reclaim UC

Note From the Revolutionaries (of Color)

2012-01-29T00:29:00.000-08:00

Originally posted on 1/28/2011 at Bicycle Barricade.

“And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change, people in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change. And a better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

~ El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)

“I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself.”

~ Frantz Fanon (aka Ibrahim Fanon)

We, the revolutionaries (of color), who strategized, organized, mobilized, and directly participated in the action to take over the former cross cultural center at UCD, which was an abandoned building, have decided to send a very clear and straightforward message to respond to the lies, propaganda, and misrepresentation of our movement—a misrepresentation that was systematically perpetrated by a couple of ‘people-of-color’ (p-o-c) groups on campus that have proved to function from within the administrative logic of the university, the very same logic that uses the police force to repress student protest.

Three/four days ago when we took over the building, we began with a clear anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and fundamentally anti-capitalist position. This was made clear when we rejected liberalism (the political supplement to capitalism): 1. We physically blocked media and surveillance into our “autonomous” space, 2. We confronted someone who wanted to sneak in an American flag into the building.

Our message was clear: We do not want administrative presence and the symbol of Empire in our space. We realize full well that the flag represents genocide, war, racism, imperialism, torture, surveillance, and the continued colonization of people (of color). We also understand the history of indigenous struggle in the Americas well enough to know that a proper anticolonial movement (decolonization) involves the total dismantling of settler-colonialism. We also know that anti-colonialism without anti-capitalism is not a total critique of the given order. We realize that a proper struggle requires us to understand the ideological history of the Americas, the coordinates of indigenous resistance to State violence, and forms of political action that combat the ideology of colonialism. This was the foundation upon which we wanted to begin to build our movement. We knew that the rejection of the flag was symbolic, but nonetheless, we were excited about the tone the movement began to have within that space (a space that also has its own radical history).

When we put up that banner “Revolution is the only Culture” (a paraphrased Fanon quote) we knew very well that it would disturb, challenge, and expose the ideological function of late liberal multicultural capitalism. We were ready for the battle with the multiculturalist logic that helps pacify and commodify marginalized communities of color into fixed non-revolutionary entities. We understand the importance of culture well enough to know that true culture is an impossibility within capitalist social relations. We know clearly that what is presented as culture is fundamentally a non-culture, a kind of non-being, an inauthentic existence, determined by the historical conditions of the exploitative relations of capitalism. Culture is nothing but a horizontal arrangement of meaningless, colonized entities within the marketplace. And, therefore, culture is in need of liberation. Revolution is the only activity that can properly dismantle relations of exploitation that produce reified conceptions of identity. In this sense, we are fundamentally against identity politics. Identity politics, which is supported by the administration, has absolutely nothing to do with the realization of human potential. It has everything to do with coopting communities of color into the logic of capitalism, ghettoizing marginal identities into narrow surveilled places, and using techniques of imprisonment (e.g. prisons, schools, mental institutions, social service institutions) upon bodies of color to finalize the colonial state. Every colonial project fundamentally worked through the methods of physical genocide and cultural genocide. We know that the colonial project in the Americas involved the same exact process of occupying a land through physical means, and then continuing with cultural genocide through institutions of education. Our fight against the administration is a fight against cultural genocide and colonialist capitalism.

When EOP (Educational Opportunity Program) came over to argue to get back the space, they were supported by a couple of p-o-c groups that ignorantly spoke of their identities and their cultures as if they are self-evident. They spoke of their individual stories of oppression and trauma. While we respect individuals, we fundamentally reject the line of reasoning that allows for this kind of isolation. We think it is a total misreading of the social, economic crises in communities of color, because no amount of individual counseling or therapy can resolve the larger problem of capitalism. The problem of capitalism can only be solved through revolutionary action which emerges from the tension between historical determinations and struggle. This is precisely why it is important for us to be aware of our own historical condition/moment. The revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East did not come out of a vacuum. A certain kind of historical situation presented itself, a certain set of crises emerged, and a certain kind of revolutionary struggle realized its task at hand. Identity politics is a strategy encouraged by administrative logic that aims to cloud the political truth procedures of marginalized and oppressed communities. And, therefore, identity politics within the logic of multiculturalism works against revolutionary politics. Our confrontation with EOP and the non-revolutionary p-o-c groups prove this point. We offered to share our space with EOP to help them become self-reliant. We also offered to occupy a larger place on campus for them. They declined both offers, and insisted on transitioning into our occupied space because that is what the administration asked them to do.

When Malcolm X argues for “extreme methods” he is precisely talking about rejecting the idea of making “peace” with oppression, making “peace” with the system. We, the revolutionaries (of color) know very clearly the role of the ‘truth’ of politics. We know how to identify our friends and enemies. Our truth is based on political action, but also a proper understanding of the “critique of political-economy.” In this sense, we never separate theory from action. We learn through doing, and we do when we learn. We are always ready to begin from the beginning. We know that the true movement of history can open up a different future, a different society without exploitation. When Fanon speaks of liberating “the man of color from himself” he is precisely talking about this possibility of the unfolding of history in the true revolutionary direction, where we destroy constructs created by the system.

Revolution is the only Culture.

Destroy (reified conceptions of) difference.

To Chancellor White from Concerned Members of the UCR Community

2012-01-28T10:05:00.000-08:00

1.26.2012

(Via Facebook)

Dear Chancellor White,

In light of the events of January 19, we felt it appropriate to issue our own letter asking for your response to some urgent questions. We are citizens of this community—students, faculty and staff—demanding answers for the troubling events of last Thursday.

Whose decision was it to militarize an unarmed, nonviolent protest on our campus on January 19, by calling in police in riot gear to threaten and assault a crowd of protesters who continually insisted loudly that their protest was intended to be peaceful?

Who decided that this peaceful protest was an “unlawful assembly,” as the police repeatedly announced over the PA system? On what basis was this determined?

Why did you (or whoever else was responsible) not come out to address the crowd and explain this decision? Did you hear them chanting, “Tell us why”? What makes a large crowd of dissatisfied people demanding dialogue with their representatives on their own campus an “unlawful assembly”? And don't those whose actions are unilaterally deemed “unlawful” deserve an explanation as to why?

Your Friday letter states that the behavior of a “small number of individuals... briefly and peacefully shut down the Regents meeting... Their actions, while making a point to disrupt and while remaining nonviolent, nonetheless prevented others from listening to the discussion by denying public access to the remainder of the meeting.”

If, as you acknowledge, the actions of that small group of students were nonviolent, why and how would the actions of a handful of disruptive students cause the entire protest to be deemed “unlawful assembly” and justify the threat of force and arrest against all of the other students and faculty members gathered?

Why has nonviolent disruption, assertiveness and defiance been equated with aggression, violence and threat on our campus, when Gandhi himself called for nonviolent disobedience to be forceful and confrontational, and when, from a first amendment perspective, “disruptive” and “dangerous” are two very different things?

You say in your most recent Friday letter that you needed to “use our police to ensure the safety of meeting participants as well as the majority of protest participants.” But is there any evidence that any of the protesters were threatening the Regents, rather than simply using disruptive—and potentially embarrassing—tactics to make their demands visible?

Even if it is still true that police presence was required, why did the police have to be armed with violent equipment, as though they were facing dangerous criminals? Could they not simply have been sent to observe and monitor the proceedings; why did they have to be armed to the hilt, and then escalate the situation with the threats and use of potentially lethal force?

Who, in this situation, was the real “threat” to our campus’ security: a group of dissatisfied but unarmed students and faculty chanting “peaceful protest!”, or a group of highly-armed police threatening to and willing to use force through batons, tear gas and rubber bullets (which have been known to kill people in other conflicts)?

Your Friday letter expresses concern about officers who “received minor injuries, as barricades were thrown at them and signs used as weapons.” But what we see in the following videos are police in full riot gear shoving unarmed students and faculty with batons, and then firing paint-filled bullets at them. Please see, among MANY others, the videos and reports of injuries to students and faculty from police violence:

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/01/20/uc-riverside-students-attacked-by-police-during-day-of-protest-for-education/

http://voiceforhumanrights.org/2012/01/21/students-at-uc-riverside-face-violence-during-protest-against-uc-regents-meeting/

http://antiimperialtheorizing.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/cops-and-cowards-reflections-on-the-recent-uc-regents-protest/

What we see on the following video clips are the protesters seizing the police barricades and trying to place them between themselves and the police. We do not see anyone using the barricades to attack the police. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT9VOYR7cMo&feature=related) Meanwhile, the following video shows a protester being hit with rubber/paint pellets. That student is clearly in a great deal of pain and saying that he is having trouble breathing. He is carried away by a handful of other students who call out for water and help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7tB2LmsbfI&feature=related, skip to 4:30)

You can also see from the videos that the response of the protesters was to chant, “peaceful protest, peaceful protest!”

How can rubber bullets and batons be considered a justifiable response to disruption and embarrassment that is not in any way physically dangerous? What evidence do we have that it was the protesters, and not the highly-armed and militarized police force, who escalated the violence?

What accounts for the tight, 1-minute so-called "comment period" provided at the Regents' meeting? Students and faculty were demanding an open forum that was NOT controlled by the Regents' own inadequate vision of what constitutes democratic dialogue and transparent decision-making. In light of this, why should their demand to be heard at such a forum be construed as a threat, justifying such escalated violence?

When fully-armed police are sent in to threaten, shove and physically assault unarmed people who are already frustrated, resentful and angry at being criminalized and having lost their voices, will this not inevitably escalate the level of violence?

So, in conclusion, Chancellor White, we are seeking answers for what happened on January 19, but are also deeply concerned with the implications of these events for the future of free speech on our campus. What makes a crowd of unarmed, peacefully dissenting people “unlawful” and “dangerous”? Who gets to decide, and on what basis? And, what forms of free, nonviolent speech and expression of dissent can be considered “lawful” on our campus, so that they are not met with met with exaggerated militarization, and the escalation of institutionally-authorized violence?

Sincerely,

Concerned Members of the UCR Community

Communique from the occupied Crush Culture Center

2012-01-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

reposted from UCDecolonized

The spaces we live in are broken: occupation is our defense.

As capital spirals further into crisis, we are constantly confronted with the watchword of austerity. We are meant to imagine a vast, empty vault where our sad but inevitable futures lie. But we are not so naïve. Just as Wall Street functions on perpetually revolving credit markets where cash is merely a blip, so also does our state government. High tuition increases have been made necessary not by shrinking savings, but by a perpetually expanding bond market, organized by the UC Regents, enforced through increasing tuition and growing student loan debt. Growth has become a caricature of itself, as the future is sold on baseless expanding credit from capitalist to capitalist. Our future is broken. We are the crisis. Our occupations are the expressions of that crisis.

But on the university campuses, where militarization is increasing daily, we have more immediate needs. Our relationship with the administration and police is not one of trust and openness; the arrogance and nonchalance with which they regularly inflict violence against us is just as regularly followed by a thoroughly dissembling, inadequate, and cowardly condemnation of that violence. One hand attacks—one hand denies. Our universities and our public spaces are today ultra-militarized zones, where students and workers are monitored and subjugated under the pretense of “health and safety.” Officer Kemper from UC Irvine drew his gun at the Regents’ meeting at UCSF. Berkeley UCPD participated in violently clearing the Oakland Communards from Oscar Grant Plaza just weeks before they would come to UC Davis for the events of November 18th. On the day of the first Oakland General Strike, UCOP office in Oakland was lent out to OPD to “monitor” protests. Under the pretext of mutual aid, squads of armed and armored riot cops move from one campus, one public space, one city, to the next. The circulation of cops throughout the state shows that the mobile, militarized force of repression knows no boundaries: it will protect capital, government, and the status quo, wherever they are threatened. In a university whose motto is fiat lux, the administration crushes dissent and veils its intentions with lies. It has the same intentions as Mayor Quan or the Military in Egypt: to crush resistance, by any means necessary.

To continue our resistance, our immediate need is to create a safe space of togetherness, care, and freedom. When we occupied Mrak, the same officers who would later be involved in pepper spraying us watched over us as we slept. As we gathered to discuss, plan, and act to protect our right to education, the Orwellian “Freedom of Expression Team” and the “University Communications Team” loomed nearby, texting the pigs and administration on their stupid androids, smiling at us in their fake, overfed way, scooting near like unpopular highschool kids trying to overhear the weekends’ party plans. Later, these same concerned FOEs, would stand by on the quad and do nothing, grinning like idiots, as students pepper-sprayed at point blank range called for medics. It is clear to us that public space has become a euphemism for militarized, ordered, monitored space. Occupation opens a common space which is not the extension of private property to group property, but the active exclusion of all that reinforces private property. We must exclude the police and the administration, and their “Freedom of Expression Team” lackeys as well, in order to create the openness and togetherness which is impossible in their presence.

