UC Protests Keep Rolling Along

November 24, 2009 in Access, Campus Protests, Student Power | by | 1 comment

Tomorrow is the one-week anniversary of the first University of California protests (and arrests) against the regents’ decision to impose huge new fees on the students of the system, and UC’s activists show no signs of letting up.

Today saw a rally and march on the main administration building at UC Irvine, and the first arrest of the week at that campus. It also saw a candlelight vigil — still ongoing — at UC Berkeley, in the wake of the news that the university will be investigating charges of excessive police force at protests there last week.

And at UC Davis, where 52 protesters were arrested in an occupation of administration building Mrak Hall last Thursday, students are hunkering down for the night at Mrak again. The Davis activists’ blog reports that between sixty and seventy students are in Mrak now, and they’ve “made a commitment to stay the night.” They’re dancing, they’ve ordered pizza, and they’re settling in to chat about demands.

8:10 pm | Liveblogging of the Mrak Hall occupation is here.

9:45 pm | A Twitterer on the scene says negotiations are happening at Mrak.

9:50 pm | The student newspaper’s Twitter feed says the occupiers have three demands: An apology for police violence on Thursday, action to save student co-ops, and amnesty for Thursday’s arrestees. They say they’re staying until at least two of the three demands are met. Another Twitterer says the cops are refusing to negotiate, but allowing occupiers to leave without arrest if they leave now.

10:20 pm | Via the student newspaper’s Twitter feed (@CaliforniaAggie), the administration is making a new offer: “Police will review alleged violence, even without formal complaint; students won’t be punished by school and admins will ask DA for leniency for those arrested Thurs.; and admins will meet with a representative group about student co-op closure. Protestors say this is not enough. They demand full amnesty for those arrested and a full apology for alleged police violence.”

11:15 pm | There has been a negotiated settlement of the occupation, and the students have left Mrak Hall. More in the morning.

Wednesday | Here’s my follow-up post on what the university agreed to last night, and why this occupation is a milestone in the UC student movement.

Ongoing Tally of UC Protest Arrests

November 24, 2009 in Campus Protests, Civil Liberties, Police | by | 8 comments

This post is a way for me to keep track of the arrests in the current wave of student protest at the University of California — for my own reference and for others’.

As of the morning of December 12, there have been 220 arrests in just 23 days. Students have occupied buildings at six California campuses in that time.

Wednesday, November 18

14 at UCLA: twelve students, two non-students, all arrested for refusing to leave the regents meeting.

Thursday, November 19

52 at Davis: one for assault and resisting arrest, 51 for trespass. Fifty-one students, one professor.

2 at UCLA: UCLA website mentions just one, a student arrested for obstructing an officer.

Friday, November 20

44 at Berkeley: three arrested in the morning for burglary, 41 in the evening for trespassing.

Monday, November 24

1 at Irvine: a student arrested for attempted vandalism and resisting arrest. (As a commenter notes, the “attempted vandalism” charge was apparently based on the student banging on a closed door.)

Thursday, December 10

33 at SFSU: Police broke up an occupation on the San Francisco State University campus, arresting 23 inside and ten outside the building.

Friday, December 11

66 at Berkeley: UC police raided the peaceful open occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall shortly before five o’clock in the morning, arresting 66 people, more than 40 of them Berkeley students. The occupation had been going on for four days, and was scheduled to end voluntarily approximately 24 hours later.

8 more at Berkeley: Eight people, including two UC Berkeley students and two UC Davis students, were arrested near the university chancellor’s home on Friday night, accused of vandalizing the residence and attacking police.

Update: A commenter reminds me that there was an arrest at UC Santa Cruz more than a month before the earliest one listed here.

Priceless

November 24, 2009 in Students | by | 3 comments

A new YouTube video about the University of California fee hikes:

According to the info posted at YouTube, this video was made for an intro to communication class at the University of California San Diego, and was filmed on campus at UCSD.

Another Day, Another UC Occupation

November 23, 2009 in Students | by | Leave a comment

Today started off quietly in the University of California — for the first time in nearly a week, the day began without students hunkered down behind barricades anywhere in the UC system.

Students were still sitting in at UCSC’s Kresge Town Hall, but the mood there was hardly confrontational on either side — the university’s administration described them as “hanging out” rather than occupying. Similarly, when students returned to Mrak Hall at UC Davis, the site of 52 arrests on Thursday night, they called it a study-in, not an occupation.

Several other campuses hosted mass student meetings to debrief and plan strategy — throughout the state there was a sense that activists were pausing for a breath after the tumult of the previous five days.

That didn’t last long.

A little before three o’clock this afternoon, a crowd of more than a hundred students estimated entered the lobby of the offices of UC president Mark Yudof in Oakland, asking to speak with Yudof. Three hours later, they’re still there.

The building is scheduled to close at six o’clock — eight minutes from now, as I write this. I’ll have more soon.

6:10 pm | Multiple sources on Twitter are reporting that the students left UCOP peacefully before the building closed. An official UC Twitter feed says that a university vice president and provost pledged “to march to Sacramento with students to advocate for more higher ed funding.”

New Student Occupations In Croatia

November 23, 2009 in Access, Campus Protests, History, Student Power, The Corporate University | by | 1 comment

In the spring of this year a wave of campus occupations swept Croatia, beginning with the takeover of the school of humanities and social sciences at the University of Zagreb on April 20. The protesters demanded free and universally available higher education, and by the end of their campaign all or part of twenty universities in eight Croatian cities had been occupied.

I had a chance to talk to some of the leaders of the Croatian occupations when I was in Zagreb earlier this month, and those conversations (and others I had there) were a real crash course in the student movements that have swept Europe this year. Much of what I learned is highly relevant to the American situation, particularly now that campus occupations are becoming a regular occurrence here.

The U of Zagreb occupation lasted for thirty-five days this spring. It took place not behind barricades but in a freely accessible building, with democratic governance meetings open to all, regular teach-ins and seminars — even a daily morning yoga session.

Today at a noon mass gathering, or plenum, Zagreb’s student activists voted to take up their occupation again. Occupations are also underway at the Universities of Pula and Rijeka, with a meeting scheduled for tomorrow at Split to consider similar action.

There hasn’t been much coverage of the current European wave of student protest in the United States, and what there has been has often been fragmented and decontextualized. I’m going to make an effort to overcome those problems in the coming days, using Croatia’s occupations — those of this spring and those going on now — as a case study and a starting point for broader discussion. Stay tuned!

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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