:45 pm Students are now occupying the offices of the UCSD chancellor, as the Black Student Union demands that the university close temporarily due to safety concerns. One report on Twitter suggests that they’ve given the university a 5 pm deadline.

1:05 pm UC President Yudof’s statement on UCSD noose incident says student who confessed claimed she had two accomplices.

2:25 pm Students at UCLA have launched a sit-in at their chancellor’s offices in solidarity with UCSD. (Apologies for lack of links — I’m posting all these updates via iPhone from Amtrak.)

4:40 pm | I’m off the train, I’m at a proper keyboard, and I have several updates:

• Reports that a second noose had been found on campus today, perhaps at the bear statue at Warren College, appear to be unfounded. There has been no confirmation of any such discovery, several hours after the reports first surfaced.

• Students at UCLA staged a solidarity action earlier today in support of the anti-racist activists of UCSD. That action, a sit-in at the offices of UCLA’s chancellor, has ended peacefully.

• At this writing, the UCSD BSU’s five o’clock deadline for action by that school’s chancellor on their demands is just twenty minutes away. Participation in the occupation of the chancellor’s offices, which had dwindled somewhat over the course of the afternoon, is rising again as the deadline approaches. One student on the scene says “hundreds” are there now, with more arriving all the time.

• I’ve set up a Twitter list of students posting about UCSD, particularly those on the scene of the current protest. You can find the list here — if you’re tweeting and want to be added, let me know via Twitter.

8:30 pm | The UCSD administration responded to the BSU’s demands not long after five o’clock, and while the BSU was far from happy with that response, they chose to withdraw and regroup rather than continue the occupation. Expect a strong new push next Monday.

In other news, the administration has announced that the student who admitted placing the noose in the library last night has been suspended, though they haven’t said for how long. The student has not yet been identified publicly.

Sunday morning | A new post on a big unanswered question: What about the accomplices?

Monday morning | The UCSD student newspaper has run a statement that it claims was written by the student who hung the noose in the library. In it, the student claims that a friend of hers made the noose from a piece of discarded rope “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD,” and that she hung it at the desk unthinkingly days before it was discovered. “As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by recent issues on campus,” she writes, “I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain.”

I consider myself a pretty committed anti-racist, and I consider myself a pretty committed First Amendment guy. I love free speech, and I hate racist speech. There are times when these two principles are in tension, as principles often are, but I don’t think they’re in contradiction, and I firmly believe it’s possible to take them both seriously.

Which brings us to FIRE.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education loves the First Amendment as much as I do, but they’re not particularly anti-racist. Which is not to say that they’re pro-racist, or that they’re racist, just that their writings tend not to take anti-racism particularly seriously as a principle.

Here. Let me show you what I mean.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I posted previously, yesterday’s administration-sponsored “teach-in” on the campus’s recent racial troubles took an unusual twist about halfway through. A group of students affiliated with UCSD’s Black Student Union, declaring that the administration’s response wasn’t meeting student needs, staged a walkout. They would, they said, reconvene for a student-led session outside the building.

This “teach-out” was by all accounts amazingly effective, but there’s one detail in the press coverage of the incident that caught my eye. It’s been reported that as many as 1200 people were present at the administration teach-in before the walkout, and participation in the teach-out has been put as high as three thousand. But check this passage from a local television station’s coverage out:

Saying the university was doing little to address racism on campus, the pair urged their fellow students in the packed auditorium and overflow room to march out of the event, and the vast majority complied. … The students then gathered en masse outside. … The teach-in continued in the auditorium, but only with about 100 to 150 people, including a handful of students.

This is only one version of what happened, of course, and crowd estimates are notoriously imprecise. It may be a complete misrepresentation, and if it is, I’d love to have it corrected. But if it’s an accurate account of yesterday’s events, I find it fascinating.

The UCSD holds a teach-in to discuss a campus student crisis — an event for students, held in response to student anger at students’ actions. A group of student leaders reject that even as it’s happening, and abandon it it in favor of their own. Virtually all of the students — all but “a handful” — join the walkout, choosing the student-led event over the administration’s.

And more than a hundred faculty and administrators stay behind in the now-empty room?

I don’t get it. Your campus is in crisis. Your students are in crisis. And your students are taking the lead in forging a response to that crisis. They’re voting with their voices and with their feet, saying that they want to discuss the situation in their own venue, on their own terms. They’re having that discussion right now, right outside the room in which you’re sitting. And you don’t follow them? You don’t join them? You don’t seize this extraordinary opportunity to watch and listen and learn?

That’s just so incredibly weird to me.

Update | Since posting this, I’m hearing perspectives on the event that complicate and/or contradict the report I quoted. If you were there, free to leave your perspective in comments — I’ll be editing and updating more later.

February 26 | I’ve been told by a participant that the article quoted above isn’t particularly accurate. The students who marched out of the teach-in hadn’t been there from the beginning — they’d been participating in the BSU’s press conference and rally for much of the teach-in. The people who stayed after the walkout were mostly people who had been in the room before the BSU supporters arrived, and as many as half of them were students.

11:30 am | According to Twitter reports from @OccupyCA, there is a sit-in going on at the office of the chancellor of the University of California at Irvine at this hour. The feed reported two hours ago — around 9:30 in the morning, California time — that twenty students were sitting in.

A few minutes after 11 am it reported that arrests were imminent, but accorting to the most tweet, at 11:24 am, students outside the sit-in were barricading the building to prevent police from making arrests.

More as I get it.

11:40 am | A post at the Occupy CA blog says the sit-in at Aldrich Hall, the UCI administration building, began at 9:30. It reports that it’s a budget protest (not a response to the Irvine 11 arrests or today’s UCSD anti-racism day of action).

11:45 am | An update to the Occupy CA post links to a fifteen-point list of demands from the occupation. Most of the demands are budget-related, but the list also calls for an end to the outfitting of campus police with Tasers, the creation of gender-neutral bathrooms at UCI, and amnesty for the Irvine 11.

11:50 am | A new update at Occupy CA says that “police, administrators, and sit-in participants are barricaded inside” the administration building. A tweet from @kellyramsey says that at least two of the building’s entrances have been barricaded with dumpsters.

By the way, Irvine has seen a lot of action already this semester. In addition to the Irvine 11 arrests mentioned earlier, there was a library study-in on campus just last weekend.

1:10 pm | There are reports from two sources that between fifteen and seventeen people have been arrested inside the building, but as of about half an hour ago Occupy CA was saying that the presence of supporters outside had prevented the police from removing anyone from inside. The reports of arrests suggest that three or four of those arrested are service workers at the university — one of the protest’s demands is the rehiring of one hundred and fifty workers whose jobs were recently outsourced.

1:20 pm | Multiple reports indicate that protesters have blocked a street near the administration building with dumpsters. Latest tweet from Occupy CA says police have given order to disperse.

4:30 pm | Eighteen people cited and released at the scene. Given that protesters occupied and barricaded an administration building, forcing its evacuation, defying police attempts to remove barricades, and shutting down a nearby street, the fact that nobody was jailed is striking. Coming eight days before March 4, it seems quite significant. More on the implications later, but between this and the events at UCSD, this was a very interesting day at the University of California.