The UC Chancellor, President, Regents—who prattle on endlessly about diversity while the university closes its doors to brown students, who hail marginal utility while “the economy” closes its fist around the poor, who dream up ways to boost the university’s standing on some imaginary scale of “excellence” while slurs, swastikas, nooses, and Klan masks appear endlessly on our campus, who meet protests with violence and truth with lies—they have already proven their incapacity to imagine a future different than the present. We occupy because we will not wait for the broken future they have planned for us, because we do not trust our “elected officials” or administrators to make decisions that address problems beyond their own narrow interests. This action is not the beginning of a discussion; this is the end of the discussion. We cannot negotiate for our needs, we will not negotiate for our needs, we will meet our needs.

Solidarity with the Egyptian Rebels from Occupied California #J25

2012-01-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

At one year from the Egyptian uprising, much love and solidarity from the occupied Crush Culture Center at UC Davis. For more on the occupation, see the Communiqué from the Occupied Crush Culture Center and the Communiqué for a Radical Occupation.

Also, this anecdote:

“Yesterday, hanging a solidarity banner with Egypt, written in Arabic, with two of my closest comrades, a Palestinian man and a queer Iranian-jew, we were told by a group of mostly white women that our ‘movement’ was run by straight white males.”

"We Won!": Reflections on Two Occupations of the Same Library

2012-01-23T20:52:00.000-08:00

Guest post by our comrade @repoliticize...

With so few “concrete” victories since the wave of student uprisings swept California in the fall of 2009, it’s a pleasure to stop for a moment, open up a beer, and say it: we won.

For the second time, a “study-in” occupation at the UC Berkeley Anthropology Library has yielded measurable—and surprisingly swift—results. I’d like to think for a moment about what it means to say, “we won,” whether or not we actually did “win,” and what this means going forward, but first, the background on the library occupation.

A much-loved and well-used library on the southeast corner of campus, the George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library was the first to suffer the disastrous consequences of a university policy that aims to eliminate 20-30 library staff positions over the next two to three years via a process of attrition. When the Anthropology Library’s only permanent staffer left his position over winter break, no interviews were set up to replace him. As a result, that library’s head librarian—herself in an interim position since 2009—had no choice but to sever the library’s hours by nearly 50 percent.

As of today, the library has returned to its Fall 2011 schedule. Faculty from the Anthropology Department have agreed to staff the library until a student can be found for a temporary position, and interviews for a permanent staff member will begin within 30 days.

Moving in last Thursday, the occupiers of the Anthropology Library threatened to extend their occupation until their demands were met and the library hours were restored with full staffing, and this was accomplished in just two nights, or about 50 hours of occupation. This is not an unprecedented success: two years ago, the Anthropology Library was occupied after its Saturday hours had been eliminated, and in less than a week, the library hours were restored.

One lesson we may take from this is that direct action works. In fact, in the case of the Anthropology Library, it has consistently worked. And we should take this moment to celebrate the significant manner in which direct action has restored part of the basic functioning of the university and—at least in this one case—reversed the terribly damaging policy of an increasingly profit-oriented administration.

But moving forward, we should be weary of overstating our success in the Anthropology Library. I write this from a re-opened library in its restored hours. One banner remains, hanging from a balcony outside until the rain stops and the department chair deems it “safe” enough to recover it. Twice now, we have made the extraordinarily reasonable student demands of keeping the library open, and twice now, we have achieved these demands—at the expense of the long-term indefinite occupation (or in 2009, a rolling, recurring occupation).

In short, this occupation is as much of a success as we allow it to be. In 2009, restoring the libraries' hours meant the end of the library occupations, but the library “study-in” model became enormously successful in its own right, being reproduced across the state on countless occasions. On the UC Berkeley campus, the library occupations took a pause, but the success bolstered organizing on campus for the November 20, 2009, occupation of Wheeler Hall—the largest and best-remembered event on campus in recent memory.

In 2009 we had no “Occupy”—we were, for a time, alone in that game. We were the California occupationists, the crazies at the marches with the U-locks in our backpacks and the “Occupy Everything” banner overhead. Winning at the library, at that moment, was cause for escalation. It confirmed for us the effectiveness of our tactics and reminded us to keep moving, keep organizing, and to keep taking what was already ours, returning and reshaping public space for the public.

In the nearly three years of student uprisings, the library occupations have earned us our only concrete, measurable successes. But the wrong lesson would be that by keeping our demands small, and by staying “reasonable,” we may achieve our goals. What we have won here is a band-aid for a university system suffering from hemophilia. Don’t get me wrong: we need band-aids—we need lots of them—but our small, reasonable, achievable demands will fail to produce either the university or the society for which we fight. They will simply bandage up the tools of class reproduction.

Our greatest successes over the last three years have been neither concrete nor measurable. And although a good deal of thought must be put into what “Occupy” is and represents, there can be no doubt that at the beginning of 2012, we stand on an entirely different ground from where we were a year ago. This shift has been effected not by policy enacted or reversed, but by on-the-ground organizing and a growing consciousness of and a willingness to act—to take direct action—against the structures of domination of which we have become a part.

This victory is only a victory if we use it as a springboard for further escalation and further growth. The policy we’re witnessing at the libraries is symptomatic of a larger shift at the university towards temporary, underpaid, and underemployed labor, which in turn reflects changes beyond the university as well. We must make these connections, and recognize that what it is at stake is, yes, the library, but it’s also the university, the public space, and the terms of our own subsistence. If we fight only for policies, then we have already failed.

The Oakland Commune

2012-01-23T10:56:00.001-08:00

Cops and Cowards: Reflections on the Recent UC Regent Protests

2012-01-21T18:19:00.000-08:00

[Update 1/23: the original post has been slightly edited for clarity; the same changes have been made below]

From anti-imperialist inc.:

The event on Thursday, January 19 at UC Riverside was a strategic experiment for Southern California organizers and nothing that occurred should be taken at face value and assumed useless. What the press hasn’t been showing is the most important point in the entire protest: when students drove the police into a corner and off the campus in the protest’s closing moments. An action that We can most definitely learn from...

i am not particularly concerned with a majority of the activity that occurred Thursday, January 19th at the UC Regents meeting in Riverside, because the energetic ad hoc efforts of the student organizers from all of the participating UC’s speaks for itself. The day represented a solid advancement for Southern California student activism. It is an advancement that has been growing and will hopefully continue to fuel a sense of urgency for Our struggle.

What i am concerned with in this essay, is what has been lacking from the critiques of Thursday the 19th: creativity, tactical analysis and above all: a look into the events that unfolded while the cops still maintained their presence on campus post-meeting. This moment, for me, crystalized an idea that has been floating around the UC community/blogosphere for some time now, the struggle cannot only pertain to austerity and fee hikes, but the opportunity has been widening for making domestic militarization a central focus of Our praxis in the student movement. A decision that has the potential to connect the struggles of students fighting tuition increases and eroding access to education, to the struggles in the prisons, to the struggles anti-violence groups face, with the struggles of immigrants rights groups and with the struggles of communities across the state.

Earlier accounts of police violence at the Davis and Berkeley campuses have been vainly provincialized, described as epic calamities – where moral outrage was merely the result of police crossing the boundaries of whiteness. So with this understanding, i do not want to dismiss the importance of acknowledging the privileged perceptions amongst the liberals and a majority of UC advocates, as a barrier between understanding modes of domination in the US and within the UC community itself. This understanding is the basis of my politics and this essay should be read with an assumed understanding of the context in which it is written from.

It should be also addressed that this is not an attempt towards a superficial inclusion (occupier “semantics”), let alone a crass stab at progressive coalition, it is a call for a genuine movement against domestic militarism, institutional racism, and all that is imbedded within the logic of Western law enforcement. It should be made very clear that a militarized police presence is, nonetheless, the divide between Us students and any dream of completely controlling Our educations. The police were the physical wall between Us and the Regents on Thursday the 19th, they were the lurking force that surveilled organizers prior to the meeting, and outside of the University they are the physical embodiment of all that is so completely fucked in Our society.

South Exit Occupied by Students

Book Block Holdin' it Down

First off, i want to make clear that reflections on the event’s engagement with the police cannot be allowed to fall victim to the same institutional press coverage and useless chronological recaps of events. We are battling on a new terrain. Many of the Southern California campuses have never seen political activity of this magnitude, so Our organizing efforts have to be fresh and creative. As well, Our reflections on actions like this need to be conducted in a manner contradictory to the norm. If We are going to conquer the new terrain before Our oppressors, We must squeeze every drop of creative and theoretical juice possible out of the body of information generated from Our actions. Whether it be strategic, theoretical, artistic or humorous, alternative forms of reflection will always have the potential to breathe new life into the praxis of SoCal student activism.

So in this manner, i do not want to make this piece a summary on the entire event itself, but rather a conceptual analysis on its conclusion and epilogue. Our practice of protest in Southern California is embarking on something this region has never experienced, but with that comes the responsibility of not falling into the patterns of the system inherent in the liberal-conservative SoCalian University atmosphere.

To briefly summarize the conclusion of the protest: During the majority of the meeting demonstrators blocked ~~ALL three possible exits~~ a number of exits the Regents could use and their parking lot entrance/exit as well, shifting from exits to exit throughout the course of the day, unfortunately never occupying them at the same time. However, once further police violence erupted and the riot police began kettling demonstrators, folks got caught up in their emotions and in the spectacle of violence – serving as the initial distraction the regents needed to slip out of the third (least occupied) exit.

Note for further actions: it is an extremely hard thing to do, but organizers must be able to step outside of the moment and see past the short sightedness that everyone else inevitably has when in protest. Constantly preparing for what is going to happen next is key and it is an imperative that organizers try not to get too caught-up in the action itself. Students did an extremely good job of this on the 19^th up until the masses of riot police came trucking in from the north side of the campus (Context: at this point everyone in the event was exhausted, mentally and physically... It was quite understandable).

The distraction only held temporarily, and protestors rushed after the regents as their vans drove away. In the unfolding action, the protesters at UC Riverside organically regrouped. Hundreds of students lined and then cornered the police forces that previously escorted the regents from the meeting.

When the Regent’s presence disappeared completely, the legitimacy of police authority was emptied of all its value. A mere hour after police kettled, shot and arrested demonstrators, the power relation had reversed, and a mass of students cornered the police into a state of tactical retreat.

This was a revolutionary moment – a moment beginning when the chants started changing from rhetorical protest clichés to “Leave Our Campus!” and “Fuck the Police!”

Southern Californian organizers should not take this moment for granted. This is how Our movement will succeed. If We see the police and the Regents as being no different from one and other – two sides of the same coin. The movement towards taking back Our schools cannot physically materialize (literally) into anything unless We confront the issue of the police. Hence, a radical movement that truly believes education is a right. The police are a hindrance on Our ability to speak and learn freely.

One fellow protester and i rationalized the events as they unfolded before Our eyes as “going overboard,” and at face value they did seem likely to be just that. But in reflection, the empowerment this moment gave to a campus on the cusp of mind-numbing political apathy and eternal “fratability,” the final confrontation is not something to be taken for granted. So to clarify what “going overboard” really is: an example would be the regents escalating Our tuition year after year after year after year.

The cornering of the police was a revolutionary moment that cannot be dismissed as anything other. To most, revolution sounds chaotic, and revolution seems messy. To be honest as i reflect on the epilogue of the protest, it is the very sloppiness and chaos of the closing hour, that made this day so beautiful!

Prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore articulates power as being not “a thing” but rather “a capacity composed of active and changing relationships enabling a person, group, or institution to compel others to do things they would not do on their own” (247). In this moment the students acknowledged their own capacity for power. In the events that unfolded after the Regents’ cowardly exit, the police lost their legitimacy as a presence of authority on the student’s campus, and proved that when students unite they are a force to be reckoned with.

Instances of police infiltration into privileged environments are as productive of moments, as they are counterproductive. How We reflect on them is the difference between creating a movement against police violence that understands the entirety of the struggle, or having it concede to the coercive forces of progressive politics and liberal who-rah-rah. The student movement must understand that police violence is structural and proliferates daily not even 100 yards away from most University campuses. In fact, a dialogue on real police brutality and real police violence (legalized racist murder per say) can even lead into possible discussions on how the institution of the University is unnatural and coercive in itself (though I’ll reserve that discussion for another time).

