Cooper Union Day of Action Today

December 3, 2012 in Access, Campus Protests, Student Power, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

New York City’s Cooper Union is one of the nation’s great private universities. Founded in 1859, it was from the start an experiment in radical accessibility — open to women and people of color and students of any religion, free to the working class. And since 1902 it has accepted students on a need-blind basis, charging none of them a penny in tuition. Today the college is among the most selective in the country, and though more than two thirds of its students come from public high schools, the average graduate leaves Cooper Union with just $10,000 in debt.

But that may be about to change.

Last year the college announced that it was considering charging tuition for the first time since 1902, citing the economic downturn, poor investments, and a series of expensive capital projects. This year Cooper Union began charging tuition in its graduate programs, and though undergraduate enrollees for the fall of 2013 have been promised a tuition-free education, no similar pledge has been made for the following year.

Students have been mobilizing against the tuition plan since it was first proposed, and today marks their biggest day of action and outreach yet. Starting at noon, the activists of Free Cooper Union will be holding a day of free classes and demonstrations at the campus’s Peter Cooper Park, followed by a three-hour Summit on Debt and Education at the college’s Great Hall at six pm.

Afternoon Update | Students have barricaded themselves inside the top floor of the college’s Foundation Building, demanding a return of free tuition, governance reforms, and the resignation of the college president. Ongoing coverage here.

Building Occupation at Berkeley

November 27, 2012 in Students | by | Leave a comment

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.

College Administrators Remove Crusading Student Government President

November 26, 2012 in Civil Liberties, Community Colleges, Student Government, Student Power | by | 2 comments

Administrators at a California community college removed the elected student body president from office earlier this year over charges that students and faculty claim were concocted in an effort to silence his criticisms of college fiscal policy.

Officials at Moorpark College say that campus cops caught 33-year-old Jon Foote drunk on campus on one occasion and “inciting [his] fellow students into becoming a mob.” A professor who was doing calculus with Foote immediately prior to the first incident says he was not inebriated, and students present at the second say he was assisting them in dealing with over-aggressive canvassers.

In reality, his supporters argue, administrators were gunning for Foote because of the light he shone on excessive campus spending at a time when classes and professors were getting the axe. The administration’s unilateral decision to remove him from office in the middle of his term was preposterous, they say.

Another incident that took place around the same time seems to lend credence to their story. Accused of plagiarizing the homework of a study partner, Foote was barred from a physics class he was taking. When he refused to stop attending, administrators sent campus police to remove him from the classroom.

The kicker? The plagiarism charges were later dropped.

Foote remains on campus, progressing toward his degree. He’s concerned that the disciplinary charges could hurt his chances of transfer to a four-year school, but he has no plans to drop out in the meantime.

And he’s thinking about running for student government president again next year.

An Open Letter to Boaz Kantor

November 20, 2012 in Violence | by | 4 comments

Earlier today I read your “Open Letter to Khalil from Gaza,” the one in which you conjured up an imaginary Palestinian, someone like yourself — a loving husband and father, trying to do right by his family — and informed him that tonight his seven-year-old daughter would die.

“You’ll wake up in the middle of the night,” you wrote, “to a deafening explosion. Your whole house will tremble. Parts of the ceiling will fall on you. You’ll run to your daughter’s bedroom, and find the northern wall gone, your daughter lying on the broken floor, a charred husk.”

You went on to explain that although it will be your government, the Israeli government, that fires the missile that perpetrates that atrocity, Khalil mustn’t be mad at them, or you, because it will be Hamas, not Israel, who will have placed his daughter in danger, Hamas who will have condemned her to death.

And so I have a question for you, Boaz. My question is this.

Even if I accept your fictional narrative of the murder of Khalil’s child, and the moral calculus you impose on it, what about the other Palestinian children?

What about the children killed by your country’s wayward missiles, and its jumpy border guards? What about Hamid Younis Abu Daqqa, shot down earlier this month by a stray Israeli bullet fired by a soldier who never knew he existed?

Is there no room in your response to such tragedies for ambivalence, for doubt, for taking up the moral burdens of your own country’s actions?

Can you honestly imagine no other way to reach out to a Palestinian who has just lost his daughter than to chastise him? To chide him? To lecture him? Is that where your moral imagination, your capacity for humanity, ends?

Is this actually what you would want to say to a person whose child your government’s army was about to murder? To a person, an innocent, whose life was about to be destroyed as the side-effect of an attempt to keep your family whole?

Is that it? Is that really it?

And if it is — if you were speaking from the heart in your open letter, if it represents the truest and best of who you are — then tell me this, please: Why on earth should he not hate you?

Why on earth should I not hate you?

Gaza Demonstrations at More Than a Dozen US Campuses

November 20, 2012 in Students | by | Leave a comment

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

Friday

Thursday

About This Blog

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

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