Our generation’s student movement is growing, but the structural imbalance of power that the few who make decisions hold; whether it is in the realm of the pedagogical, economic or the state’s monopoly on violence, entails a Praxis that must involve more than hikes and cuts. Want to knock power off its pedestal? Then aim at its pillars to get to the top.

Not one person who confronted the police that day can say the events on the 19^th didn’t change their perception of the University. For a display of anger to occur at this magnitude, in the historical and geographical conditions in which they existed: a campus on the remote outskirts of the geographical and ‘Political’ UC system, should be seen as a catalyst for activist organizing on Southern California campuses. And above all it should serve as the beginning of the dismantling of the historical and physical walls that divide Us and the possibilities of controlling Our own education. Walls which encompass the Regents, the Police, the bloated salaries of administration and the fee hikes/loans (*cough* chains) that hold us down.

The goal is not “thoughtful” piecemeal reform with the Regents, which of course is going to garner national media attention Chancellor White... um duhh... calls for reform always fit in well on propaganda networks. It is total control of Our educational opportunity and the means for learning that we want. On January 13th there was no loss in the real struggle to defend education, because the real struggle isn’t to defend it, but to revolutionize it. Wanting “engaging” and “provocative” discussions with the Regents can only get so much. The goal is to end the hierarchical control of education and the defeat the family structure of Our higher education system, that as UCR’s student body president once said (roughly paraphrasing): “students should be the children, and the administrator should be like their parents.” Having someone telling you how to learn is a little different then someone teaching you how to learn. So don’t blur the two prez. Free education! Free the UC’s! Embrace radical pedagogy! And ftp.

Reportback from #J20

2012-01-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

From an anonymous friend...

(pic)

This narrative of January 20th 2012 mostly follows the big sound bus brought by the Occupy Oakland Reclaim the Streets party. It ends during the building takeover, so there's more to the story if someone wants to add.

The morning's actions began before the sun came up, but not before the rain. Bechtel was quickly militarized (pun intended) with barricades and security guards, but people had already managed to get inside and squat the lobby. There were banks locked down or shut down all over the financial district. The sound bus gathered people and energy until the first Reclaim the Streets. It snaked around, visiting and supporting each lockdown or action and brought the music, dancing, and other ruckus with it. Bechtel was the first stop; shaking collective asses, blocking traffic to one of the world's most insidious military industrial leaders seemed to set a tone for the RtS. There was a move-in house party in front of Citibank to oppose foreclosures that included a Christmas tree, couch and TV. Code Pink was outside of Goldman Sachs with a person-sized squid to call attention to GS's slimy and sucky business dealings.

The intersection of California and Montgomery became a very important place at which to continue causing trouble all day long. Wells Fargo on one side with badass queer folks locked down and Bank of America on the other side with more lockdowns made it an ideal spot to park the bus and party and block traffic. When the police spastically arrested one person and the crowd surrounded them, many more cops showed up and the bus moved on.

Back at the Bank of America one block from B. Manning Plaza (aka Justin Herman) some folks had renamed BofA the “People's Food Bank of America” and served some delicious food to anyone walking by hungry. The bus crew was happy to partake when they arrived back at Embarcadero in time for the noon march.

The noon march was led by folks against ICE and was more regulated, but it in some ways it resembled the RtS. Although there were the ubiquitous orange-vest-people keeping the march on one side of the street, it also went to visit and support other actions before it arrived at ICE. Once ICE had been shut down, the march more or less dispersed and the RtS continued where the march left off (but without orange-vest-people of course.) Back to California and Montgomery, where the cops cut off the bus so it couldn't park again in front of the lockdown. There was one more stop before meeting up with the big evening march at BM Plaza. Unite Here Local 2 was picketing outside the Hyatt by Union Square. The union folks seemed a little less excited about being innundated with clowns, jugglers and other miscreants than the other actions, but when some bus folk joined the picket they got more into it. Suddenly it became apparent that the fountain outside the hotel had been filled with soap, because bubbles started flying in the wind, covering anyone in their path.

(pic)

Real trouble started right before the bus was about to leave the Hyatt. One especially friendly officer threatened the bus driver with 15 points on his driving record and suggested that he take the bus and leave town, though in different words. With threats still fresh, the bus left without the RtS and they marched back to BM Plaza. About 15 minutes before the march started, word went around that the bus was pulled over for something having to do with the taillight. About 50 people ran over to support, but were surprised to see the whole march come up the street and surround the bus and all the cops on the scene chanting “Whose bus? Our bus!” and “Cops go home!” 10 or so minutes later, the cops let the bus leave. Not sure exactly the end of the bus story, whether it got back to Oakland or not, but hope to find out soon.

The building occupation crew waited for a while at their meetup spot for the rest of the big march to arrive. They double-checked their banners and some masked up for the action ahead. Spirits were rowdy and high on the way to the building. The anti-capitalist bloc shouted at the police riding their motorcycles on the sidewalk and prevented cars from driving through the crowd. The building itself was huge – really, really huge. It was unbelievable at first that it could be empty. There were already police barricades set up, but the march was told that there were already occupiers inside. The cops started forming lines on either side of the block filled with people, and the fear of a kettle situation was real. Folks started walking down the block, and surprise! The Bentley dealership got its windows smashed by a couple of people. After an announcement that people were inside and wanted support, the march turned back toward the building.

However, this author did not. If anyone knows the rest of the story, please contribute!

Kroeber library Study-in resolution

2012-01-21T01:38:00.000-08:00

The following statement was just sent to the chancellors at UC Berkeley, as well as to the media, and to organizing lists:

Whereas, The George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library hours were cut this semester by close to 50%; and

Whereas, a policy of attrition is eroding all of our libraries and other vital student services; and

Whereas, the loss of resources and services has a detrimental effect on educational opportunities for students at this campus; and

Whereas, the University’s stated mission “is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge;” and, finally

Whereas, the University cannot fulfill this mission, or maintain its status as a premier learning environment, without the full functioning of, and access to, its exceptional libraries as they are pivotal in providing space for the sharing of knowledge and the free exchange of ideas; and

Be it resolved, we demand the restoration of the Anthropology Library hours to their Fall 2011 schedule; and

Be it further resolved, that we demand the proper staffing, funding, and foresight in order to maintain full operational capacity of all campus libraries; and

Be it finally resolved, that while you remain unwilling to maintain the normal operations of our library, we will keep the Anthropology Library open until our demands are met.

Statement from the Anthropology Library Occupation

2012-01-19T22:38:00.000-08:00

[Update 1/20 9:02 am: Check out Zunguzungu's reportback from the library occupation.]

Via Occupy Cal:

We love our libraries and are here to protect them. Libraries are critically important for excellent education for all. We students, faculty, and community members collectively have decided to occupy the Anthropology Library at UC Berkeley to protest the dismantling of the library system on campus and public education as a whole.

We chose to occupy this space because the Anthropology library is a recent victim of extreme service cuts. The hours of operation are being cut from the previous, already slim, 9am-6pm to the current 12pm-5pm, because the university has not taken the necessary steps to sufficiently staff the library. The multiple attacks on campus libraries are a reflection of privatization and the devaluation of the public education system.

We are here to reverse this process. We call on the administration to take immediate action to hire another full-time librarian to ensure full access to this valuable resource.

The administration may claim that there are insufficient funds, but in reality these resources exist, but their allocation by UC administrators and the state does not adequately reflect the values of excellent public education. Why have the UC Regents continued to approve 21% increases in administration salaries, while students are being denied access to their libraries? Why are the taxes of the 1% so low while essential social services are being cut across the state and country?

We stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement as a whole and the protestors at UC Riverside who were met with violence in their attempt to protest the austerity policies of the UC Regents, Sacramento, and Washington D.C.

Defend our libraries and schools. Occupy together.

--- The Anthropology Library Occupation
January 19, 2012

The Getaway + Other Videos

2012-01-19T22:32:00.000-08:00

UCR Book Bloc Disrupts Regents' Meeting

2012-01-19T18:33:00.000-08:00

A beautiful book bloc, appropriately featuring Foucault's Discipline and Punish, faced off today against the cops called in to defend the UC regents. The LA Times takes a good picture, but writes a terrible article:

Two demonstrators were arrested for crossing the police lines at the Student Union Building, according to UC Riverside spokesman James Grant. No one was reported seriously injured in the incidents, although one campus police officer suffered minor cuts on his hand from a demonstrator’s sign, Grant said.

One campus police officer suffered minor paper cuts on his pinky. Certainly, there were no students beaten with police batons or shot with rubber bullets.

Clearly, UC officials did not want a repeat of the controversial incident in November when UC Davis police pepper-sprayed student demonstrators at that campus.

Clearly, UC officials told the police to forgo the pepper spray and go straight to rubber bullets.

Fuck the police and their stenographers in the mainstream media. The real reporting's from our comrades at UC Rebel Radio:

The UC Regents' Meeting at UC Riverside began early today. Most mainstream media were inside the HUB building in which the Regents gathered. While we waited outside, reports from inside were telling that the public comment session was often interrupted by the Regents in their failed attempts to appease the student protesters who only had 1 minute each to express themselves. One comment was that regent Sherry Lansing tried to address the students by the usual means of misdirecting the students efforts towards the capital. The reports were that her comment was "useless and boring". After the public comment session was done with, the students offered their own meeting via mic check. But the Regents did nothing but hide in another room with very few people allowed in from the public. Police remained inside but did not move to arrest anybody. At around 1 p.m. everybody was running from the front doors of the HUB to the back doors through which the Regents were supposed to make their quick escape. Students took over a staircase and then another as police in riot gear blocked their way. Administrators were seen at the windows and balconies of the buildings while talking on their cell phones, taking video, and laughing at the people below them.

The police issued several orders to disperse and every time the students booed them and asked them "Why do we need to disperse? Give us a reason!" But the police only managed to repeat the same statement over and over. At one point the Chancellor of UC Riverside, Timothy P. White was seen on the balcony and was confronted by students asking to be allowed into the building and to the meeting. Upon being recognized, he quickly left the balcony and went back inside the building to never be seen again.

Later in the day, at around 3:30 p.m. the students were notified by scouts that the police were gathering in the back to make way for the exit of the Regents. Students split their ranks and took both exits, but no Regents were seen. At 4:30 p.m. (give or take) the Riverside Police Department sent in re-enforcements and the police line started their push back on the back side of the HUB building next to the parking lot.

Rubber bullets and pepper balls were fired. The police was chased over to the other side of the building. Over 5 people were arrested and there was a rumor that a fence was thrown at the riot police.

Word is that this face-off is still on-going.

We will keep you updated.

[Note: most the videos that were originally posted below have been moved to this post.]

[Note #2: for a more detailed analysis of the day from a comrade down south, check out these reflections.]

Banner Drops at UC Berkeley

2012-01-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

Today two banners were dropped on UC Berkeley campus. One, reading "TIME UC US OCCUPY," was dropped from the Campanile (hard to see in the picture, but that's what Daily Cal reporter Damian Ortellado, who took these pictures, tweeted) while another (actually a three-banner set), reading "FUCK YOU BIRGENEAU," was dropped at Eschelman.

This unsigned letter was apparently being distributed at the site of the banner drop:

Respectfully to:

President Mark Yudof, Regents, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, UC Chancellors, High Level Administrators, and Fellow Students.

We come to you at a time when our careers and futures look bleak, and the future of the generations to come look even more inauspicious than our own. We can all agree in saying that in our own unique perceptions of this world, we see its problems and calamities, and recognize the time has come to act.

The voices of students have spoken. We know there is something inherently wrong within our method of operation, and as you have seen, no matter what the method of repression, even allowing time to pass to kill us, we will continue to speak and voice this message. We call on each and every one of you whose eyes touch this message to act in all your ability, with full vision and intensity, to work to create the real solutions to the problems we face, especially those within our university community.

Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring, massive worker strikes world wide, the riots in London and Greece, student revolution in Chile, the network of occupiers infecting every cultural sphere of the globe made up of people in every demographic and possible category one can be placed, when viewed together, demonstrate the underlying tensions that we as a species are feeling together. We are paying attention.

These matters must be attended to or the decline of our complexly interconnected species will surely come to disaster in due time. Today we focus on education. We ask to those who can, those who in their present time have power, to help mold a new way to how we operate and function in our educational system. Education is not a commodity only to be sold to those who can afford it. We hope that all will address their own personal responsibilities to their campus and local communities, to influence those in your spheres of work and school, to create and facilitate the solutions for our educational system, and the problems our nation faces that we see fit. No matter where you stand, we must act.

We, some students here at UC Berkeley, with the privilege at our backs to be attending this great university, have recognized the need for change through our studies in class and in our homes, and are watching with a close eye of the events that are transpiring. We understand education is the solution, and this is why we fight for it. This global awakening is a direct result of mass education and awareness through the resources we have been given through the gift of technology and human creativity. We are beginning to see, and time is running out.

To you whom it may concern: our networks only grow, and we will more than gladly generate the solutions for ours futures ourselves if you don't act in all your ability. We want to see things change, not the tabling of our tuition hikes for student outrage to die out.

The time is now.
Occupy your education.

Fiat Lux,
Students
Go Bears!

...tic tock

Back to the Anthro Library!

2012-01-18T07:55:00.000-08:00

One of the first direct actions during the fall 2009 cycle of anti-privatization protests was the "study-in" at the Anthropology library. Due to budget cuts, or so the administration misleadingly suggested, the library's hours had been cut back to the point that it would no longer open during the weekends. As midterms were coming up, students were desperate for places to study. On October 9, 2009, a group of about 300 students, workers, and faculty moved into the library and refused to leave at its 5pm closing time. UCPD initially attempted to remove them but in the end opted not to intervene -- most likely out of the administration's fear of the photos of cops dragging struggling students from the library -- and the library was held for a full 24 hours. During that time, there were study spaces, teach-ins (including a presentation by Bob Meister in which he presented for the first time his groundbreaking findings that would be published the following day as "They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street"), spoken word, free food, and lots of sleeping bags and pillows. On leaving the library, organizers vowed to liberate one library every week and designated the Ed/Psych library the next target. In the interim, and notably without any demands having been made, the administration miraculously found the money to keep the libraries open. Not student government, not lobbying in Sacramento, not signing petitions, not even holding rallies -- it's direct action that gets the goods.

But now, they're trying to cut the hours again. They think we're not paying attention. But we are. And we're going back:

Defend the Anthropology Library!

Occupy Cal is calling for a ‘Study-In’ encampment inside the Anthropology library, Kroeber Hall, for Thursday, January 19 at 3pm. The Anthropology library is a recent victim of harsh service cuts caused directly by the university’s mis-management of funds and privatization. The hours are being cut from the previous, already slim, 9am-6pm hours to the current 12pm-5pm hours. This is part of the story of how university administrators are failing the educational mission of the UC, part of the corporatizing and privatizing movement. The UC regents recently raised selected salaries by 21%, yet we are still experiencing the cutting of extremely valuable resources for our education. Bring Your Own Tent, sleeping bags, and pillows for Occupy Cal’s first encampment of the Spring 2012 semester. Let’s keep the library open as a shared public space!

Join Occupy Cal in a Study-in and Encampment to protest these cuts!

January 19th, 2012
230 Kroeber Hall
Study-in: 3pm-5pm
Encampment: 5pm - ?

This action is in solidarity with the Regents' meeting protest at UC Riverside.

Reclamations Journal has launched a new blog

2012-01-17T11:45:00.000-08:00

In the fall of 2009, a few graduate students at UC Berkeley who were active in campus anti-privatization politics founded Reclamations Journal, which was conceived as a forum for debates and analysis emerging out of struggles to reclaim the educational commons in California. Since then, the editorial collective has expanded and has published three issues. In the fall of 2011, the editors decided to move away from full-length online issues, publishing their first political pamphlet (concerning student debt). Now, in order to have a more temporally immediate relation to ongoing campus struggles, the collective has shifted most of its activity to a new blog, which was just launched today.

The blog features two new posts, the first an interview with Ricardo Dominguez entitled: "On Electronic Civil Disobedience." Here's an excerpt:

Zach Blas: On March 4, 2010, during the mass student protests sweeping across many University of California campuses and the US, the b.a.n.g. lab led a virtual sit-in in solidarity with these protests against the University of California Office of the President. Could you describe what this action entailed and its legal ramifications? Why, considering that you have led previous virtual sit-ins against various institutions within the UC system, did this particular one instigate an FBI investigation of yourself, the b.a.n.g. lab, and the threatening your tenure?

Ricardo Dominguez: Well, the Transborder Immigrant Tool was already under investigation starting on January 11, 2010 by UCSD (the entire group of artists working on it were under investigation); then, I came under investigation for the the Virtual Sit-In performance against the UC Office of the President (UCOP) on March 4th, 2010 (which, as you pointed out, joined the communities state wide against students’ fees in the UC system and the dismantling of educational support for K – 12 across California). That was then followed by an investigation by the FBI office of Cybercrimes. The FBI was seeking to frame the performance as a federal violation, a cybercrime, based on UCOP stating that they lost $5,600 U.S. because of the disturbance–it is important to know that the cost had to be over $5000.00 U.S. for it to be a crime. So UCOP tacked on $600.00.U.S. to push the performance into cybercrime territory. In the end, I think that the event of all the actions on the streets of California, the occupations and protests across all the UC’s by students and faculty, and the on-line actions by students and faculty created a space where they could not fail to notice its impact on multiple scales – and our work was already under investigation for TBT, the Mark Yudof resignation site that we hosted, plus the ECD gesture was just too much for the frail imaginary of UCOP.

The other new entry on the blog is the first installment of a compilation post, which brings together 50 or so essays written by public education organizers in California over the course of Fall 2011. The Reclamations editors have annotated all of essays -- reading through the annotations actually allows for a rich recollection of last fall's campus struggles, and indicates the degree to which these struggles were wrapped up in and enabled by the broader occupy movement that took shape over the last few months. Each day this week, another installment of the compilation post will be published.

Access for Whom? The Middle Class Access Plan (MCAP), Diversity, and Privatization

2012-01-16T22:07:00.000-08:00

In December, UC Berkeley announced a "groundbreaking" financial aid program called the Middle Class Access Plan (MCAP), which Chancellor Birgeneau hailed in the press release as a means of "sustain[ing] and expand[ing] access across the socio-economic spectrum" in an era of incessant tuition hikes. The following analysis was written by Zach Williams and posted at the blog Good-In-Theory. A summary of all the data used in the writing of this post is available here.

Class Conflict and Racial Strife Across the UC and its Golden State

What could be wrong with increasing access? Even further, what could be wrong with increased access for the middle class, when it appears as if current policy has been pushing the middle class out of Berkeley?

But wait, who is the middle class? And how are we increasing access for them? And why are they being pushed out? And why does it matter -- that is, why is that the problem we’re throwing money at? Because there are plenty of problems at which to throw money ($10-12 million dollars worth of money, in fact). But Birgenau has chosen this one.

So what is the problem, exactly? A shrinking middle class population (likely chiefly white) at the UCs.

But why is that happening? Because the high tuition/high aid model has led to a split in the population of the UC, divided between low-income families (~36% earning under 50k/year at Berkeley) and high income families (~30% earning over 150k/year at Berkeley. Another 10% or so still fall under the Blue and Gold program, which caps out at 80k. The remaining band of 20-25% has been narrowing, and thus needs our help.

Why? Well, because apparently declining enrollment among ‘the middle class’ is inequitable.

Never mind that likely 80% of California children live in families earning under 80k/year, while over 40% of UC Berkeley students come from families earning over 100k/year.

You see, under-representation of the bottom 80% is normal -- it’s expected, even, along with over-representation of the top 10%. But decreasing enrollments for part of the top 20% of children in the state? That can’t be tolerated.

So we have to lure them back in. And don’t be fooled -- this is about nothing other than luring people back in. Sure, MCAP has a friendly face to the extent that it eases costs for already enrolled middle class students, but this program is not about a temporary spate of relief for enrolled ‘middle class’ students. MCAP is taking a long view of the strategic situation in which the UC finds itself. And that situation involves intense competition with the Ivy league and other top tier liberal arts colleges and research universities over elite students.

So who are the students UC can draw in? Well, they aren’t Asian students, who attend the UC at a rate much higher than any other group already. There may be a few other minority students -- ~2200 UC system wide who are accepted but elect to go elsewhere and have middling acceptance rates. But the bulk of those who UCB is now pursuing fall into 10k or so white students who are admitted, but do not accept, UC enrollment. These students are, proportionately, the least likely to both apply to the UC and to accept enrollment when admitted.

Where are they going? Comparable private colleges, of course. That’s why, nationally, the MCAP program is perceived as a first effort by elite public schools to compete with the Ivy league over the upper middle class -- and this gets precisely to the point. MCAP isn’t about Californians. It’s about Out of State (OOS) enrollments.

While UC Blue and Gold is restricted to California residents, MCAP is restricted to ‘domestic’ residents -- that is to say, residents of the United States. And what do non-Californian ‘domestic’ residents pay? Another 23k/year in tuition. That more than covers any pittances extended to California’s middle class.

What MCAP does is introduce further granularity into the price discrimination scheme run by the UC. UC Blue and Gold allowed for an attenuated rate of tuition for in-state students earning under 80k. But there’s no fidelity among out of state students, who don’t qualify for Blue and Gold, or other in-state inducements like Calgrants. So while a California family earning 80k/year may pay 0 tuition, receiving 12k in subsidy to the cost of attending the UC (priced at 32k total, 24k excepting the expected student contribution), an out of state family earning 80k has a 35k a year tuition bill, plus that 20k/year in cost of living expenses, with no relief in site.

But the UC doesn’t need 35k to break even. Berkeley, the most spendthrift of campuses, lays out 19k per student. That’s 12k in tuition dollars plus 7k in state funding. OOS tuition has to make up the 7k not covered by the state. The rest is pure profit. Every lump of OOS tuition delivers about 16k in profit.

By fixing cost of attendance at no more than 15% of income for the in-state portion of fees, the UC has committed to giving middle class families up to 12k in subsidies. For Californians, some of that would be covered by Cal Grants. For those who qualify for Blue and Gold, some of that would be covered by Pell Grants.

But for out of state students, it all comes from Berkeley’s institutional aid.

The MCAP program allows for previously unavailable granularity in pricing for OOS students. Now, instead of all OOS students being saddled with roughly 35k/year in tuition, they will pay anywhere from 23 to 35k/year in tuition (disregarding non need-based aid). This is to say that the chief function of MCAP is to further increase the ability of Berkeley to recruit relatively wealthy out of state students who are willing to pay a lot, or at the least take on a lot of debt, in order to attend the UC. OOS students, after all, accept admission to the UC at a lower rate than in-state students, so anything to pull in more of these cash cows is desirable.

The other side of this story is how this program speaks to the general structure of the UC’s funding model. MCAP clarifies how tuition, through Blue and Gold and MCAP combined, functions effectively like a tax rate. This is a tax rate expressly for the purpose of redistributing income -- all the recent tuition increases have consisted of a return-to-aid portion, which is to say a significant portion of all tuition increases has been devoted to mitigating the effect of those tuition increases for people with low income.

For families within California, this reflects how the failure of state policy has led to the UC replicating the functions of the state. Because the California public as a whole is not willing to pay taxes to support public education by popular mandate, the wealthy in California have been able to avoid subsidizing the accessibility of the UC.

Instead, the UC has taken advantage of high demand for its product and the loose climate in higher education funding (through Federal support and student loans) to transfer the burden of maintaining UC accessibility on to wealthy or debtor students who wish to attend the UC.

In this way, accessibility to a quality university system is now contingent upon the realized demand of the wealthy, and the indebted, for that university system. Quite simply, the UC’s public mission has been privatized. Private charity, in the form of OOS tuition and ever increasing in-state tuition for the relatively rich, maintains access for poor students.

In this way, the burden of maintaining the UC is being shifted to wealthy and/or debtor students by raising their ‘taxes’ with nearly yearly tuition hikes. The turn to increasing enrollment of OOS students, coupled with the middle class access plan, allows the granularity of this tax to extend across the most profitable segment of the UC’s population.

The failure of tax policy at the state level has led to taxation at the UC level. This shifts the tax burden in three ways. First, it shifts the burden from CA taxpayers to CA families with children, who are, on average, poorer than CA taxpayers (though the children who go to the UC are not). Second, it shifts the burden to out of state money. Third, it shifts the burden onto in-state and out-of-state student and family debt.

What this leaves behind is any focus on the demographics and issues of California as a whole. The UC remains disproportionately wealthy while Hispanic and Black students remain disproportionately absent.

The collapse in public support and the turn to privatized financing cannot be disentangled from the persistent and endemic racial disparities proper to the UC. Increasing state diversity and increasing UC privatization are not simply coincidental. Rather, the demographic shift in the college-aspiring population of California has accompanied a general increase in private responsibility for the cost of college.

The UC has been able to sustain this shift while still enrolling poor students by relying upon the contributions of out of state students and wealthy in-state students, as well as increasing the expectations of student and family contributions across the board for all students, regardless of income.

As state funding falls, this means that the UC’s continuing operation as an accessible university comes to depend more and more upon the private demand for an elite education of non-Californian students. Poor Californians are increasingly at the mercy of the largess of rich out-of-staters.

In this way the public mission of the university has come to depend upon the private wealth of the rich who choose to attend it, and as such the character of the UC, as a public university, depends upon its ability to cater to these students.

This is to say that the UC must cater to the desires of the rich (largely white) kids who keep it afloat rather than the poor (largely hispanic) ones who make up a growing portion of the state. And so national competitiveness with elite institutions trumps focus on the challenges faced by California’s youth. MCAP, rather than acting as a boon to California’s middle class, merely serves as another way of catering to the rest of the country’s elite students, by further incentivizing their attendance.

In this manner, the people and students of California are losing control over their University, as their University, and their ability to attend it, comes to depend more and more upon the choices of others.

Spring into Action -- Occupy Cal first week actions

2012-01-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

Posters for March 1 & 5 actions in defense of public ed

2012-01-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

Flier - March Action for Education march1-2012-v4

Protest the UC Regents Meeting at UC Riverside, 1/19

2012-01-12T19:34:00.000-08:00

Fliers made by unaffiliated students:

Teach the UC and CA Budget, Winter 2012 Edition

2012-01-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

Check out the Teach the Budget Blog for more information, flyers, and an action kit.

Teach_the_Budget_Winter 2012 has arrived!

Use it to teach your students, your friends–or yourself–about the budget crisis at the UC, and how it connects to state and national political and economic issues.

Open Letter from Organizers with the Nor-Cal Occupy Education Coalition to Organizers in Southern California

2012-01-04T18:36:00.000-08:00

This letter contains an apology and an invitation to further discussion. Since convening a cross-sectoral planning meeting in Berkeley on December 10, we've received a fair amount of feedback, much of it negative, from organizers in southern California about how this meeting took shape. There is a sense shared by many that this meeting was rushed, that we failed to meaningfully consult organizers outside our region, and that we sometimes engaged in a slippage between “Northern” and “Statewide” that's been all too common in the last few years of public education protest. By deciding on a day of action without consulting people from other regions, we've acted in some ways undemocratically, imposing on others a protest schedule that may not work as well for them as it hopefully will for us.

We're sorry to have moved forward without adequately working with those who have an equal stake in this movement, and we're committed to doing what we can to make this movement truly statewide and democratic.

In order to begin addressing these problems, and to work together in a more meaningful and horizontal way, we think it makes sense to first hold a conference call in the next couple of weeks, where organizers from southern California who are interested in this conversation can convey directly to us how they'd like organizing and coordination, statewide or otherwise, to happen in the coming months.

If you are interested in joining this call, please fill out the poll at the following location

Following this call, hopefully we will all have a better sense of possible next steps, whether this might include forming a more representative coordinating committee, building for a cross-sectoral planning meeting in southern California, and/or considering upcoming meetings in Riverside and Santa Barbara as places where the near future of organizing in So-Cal and statewide will begin to be determined. Through this, ideally we'll be able to find ways to collaborate over the coming months, even if our schedules of protest end up being not wholly identical.

We know that organizing in a way that respects all who have a stake in the defense of public education is the only way we'll be successful, and are committed to acting according to this principle.

In Solidarity,

Amanda Armstrong
Alex Barnard
Alan Benjamin
Eric Blanc
Luz Calvo
Natalia Chousou-Polydouri
Elizabeth De Martelly
Meleiza Figueroa
Juan Garcia
Courtney Hanson
Maggie Hardy
Nate Heller
Shannon Ikebe
Keli Iwamoto
Deborah Jacobs-Levine
Stan Klein
Alex Kluber
Olivia Lichterman
Blanca Missé
Betty Olson-Jones
Millie Phillips
Mustafa Popal
Jody Sokolower
Stardust

People's police review board is soliciting anonymous writings on police violence

2011-12-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

On December 1, the People's Police Review Board (PPRB) emerged at UC Berkeley through a direct confrontation with the administration-sponsored Police Review Board.

Since then, the group has spent a fair amount of time thinking about how an independent investigation into UC police violence and administrative responsibility could take place without putting in legal danger those who offer testimony. We've also discussed some of the needs for support that those injured on November 9 and other days might still have, including the need for collective discussion to help work through the psychic effects of experiencing and witnessing police violence.

In order to begin getting people back together, talking about the securitization of campus, and making possible an investigation of recent university repression, the PPRB is planning a public forum for the first weeks of the spring semester, exact date to be announced.

For this forum, we're soliciting anonymous writings about the UCPD, and about past incidents of police violence. The statements will be read by volunteers at the forum. We're looking for all sorts of reflections from everybody affected: community members, students, workers, instructors, parents, and those relatively distanced from the universities.

Here's the form for written submissions.

Hopefully, the forum will open onto a sequence of actions this spring that push back against police impunity and administrative repression on and beyond our campuses.

Oscar Grant Memorial March, 1/1

2011-12-29T20:08:00.000-08:00

From Indybay:

January 1st, 2012: Oscar Grant 3rd Anniversary Memorial March and Rally

Stand Up to the Watchdogs of the 1%--Your Local Police Department!

1pm March from Oscar Grant Plaza at 14th & Broadway to Rally at Fruitvale BART

A major political movement was launched on January 1st 2009. Its catalyst was the police killing of Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed Black father executed by the BART police. This murder awakened a sleeping giant—Bay Area residents angry and frustrated at the continued abuse of power perpetrated by law enforcement. Oscar and all the young people that were attacked and terrorized by the BART police that night, in addition to the many victims of police brutality in the greater Bay Area, have become ingrained in our collective memory. Their lives are the unspeakable price we pay to live in a society based on racial injustice.

Not only do police serve the needs of the 1%, they have always existed to put down resistance in communities of color. But when other BART riders posted their video recordings of the murder of Oscar by BART officer Johannes Mehserle, the internationally-viewed footage led to a new form of resistance: Community Copwatching. Cellphones, cameras and a popular upsurge brought the first arrest, trial and conviction of a white officer for killing a Black man.

The movement that touched ground in January 2009--the organizing to address police terrorism--laid the ground work for the movement against the 1% here in Oakland. The polarizing disparity of wealth and the numerous police killings in our communities are inextricably linked. To unravel a system that forecloses homes, pushes our families into poverty and criminalizes our youth while gentrifying our neighborhoods, we need to not only address a system based on greed but a system that needs police brutality to survive and thrive through state terror.

On this 3rd anniversary of Oscar’s murder, lets take to the streets to show that Oscar Grant is gone but not forgotten. Oscar lives on in the memories of his family and friends and in our resistance to the police.

For more information or to speak contact: oscargrantcommittee [at] gmail.com

Sponsors:

Oscar Grant Committee
Occupy Oakland
Bring the Ruckus

Protest the UC Regents Meeting at UCR on Thursday, January 19th

2011-12-26T22:45:00.000-08:00

Original post here from the Free UCR Alliance.

Dear Students, Faculty, Staff, and Community Members,

We are writing to have our voices heard and call people to action to defend public education. Our futures are being mortgaged in order to maintain bloated administrative salaries and further privatize critical social services across this state, country, and around the world.

In the past decade alone the UC has seen a 342.2% increase in tuition and fees. This trend directly corresponds with a period of exorbitant administrative growth and devastating cuts to instruction, support services and staff, and other critical UC programs. On December 13, 2011 Governor Jerry Brown announced another $100 million in cuts to the UC system, which brings the total to $750 million this fiscal year alone.

The annual fees for attending a UC were $3,859 in 2001-2002; now they are $13,218, and estimated to increase substantially within the next four years. This trend runs completely contradictory to the 1960 CA Master Plan which calls for tuition-free public higher education in this state. Quality, accessible public higher education is a cornerstone for establishing social and economic equality on local to global levels and as such demands our active support and protection.

Our public institutions of higher education are being actively privatized and glutted by regents, trustees and administrators who are deeply invested in large private business interests. These people and the interests they represent want to continue profiting from a drive to remake our public institutions in the image of private-for-profit models.

We are asking that all of us continue to take a stand and fight back to defend our public institutions against the betrayal of many of those charged with their protection. As the students, faculty, and staff who run California’s public colleges and universities, it is our responsibility to assert every day that these are OUR SCHOOLS and that we are not powerless to further the mission of maintaining affordable, accessible and quality public higher education not only in this state, but around the world. An accessible educational experience is important for people everywhere to be able to obtain if they so choose that we might construct a more equitable, just and peaceful world for everyone.

The UC regents are invested with the responsibility of “managing” the UC system. They have insistently refused to engage in constructive dialogue with students, faculty and staff on critical issues that have been repeatedly brought to their attention. Some of them are personal friends and/or business partners of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or other influential politicians and that is precisely how they obtained their initial appointment as regents. A vast majority of the current regents have no professional background in public education and a corresponding majority of them maintain direct ties to business interests that seek to develop financially profitable relationships with the UC and other public institutions.

Banks and other corporations get bailed out and we get sold out, time and again. The regents’ silence in Sacramento fits the destructive model of privatization that they have in mind for the UC. As part of this agenda, it also fits their interests to raise the salaries of administrators even as they tell the rest of us that we need to “continue making sacrifices.”

We are the instruments of change and the power to create it lies in our hands. Enough is enough. We will let our voices be heard and continue to demand that the UC regents and administrators be held accountable. Please join us for a day of non-violent protest at the regents’ next meeting, which is scheduled to take place at UC Riverside on January 17-19, 2012. A day of mass mobilization to defend public education is being called for Thursday, January 19, 2012 at UC Riverside. Come join us as we continue the fight to defend and maintain quality and accessible public education not only in this state but around the world.
Sincerely,

Concerned Students, Faculty, Staff and Community Members of UC Riverside
p/s: Please click the link & sign the Regent Reform petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/uc-regent-reform

First Building Occupation Assembly

2011-12-25T22:20:00.000-08:00

On December 21, the Occupy Oakland GA voted to approve a proposal to occupy a building that would serve as "a social center, convergence center, and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement":

We propose to occupy and hold a large building that will serve the purpose of becoming a social center, convergence center and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement on Saturday, January 28th, 2012. The building will have sufficient office space for all of the Occupy Oakland committees and an auditorium large enough to hold Occupy Oakland general assemblies and adequate sleeping space. It will be a vacant building owned either by a bank, a large corporation of the 1% or already public. The occupation of the building will take place in daylight and on a weekend to ensure more safety and aim for maximum participation. The building will be the destination of a mass march, promoted as a “Move-In Day March” starting at Oscar Grant Plaza at 1pm and finishing up in the new building. Together we will enter the space, clean it, set it up and occupy it.

Having learned from the previous attempts at occupying spaces or buildings where we weren’t able to hold space because of police crack-downs and/or poor planning we know that the only way for this to work is having massive participation and when the time comes, effective defense of the building. To work out numerous details we propose having Building Occupation Assemblies that meet at Oscar Grant Plaza on Wednesdays at 5pm and on Sundays at 1pm with representatives from the Occupy Oakland committees and individuals. The working groups of this assembly will meet to discuss the plans necessary to make the move-in successful and create a vibrant social center. The strategies for the defense of the building will be decided collectively in these meetings.

We further propose a 2-day festival at the start of the occupation which would include cultural events, workshops and strategy sessions to generate community support and participation to further the occupy movement. The Building Occupation Assembly will coordinate this weekend festival. They will plan a full schedule of events, as well as coordinate outreach.

Those writing this proposal are in full agreement that keeping the address of the building a surprise is necessary when planning an action of this scale, so that the building proposed doesn’t have a preemptive shutdown by the city. On the other hand, to make this an all-inclusive action by Occupy Oakland, the authors of this proposal have been in touch with various individuals from committees regarding the particular address of the building. These include: the Kitchen Committee, Events Committee, Supply Committee, Sound Committee, Medics, Free School, Library, Finance Committee, Occupy Legal, Anti-Repression Committee and the Facilitation Committee yet we hope to expand this list. These individuals know the exact address of the building in order to help organize this action in a coordinated yet decentralized manner.

To conclude, in talking to members of our community and upon consulting committee members, many feel strongly that it is time to get Occupy Oakland indoors. The winter and rainy season is upon us and has taken its toll on our numbers, our strength, and our will to continue. We know there is much more to do, and we are excited to see our projects and political endeavors through by fighting for a new space seized from the 1% without permission that will suit our needs, and become something cherished by Occupy Oakland, residents of the Bay Area, and beyond.

As expected, the first meeting to start planning for the occupation will take place at 5pm on Wednesday, December 28th at the North Steps of Oscar Grant Plaza. The invitation we received via email reads as follows:

Recently, the GA passed a proposal to take a large building as a social center for Occupy Oakland. The date for this action is January 28, 2012. The intention is that this space will become the new home for Occupy Oakland, providing ample space for all of our committees and activities, room for assemblies, and sleeping space. (It must be added, however, for those who are concerned about it, that there was much support at the GA for retaining a presence at Oscar Grant Plaza, and even re-encamping at the plaza at a later date, projects which many in attendance at the GA did not think were in opposition to each other). This is a huge, exciting and important step for Occupy Oakland, one that many have been talking about for a very long time -- at least since November 2 -- and we expect that success in this regard will likely be very inspiring for other cities. In order to succeed, we will need this building to be as vibrant and full of activity as the camp was. Therefore, we want to have the full participation of all the committees, groups and individuals who have so far made this experiment so powerful. The first meeting will be on Wednesday December 28 at 5pm on the north steps of Oscar Grant Plaza, and we strongly encourage everyone who can to attend.

Future Meeting Schedule: Until January 7th, the Building Occupation Assembly will meet Mondays and Wednesdays at 5pm (in accordance with the modified GA schedule). Starting Sunday January 7th we will meet Sundays at 1pm and Wednesdays at 5pm. If needed the frequency of these meetings will be increased by the assembly.

Op-ed: Reviewing the case for Katehi’s resignation

2011-12-18T22:37:00.000-08:00

By Nathan Brown
Original post here.

Immediately following the events of Nov. 18 at UC Davis, which have come to be known as “the pepper-spray incident,” I wrote an open letter to Chancellor Linda Katehi demanding her resignation. Since then, calls for the chancellor’s resignation have continued to grow. These have been issued by:

* A petition signed by more than 110,000 people;

* The board of the Davis Faculty Association;

* The majority of the faculty in the physics department;

* The English department;

* The department of comparative literature;

* The Program in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies;

* A group of faculty in the history department;

* The chairman of the UCD Graduate Student Association;

* The general assembly of the UCD student movement;

* A no-confidence letter signed by dozens of faculty from many different departments; and

* An international letter of solidarity declaring an academic boycott of UCD until the chancellor’s resignation.

It is no small thing for the majority of the faculty in two of the largest and most important departments in the sciences and humanities, physics and English, to call for the resignation of a university chancellor. It is even more significant when this call is joined by other departments and by more than 100,000 people, including thousands of UCD students, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as residents of the city of Davis.

Despite the chancellor’s efforts to sow ambiguity concerning her orders to police, these calls for her resignation are ultimately grounded in an irrefutable fact: One week after the chancellor of UC Berkeley ordered riot police to remove an encampment on that campus, and one week after student and faculty demonstrators were brutally beaten by those police, Chancellor Katehi made the same decision in the same circumstances at UC Davis. She also ordered riot police to remove an encampment, and the same result, followed: police violence against students.

The decision to send riot police onto our campus under these circumstances was not a mistake or an oversight, but the repetition of a dangerous failure of leadership by another UC chancellor just nine days earlier. Considering the severe consequences of that failure for our students and for the reputation of our university, demands for the chancellor’s resignation are far from hasty or ill-considered. Rather, they acknowledge that while the chancellor already had ample opportunity to learn the lesson of what happened at Berkeley, she either failed or refused to do so.

Chancellor Katehi has said she accepts “full responsibility” for the events of Nov. 18. Those of us calling for her resignation agree that she is fully responsible, and we demand that she accept the consequences of that responsibility by stepping down.

Since Nov. 18, the inconsistency of the chancellor’s response to calls for her resignation has not alleviated but rather exacerbated her failure of leadership. On the one hand, she has accepted full responsibility; on the other, she has attempted to displace blame onto the vice chancellor and the police. As faculty and students have pointed out, the investigations organized by UC Davis and the UC Office of the President are riddled with conflicts of interest that belie their supposed independence and objectivity.

The cover provided by these investigations now allows the chancellor to respond to direct questions concerning her decisions on Nov. 18 by saying she is no longer at liberty to speak about the matter. While the chancellor emphasizes the need for “dialogue,” student and faculty forums organized by the administration have determined who can speak through a lottery system that seriously undermines any genuinely open conversation about her capacity to lead the university.

Meanwhile, articles have brought to light Chancellor Katehi’s co-authorship of a report recommending the return of militarized police to Athens Polytechnic University as a deterrent to the “politicization” of the campus, as well as her involvement with a program of information sharing between American university campuses and the FBI. These reports are troubling evidence of an ongoing effort to quell and suppress political dissent on university campuses through the use of policing and surveillance.

Amid these developments, the UC Davis administration has now announced the composition of a new Chancellor’s Advisory Board, which, we are told, will help to guide our university into the future. This board includes the CEOs of Bechtel and of Chevron, as well as the senior vice president of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. It also includes the principal of McGill University, who, twice in November 2011, ordered riot police onto that campus — police who also used pepper-spray against peaceful protesters. And it includes M.R.C. Greenwood, former UC provost, who left her post at the UC amid a scandal over improper hiring practices and conflicts of interest.

In other words, in the midst of international condemnation concerning the suppression of free speech and political dissent through police violence on our campus, Chancellor Katehi has chosen to surround herself with university administrators who have also used riot police to quell student protest and who have resigned amid scandals concerning the inappropriate use of administrative power. She has chosen to surround herself with the CEOs of corporations tied to war profiteering and environmental catastrophes.

While the chancellor now pretends to support the efforts of students and faculty to defend the public mission of the UC system, the composition of her new Advisory Board exemplifies a different vision: a future in which the shared governance of the university is replaced by ties to corporate interests that hasten, rather than struggle against, the privatization of the UC system.

What these developments since Nov. 18 confirm is what many students and faculty already realized then: that the chancellor’s decision to deploy riot police against students demonstrating in defense of public education was no “mistake” and had nothing to do with the “health and safety” of the campus community. Rather, it was the political content of the students’ protest that had to be suppressed due to the chancellor’s own political commitment and her own vision for the future of UC Davis: a commitment to the privatization of a great public university and a vision in which the interests of corporations and administrators take precedence over those of students.

Those of us calling for the chancellor’s resignation do not share that vision. There are many of us, and that is encouraging. For the good of the university, we continue to insist that the chancellor needs to step down.

— Nathan Brown is a professor of English at UC Davis.

Occupying Education: The Student Fight Against Austerity in California

2011-12-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

[from the November/December 2011 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas; download the PDF version here]

(photo by Andrew Stern)

By Zachary Levenson

On November 18, University of California (UC), Davis police attempted to raid a student occupation on the campus. When a line of UC Davis students refused to move out of the way, Lieutenant John Pike covered their faces with military-grade pepper spray. He returned for a second round, making sure to coat everyone’s eyes and throats.

“When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood,” described Assistant Professor of English at UC Davis Nathan Brown.[1]

Within 24 hours, a video of the incident had gone viral on YouTube, and the media feigned outrage. UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi apologized for the incident, and UC president Mark Yudof announced a task force to address the police violence. UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau was also forced to apologize after campus police clubbed UC Berkeley students and faculty while they also nonviolently defended an encampment on their campus two weeks before.

This is hardly the first time that California students have faced brutal police repression in recent years. This sort of authorized police violence has been a constant feature of campus administrations’ response to students as they have continuously mobilized against the privatization of their public universities over the past two years.

***

Early in the morning of November 20, 2009, 43 students from the UC Berkeley occupied Wheeler Hall, the building with the most classrooms on campus. When police arrived a couple of hours before classes began for the day, they found the doors barricaded and a small contingent of supporters gathered outside. Within a few hours campus unions were picketing, and students and workers had surrounded the building, chanting in solidarity. By midday, the number of supporters outside Wheeler Hall had grown to over 2,000, now actively defending the occupation in an impassioned standoff with hundreds of riot cops sent in to enforce order. Hanging from a second floor window was a spray-painted banner reading, “32% HIKE, 1900 LAYOFFS,” and the word “CLASS,” circled with a line through it. Purportedly in response to state funding retrenchment, the UC Regents had approved a 32% tuition hike for UC students across the state the day before. Students were livid.

In fall 2009, across the state, students launched dozens of occupations, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and blockades against the tuition hike and austerity measures. The police responded with repression, using batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and even Tasers. During the Wheeler Hall occupation demonstrations, one student was shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet at point-blank range, another ended up in the hospital after her fingers were nearly amputated by a police baton, and dozens reported being beaten.

“Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops,” read a graduate student nearly two weeks later, standing atop a chair, at a forum organized by the UC student government in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Police Department (UCPD). “The privatization of the UC system and the impoverishment of student life, the UC administration’s conscious choice to shift its burden of debt onto the backs of its students—these can be maintained only by way of police batons, Tasers, barricades and pepper spray. These are two faces of the same thing.”[2]

When he finished reading the statement, the students rose to their feet and followed him out of the room.

***

The 32% fee hike came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with California facing a budget deficit in excess of $11 billion. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested at the time that without immediate action, the deficit would nearly triple.

“I compare the situation that we are in right now to finding an accident victim on the side of the road that is bleeding to death,” he told reporters. “We wouldn’t spend hours debating over which ambulance we should use, or which hospital we should use . . . we would first stop the bleeding, and that’s exactly the same we have to do here.”[3]

The remedy came in the form of sweeping austerity measures, complete with hundreds of layoffs, cuts to campus services, consolidation of academic departments, and a shift of the financial burden from the state onto students. The move wasn’t entirely unexpected. The UC Board of Regents, the 26- member body that approved the 32% fee hike, oversees fee and budgetary decisions on all 10 UC campuses. The majority of its members, however, are not elected, and few of them have a history in education. Eighteen of them are appointed for 12-year terms by the California governor, with backgrounds in commercial real estate, private equity, financial services, investment banking, and consulting.

The state cuts to education came on the heels of a longer term project to restructure California’s public education system. Over the last decade, the Regents and the UC Office of the President (UCOP) expanded top-tier executive positions by more than 120% and roughly doubled middle managers, while only increasing new faculty hires by 25%. Now, under the new measures, a couple thousand staff members were laid off. Eight percent of classes were cut, all university employees faced furloughs, and students were driven into deeper debt. Nevertheless, 10 months after the 32% fee hike, university executives received $11.5 million in bonuses.[4] Although UC president Mark Yudof tried to justify the tuition hikes and austerity measures as necessary adjustments in the face of cuts to state spending, it was clear that the university administration was using the hysteria over very real California funding cuts to legitimize the ballooning administrative apparatus at the expense of students and workers.

Students refused to sit back as their university was privatized. In late September 2009, with the tuition hikes looming, Berkeley students staged the first campus walkout in years, drawing between 5000 and 7000 supporters to the school’s main public space, Sproul Plaza—the largest demonstration turnout at the school in decades.[5] A few thousand rallied at Davis, 700 at UCLA, and hundreds more on other UC campuses, culminating in the weeklong occupation of the graduate student commons at UC Santa Cruz, the first in a wave of occupations that would sweep the state in the coming months.

Nearly two months later, the day before the UC Regents vote, students again took action. UCLA students occupied their school’s Campbell Hall. In Santa Cruz, students and workers effectively shut down the campus for the day and briefly occupied the school’s Kresge Town Hall. The next day they took Kerr Hall and held it for four days. In Davis, students occupied Mrak Hall. Fifty-two people were arrested. The next day, students took Dutton Hall, and then Mrak again a few days later.[6]

All 23 California State Universities (CSU) campuses and several of California’s 112 community colleges (CCCS) also saw sustained actions, ranging from sporadic occupations in the fall 2009 to concurrent marches on every CSU campus and 10 simultaneous occupations in April 2011. That month over 10,000 students and workers at every CSU campus marched in a coordinated day of action. Students held brief occupations on the Stanislaus, Bakersfield, Northridge, Pomona, Fullerton, Monterey Bay, San Jose, San Francisco, and East Bay campuses, and a longer occupation at Sacramento State.[7] Like their counterparts at the UCs, CSU students faced similarly astronomical fee hikes in the face of state divestment. The CSU Board of Trustees raised the school system’s tuition by 32% in 2009. Over the past year, they have increased student fees three more times, totaling a rise of roughly 20%, with an additional 9% hike passed in mid November.[8]

These occupations had laundry lists of specific demands, but the students generally agreed that actions targeted the layoffs and fee hikes. Even those occupations with no specific demands—foreshadowing the current Occupy Wall Street model by a full two years—were interpreted by both campus administrators and the general public as challenging the shift toward a model in which students are forced to finance their education by taking on increasing levels of debt.

***

Along with the tuition hikes and the shriveling state budget for education were sweeping cuts to La Raza Recruitment and Retention Center (RRRC), a volunteer- based campus organization that recruits Latino students to schools across the state. Latino admissions into UC Berkeley declined by 18% for the 2011–12 school year. Faced with these austerity measures, Latino students became increasingly involved.[9] A half-dozen members from UC Berkeley’s student-run Latino Sociology Association participated in the occupation of Wheeler Hall, and many more gathered in support outside. RRRC members became politicized over the course of the spring 2010 with their office increasingly used as an organizing space. In addition to the drop in admission, at least three other factors contributed to the large participation of Latino students in campus actions during the fall 2009 semester. First, a number of key Latino organizers live in Rochdale Village Apartments, a low-cost student housing facility run by the Berkeley Student Cooperative that was in danger of losing its lease agreement with the UC Regents. The students saw the threat to Rochdale as linked to the larger issue of university divestment.

Second, following the passage of SB 1070 in Arizona, more than two-dozen Latino students participated in a hunger strike in the spring 2010 on the UC Berkeley campus to force Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau to denounce the bill. Birgeneau, however, refused to meet with them for over a week. When 200 students, workers, and faculty marched to Birgeneau’s on-campus residence (while he was holding a fundraiser dinner), their request was met with scores of riot cops. Much like the Wheeler occupation of November 2009, the repressive response from the administration further radicalized students. The hunger strike lasted for 11 days and was followed by a similar action the following year, with much the same response.

The third development that especially radicalized Latino students at Berkeley was the threatened consolidation of the various autonomous Ethnic Studies departments into a single unit beginning in 2010. The administration was quick to point out that only a single staff member would be dismissed, but for the already underfunded departments, the push was a significant affront. Many feared the step was a means to quietly phase out the departments, as the American Studies Department (encompassing Ethnic Studies) had just been dissolved at nearby UC Santa Cruz, and Ethnic Studies had just been banned in the state of Arizona.

***

At least partially inspired by the California occupations, students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) shut down their campus for two months in the spring 2010 in response to a tuition hike and austerity measures on the island. Later that year, a pair of UPR student organizers visited UC Berkeley. While it would be a stretch to suggest that California students mined the events at UPR for tactical direction, it was hard not to observe some of the parallels. Just as it was sustained resistance to an impending fee hike that would draw the wrath of riot cops at the UPR in spring 2010, so too has this been the case at campuses across California, where the swift implementation of budget cuts coupled with tuition increases has been backed by both physical and legal forms of repression.[10]

During the 2009 mobilizations, students were beaten, pepper sprayed and even Tasered. At the November 2009 Regents’ meeting at UCLA, pepper spray was projected over a crowd from what appeared to be hoses. Masses of UC Davis students who marched onto a nearby highway against the tuition increases were greeted with beanbag rounds. One woman was forcefully dragged across the pavement and tossed in the back of a police car.[11] The pattern has continued into the latest round of occupations, with Berkeley students battered by police batons and Davis students hosed with pepper spray.

If anything, this escalation of blatant coercion has aided organizing efforts. Students and workers who were previously inclined to dialogue with the administration and UCOP have become some of the most radical activists on campus, eschewing negotiations in favor of more militant modes of contesting austerity measures. Formerly “safe” channels for dissent, such as solidarity pickets with campus unions, are now often surrounded by police who intimidate attendees by filming them for prolonged periods. A number of UC campuses have explicitly encouraged police and administrative infiltration. At Berkeley, a young administrator posed as a student while she attended general assemblies organized by student activists. She then passed along information to the UCPD.[12] UC Santa Cruz paid $6,000 to a private investigator to document student demonstrations, while at UC Davis, undercover officers have regularly marched in plainclothes with protesters.[13]

Following the 2009 actions, lengthy extralegal ordeals most effectively stifled student organizing. Roughly 140 students at Berkeley and dozens on other UC campuses faced sanctions ranging from community service and confessional letter-writing to, in many cases, seven-month suspension and even expulsion. While many students were willing to risk minor disciplinary sanctions and even misdemeanor charges, the threat of suspension or expulsion deterred students from turning out for protests over the course of the next year. In 2010, occasional actions drew close to a thousand fairly militant supporters, but nothing like the crowds of the September 2009 walkout or the Wheeler occupation two months later. During 2010, many of the most active campus organizers continued with anti-austerity work in Oakland, as well as sustained mobilization against police brutality following the killing of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police on New Year’s Day 2009 in Oakland.

With conduct hearings now finished and with the threat of extralegal disciplinary sanctions at its lowest point in at least a year, mobilizing is on the rise. The Occupy Wall Street movement has also helped to reinvigorate student organizing against the effective privatization of California’s public universities—tuition now exceeds state contribution for the first time in UC history.[14] On November 2, a few hundred students marched from the Berkeley campus to the Port of Oakland, joining over 50,000 who shut down the docks for the day as part of an attempted general strike under the banner of Occupy Oakland. (The Oakland encampment had been forcefully evicted by riot cops just days before.)

On November 9, in the largest campus rally in over two years, thousands of students gathered in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza and launched Occupy Cal, with support from occupiers from Occupy Oakland just a few miles away. But with authorization from Birgeneau the police moved in, sending at least two students to the hospital and dozens to jail.

“The student movement is better able to control the actions of students than the administration is able to control the actions of the campus police,” said Alex Barnard, a Berkeley student whose ribs were broken at the protest.[15]

Meanwhile, tuition continues to rise. The most recent scheme pushes fees above $22,000 by the 2015–16 school year. To put this in perspective, California’s free tertiary education system was dismantled through decades of creeping price hikes, in which a relatively negligible “educational fee” introduced in the 1970s surpassed $1,000 for the first time during the 1991–92 academic year. This year at UC Berkeley, fees exceed $14,000 for in-state students and approach $38,000 for out-of-state. The current proposal would reduce the in-state university population by over 15%, producing an estimated 13% drop in black enrollment and 18% in Latino enrollment.[16]

These numbers are misleading, however, for as Los Angeles Times columnist Paul Thornton points out, once room, board, and books are included, the in-state figures “approach $30,000 per year—and feel a lot like the cost of an Ivy League education with few of the perks.”[17] The Regents’ current proposal is contingent upon increased state funding; under this plan, if the state does not augment expenditure on higher education, fees will increase by 16% annually over four years for a sum total of 81%. According to University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UCAFT) president Bob Samuels’ calculations, tuition would exceed $22,000 by the 2015–16 school year, excluding room, board, and books.[18] This, while departments are being slashed and librarians, staff, and untenured faculty laid off, swelling class sizes.

UC tuitions are now increasing at the highest rate of any public university in the United States. While the Regents may still call off the impending 81% fee hike, the damage has been done: workers laid off, students driven into increasing debt, and affordable education thrown to the dogs. We will see in the coming months how successful the convergence of the national Occupy movement and sustained student demonstrations is in pulling off further mobilizations. Will students in California, like those in Chile or Puerto Rico, be able to shut down their campuses indefinitely in order to demand an end to austerity? With the current round of rallies and actions exceeding the size of the 2009 mobilizations, and with the increasing popularity of the tactic of occupation, this seems to be precisely the direction that the statewide fight against austerity is headed.

***

Notes

[1] Nathan Brown, “Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi,” Bicycle Barricade (blog), November 19, 2011.

[2] Reclaim UC (blog), “Statement from ASUC/UCPD ‘Forum,’” December 1, 2009.

[3] BBC News, “California ‘Faces Budget Crisis,’” December 2, 2008.

[4] John Bruning, “Rancor Surrounds Contract for University of California Grad Students,” Labor Notes, December 6, 2010.

[5] Mary O’Hara, “University of California Campuses Erupt into Protest,” The Guardian (UK), September 24, 2009.

[6] For a map of statewide actions during the this period see After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California (Winter 2010): 2, afterthefallcommuniques.info.

[7] Those Who Use It (blog), “Wave of Brief Occupations Sweeps California; 10,000 March on All 23 CSU Campuses,” April 13, 2011.

[8] Lisa M. Krieger, “CSU Proposes 9 Percent Fee Increase,” Mercury News, November 15, 2011.

[9] Josh Keller, “As Berkeley Enrolls More Out-of-State Students, Racial Diversity May Suffer,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2009.

[10] Rima Brusi-Gil de Lamadrid, “The University of Puerto Rico: A Testing Ground for the Neoliberal State,” NACLA Report on the Americas 2, no. 44 (2011).

[11] The video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6BYPN5dIq0.

[12] See pp. 70, 147, 152, and 232 of a dossier of administrative documents from fall 2009 obtained via public records request, available at tinyurl.com/8yxtqvh.

[13] Laurel Fujii and April Short, “Public Records Reveal University Surveillance of Student Organizers,” City on a Hill Press, March 3, 2011; see also Janelle Bitker, “Students, ACLU, Media Scrutinize Attempts to Monitor Protests,” California Aggie, April 12, 2011.

[14] Larry Gordon, “A First: UC Fees Exceed State Funding,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2011.

[15] Tyler Kingkade, “UC Chancellor Orders Internal Review in Light of Police Violence,” The Huffington Post, November 14, 2011.

[16] Keller, op. cit.

[17] Paul Thornton, “Is a $26,000 UC Education Still a Deal?,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2009.

[18] Bob Samuels, “UC Might Increase Tuition 81% over the Next Four Years,” Changing Universities (blog), September 12, 2011.

Delegitimate UC

2011-12-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

By Rei Terada

[Audio version here]

The moment we’re in right now is auspicious, fragile, and surprisingly well-defined. The thing that strikes me most about the moment is how much it is a particular moment, with specific characteristics and borders. It appears as the clearest-looking and most pregnant moment since students starting taking action in Fall 2009. It’s the moment we’ve hoped to attain since Fall 2009. And now that it’s here, it won’t last long.

In Fall 2009, UC’s upper administration must have assumed that they could wait out the student movement. This assumption has been proven false by a relatively small core of student activists who weathered a very difficult year in 2010-2011. What resources does the administration have for surviving the student movement, so that it can go ahead with privatization? (1) The frequent and intimidating use of the UCPD; (2) the criminalization of protest, including prosecution in criminal courts; (3) control of the UC bureaucracy; (4) a media strategy of deflecting attention to the Legislature (a strategy whose logical end would be the headline “Regents On Same Page with Angry Mob”); (5) unlimited funds at their disposal to pursue 1-4.

But we have seen the weaknesses in these strategies.

Policing and criminalization have not stopped the protests. In fact, they have got in the way of the UC media strategy, as public attention has turned from the budget shortfall to outrages that UC administrators themselves are ordering. This means that two of the five fronts that UC administration has controlled have shifted, and their media strategy is damaged. They realize this, and they’re not sure what to do about it. The cancelled CSU meeting, semi-cancelled Regents meeting, new rules for protesters issued by UC Riverside, the responses of the Regents to the interruption of their meeting, the response of UC San Diego to students breaking into their library on Monday, and the various appointed commissions are all examples of administrative reaction to the transformation of the police and criminalization arenas. One thing that can be gleaned from the assorted reactions is that it’s likely to be a long time before police do anything incriminating on camera again. I think activists realize that in future, UCPD is not likely to offer up such means for galvanizing campus solidarity as the pepper spray video has been. Of course, I’m not saying that UCPD is going to be non-violent now, but rather that it’s not likely to be the kind of violence that you can photograph. We’ll need to find other ways to photograph privatization, and other ways to continue trying to get through to the media what privatization is.

In order to explain why I think getting through to the press matters, I need to go back to my list of UC administrators’ resources. Of those categories of resources, their strongholds are their ability to fund infinitely their usurpation projects and their control of the bureaucracy. What is a UC administrator? What makes Dean Edley possible? Where is Dean Edley manufactured? I’ve been a department chair, if of a small department, and in my experience the existential substance of an administrator depends on (a) funds and (b) the internal politics of bureaucracy understood in terms of detachable self-interests, otherwise known as: what other administrators think. In my time as a chair, the only way it was possible to get anything to happen was to make or threaten to make one administrator look bad in the eyes of another. It’s to this extent that administrators care about the media: when they look bad in the press, it matters because other administrators are watching.

The Regents have defined their funding as private funding, and given the confluence of their interests and the interests of their private funders—who are often enough one and the same, as in the person of Richard Blum—they’re never going to run out of it. However, attacks on the salaries of the administration are worthwhile. They’re worthwhile not because they solve the budget crisis, as the Regents like to say, but for every other reason: first of all because they speak to justice and the broader Occupy movement and the press understands that; secondly because the funds are real and certainly would be more useful almost anywhere else; but also because we might take the administration at its word and consider the possibility that “talented people,” by which they mean themselves, would flee the UC system if their salaries were lowered at all. If upper administration cares about its salaries so much—enough to keep incurring bad publicity, which they also care about—we should keep attacking their salaries, and most of all, their ability to set their own salaries.

But that’s a minor point: the goal is not merely to pick off Regents but to change social relations.

So now I come to the last resource they have, control of the bureaucracy through control of the support of other administrators. At this point, UC bureaucracy has a complex relationship to faculty governance. Upper administration has avoided and circumvented faculty governance to advance privatization, for example by operating through appointed task forces interpolated into the system of standing Academic Senate committees. Yet they still rely on faculty to staff these task forces and to deliberate on and implement their conclusions. Thus, it remains inescapable to consider the role of the faculty and the question of the relation of representational procedural democracy to the movement to Reclaim UC. My impression is that so far, most UC faculty have considered it their role—our role?—their role—to fight privatization through the given governance and social structures, regardless of what their political beliefs are off campus. In other words, people who aren’t proceduralist liberals off campus or in their writing on campus fight privatization through Senate committees, faculty associations, and social groups committed to a dialectic of recognition with the administrators as antagonists. The idea is that even as direct actions by students are going on, these representational and discursive realms remain worth intervening in and reflect a kind of division of labor between students and faculty. (It’s also not a negligible factor that the Faculty Code of Conduct may be even more repressive than the Student Code of Conduct.)

I’d like to suggest that given the significance of bureaucracy as an administrative stronghold, the arena of bureaucracy is worth intervening in if and only if the legitimacy of governance by upper administration is negated by the intervention. A professor who agrees to be on a committee thinking that from that position she’ll be able to limit damage and fearing that if she is not on it things will be even worse is not negating the legitimacy of the administration, so that should not be done.

But a resolution introduced in the Academic Senate, or issued by an individual department, stating that the Regents should not be allowed to set the salaries of upper administrators would reject their legitimacy and would be worth doing, not least because it would be news. A resolution by the Riverside Academic Senate, or individual departments, rejecting the brutish rules for protest that UCR’s Dean of Students has just invented would negate their legitimacy and would be worth doing. One of the remarkable things that happened quietly a couple of weeks ago which shouldn’t be lost amid the spectacular things that also happened is that the departments of Asian-American Studies, English, and Physics, as well as a group of historians, at Davis released statements expressing no confidence in their chancellor autonomously, without going through a given bureaucratic structure for resolutions or comment. Nor did they speak as atomized individuals gathered temporarily on a petition. Rather, they identified themselves as un-Chancellor-friendly ongoing spaces and created a new form of relation to Davis administration. Further, they pulled the Law faculty into responding to them in kind.

The faculty response at Davis was the first instance that I know of that the Administration’s hold on the bureaucracy itself—its structure and its hegemonic representative capacity for faculty—could be weakening. If they lose their grip on the bureaucracy, the upper administration will be exposed to the contempt of their national peers; and being administrators, they would experience that as an existential threat.

So I’m brought around to something I never thought I would recommend: faculty reinforcements—faculty participation of a targeted sort—in the movement to Reclaim UC, so that we can follow these departments at Davis into a new area of contestation. Public response to the acts of Berkeley professors Celeste Langan, Robert Hass and Geoffrey O’Brien, who were beaten alongside student protesters by Berkeley police on November 9, show that professorial participation in anything that delegitimates the Administration is disproportionately effective. The disproportion is disturbing because a faculty body seems to be worth more than a student body. That’s a problem. But only their participation could bring that problem to light where it otherwise would have remained hidden. In order to keep and increase pressure on the administration at this moment when the police front may be disappearing from visibility, one thing we should do—faculty and students (and here I have just used a version of the first person plural that I thought no longer existed)—is negate the legitimacy of the police-related commissions, especially the ones farcically composed by Yudof. Their egregiousness is legible, even to the uninitiated, even to the press; and for that reason they are an excellent introduction to privatization and anti-privatization.

The People’s Police Review Board deploys a principle we all need to support. If faculty show up at a stop of Dean Edley’s listening tour among protesters making it clear that it’s outrageous that the event is happening at all, that will be disproportionately useful. Boycotting the events, making it clear why not to show up, would also be useful. Instituting an actual alternative review board on whatever collective level is possible would be excellent. Why wait for Yudof to withdraw his appointments? Why shouldn’t faculty and students form an alternative body and demand that the witnesses responding to Yudof’s review respond, while they’re at it, to our own?

What matters here is form and principle. The outcome would not be merely the propositional conclusion of the investigation, nor UCPD’s refusal to comply with one, and the corresponding demands these events would generate. Rather, what’s important is the capacity of self-respecting communal forms to dramatize the administration’s illegitimacy using Yudof’s commission as an illustration. Given that faculty bodies are worth more to the University and media than student bodies, students are going to have a much harder time delegitimating the administration without this particular kind of faculty support: the kind that involves professors’ asking themselves, What are we doing to legitimate and delegitimate privatization?, ceasing to do the former and making sure to do the latter. The grievable faculty body reaps advantage every time faculty appear in the service of delegitimation, and only then.

To sum up, then: many areas of the struggle are changing rapidly and some may be vanishing as we have known them. These sudden shifts in terrain reflect the pain the movement is inflicting on the Administration and the unevenness of its reactions. Things are moving so rapidly that we could easily fail to adjust. If that happened, it could be difficult to get into a similar place again. So winter quarter is the time to expand into the very areas into which the Regents have retreated by undermining the conditions that support administrators as administrators, and which are their main refuge, and making this effort literally visible (everything now should be photographed and filmed as artfully as we can manage it). Funding they will always have; but with their contacts, they can just as well have it somewhere else, and I suspect that thought has flitted through the mind of every UC administrator. Contesting administrators’ control of bureaucracy matters because they experience that control as the anchor of their identity, and this is one of their limitations, a soft spot in their mental and material organization. My philosophical emphasis is on non-instrumental and negative thought and non-teleological self-constitution, so it may seem to go against the grain to have offered reflections that are so prosaic. But this is a matter of historical and perceptual scale. There is a degree of magnification, a middle distance, that is always prosaic even as it is surrounded by an infinite and unsystemizable complexity. Needless to say, all of this is worth doing regardless of what happens after.

ACLU checks UCPD/Admin's shady review of police violence on Nov. 9

2011-12-12T13:20:00.000-08:00

2011.12.12 Letter to UCB Re Investigation Process

A Letter Of Thanks You Won't See In Today's Mainstream Media Coverage Of West Coast Port Actions

2011-12-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports

December 12, 2011

We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.

We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the five of us we have 11children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.

We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.

Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?

We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families.

There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.

We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.

Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.

You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.

Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.

It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.”

But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal operator that runs one of the West Coast’s major trucking carriers, Shippers’ Transport Express, doing this? Why would mega-rich Maersk, a huge Danish shipping and trucking conglomerate that wants to drill for more oil with Exxon Mobil in the Gulf Coast conduct business this way too?

To cheat on taxes, drive down business costs, and deny us the right to belong to a union, that’s why.

The typical arrangement works like this: Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks. The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it. Our employers do not have to pay the costs of meeting emissions-compliant regulations; that is our financial burden to bear. Clean trucks cost about four to five times more than what we take home in a year. A few of us haul our company’s trucks for a tiny fraction of what the shippers pay per load instead of an hourly wage. They still call us independent owner-operators and give us a 1099 rather than a W-2.

We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?

Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who haul clothing brands like Guess?, Under Armour, and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. The carrier they work for in Los Angeles is called Toll Group and is headquartered in Australia. At the busiest time of the holiday shopping season, 26 drivers were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. The company hired an anti-union consultant to intimidate the drivers. Down Under, the same company bargains with 12,000 of our counterparts in good faith.

Despite our great hardships, many of us cannot — or refuse to, as some of the most well-intentioned suggest — “just quit.” First, we want to work and do not have a safety net. Many of us are tied to one-sided leases. But more importantly, why should we have to leave? Truck driving is what we do, and we do it well.

We are the skilled, specially-licensed professionals who guarantee that Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart are all stocked with just-in-time delivery for consumers. Take a look at all the stuff in your house. The things you see advertised on TV. Chances are a port truck driver brought that special holiday gift to the store you bought it.

We would rather stick together and transform our industry from within. We deserve to be fairly rewarded and valued. That is why we have united to stage convoys, park our trucks, marched on the boss, and even shut down these ports.

It’s like our hero Dutch Prior, a Shipper’s/SSA Marine driver, told CBS Early Morning this month: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice.

Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.”

But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here.

We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.”

Thank you.

In solidarity,

Leonardo Mejia
SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express
Port of Long Beach
10-year driver

Yemane Berhane
Ports of Seattle & Tacoma
6-year port driver

Xiomara Perez
Toll Group
Port of Los Angeles
8-year driver

Abdul Khan
Port of Oakland
7-year port driver

Ramiro Gotay
Ports of New York & New Jersey
15-year port driver

On the UCPD's 5150 detention of Alex Kim (Update: Alex has been released)

2011-12-11T23:07:00.000-08:00

Update (11:31, Sunday evening): Alex has been released from Alta Bates.

***

Last Wednesday evening, as I sat on the Mario Savio Steps in front of Sproul Hall waiting for the Peoples’ Police Review Board meeting to begin, Alex Kim greeted me and silently handed me a small flower. Each time I visit the site of our Occupy Cal encampment, I look forward to seeing him and hearing him play the violin or just adding a bit of friendliness to our little community. Alex has continuously occupied our encampment since the day it was erected, and beginning in late November, he took a voluntary vow of silence as a means of nonviolent protest.

At 4:38 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Alex was approached by UCPD officers who grabbed and handcuffed him before taking him away. According to several witnesses, police officers responded that he was arrested under Section 5150 of the California Welfare Institutions Code, which states, “When any person, as a result of mental disorder, is a danger to others, or to himself or herself, or gravely disabled,” he or she can be taken to “a facility designated by the county and approved by the State Department of Mental Health as a facility for 72-hour treatment and evaluation.” In other words, as a result of his choice to remain silent, Alex was deemed mentally unfit. But we understand that this was not the real reason for his arrest; rather, Alex was targeted for his dedication to the Occupy Movement.

As someone who knows Alex, I believe that this is a truly abhorrent abuse of police power—one that threatens all of us with arbitrary and psychologically damaging detentions under the auspices of public safety. Not only have our freedoms of assembly and speech been repressed, but now, even our constitutional right to remain silent is being actively undermined.

-Beezer de Martelly

image from the daily cal.

Rei Terada's talk at Dec. 7 Forum

2011-12-11T18:20:00.000-08:00

Worth listening to in full:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26534530/rei.mp3

Text version is here.

Notes from Dec 10 nor-cal planning meeting

2011-12-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

This Saturday's planning meeting was a huge success. Over 100 people came from a wide range of sectors and organizing spaces; we all packed into the UAW office in downtown Berkeley (after awhile, the space got a bit toasty).

Despite the fact that we were mostly strangers to each other, we forged a real sense of common purpose yesterday; by the end of the meeting, we were engaging in collaborative debate about mass actions with an inspiring level of thoughtfulness and sensitivity to each other and to the auspicious political moment in which we find ourselves.

As a comrade, who took these notes, said: "The spring is shaping up to be truly awesome."

OUTLINE OF THE MAJOR PROPOSAL ON WHICH WE DECIDED

*** Day of Action March 1, 2012, followed by a March to Sacramento, March 5 Rally, and Occupation of Capitol Building ***

~We are calling for a Day of Action across the state on March 1, 2012, where each sector/location/body self-organizes locally (+ regionally if they choose) to support public education and social services for the 99%.
~Following this Day of Action, we call for a march to converge on Sacramento in time for the March 5 rally for education initially called by the student governments. (We are considering a multi-day, continuous march from the east bay, but honor broad forms of participation in the actions leading up to the fifth).
~We call to "Occupy the Capitol" (building) for several days, beginning on March 5, and this space will be a hub from which we can plan other kinds of actions (such as marching on The Chamber of Commerce, on banks, etc., which are in close proximity to the capitol);
~We will begin autonomous build-up actions starting in late January/early February (these include several of the other proposals not mentioned above)

NEXT MEETING
~Saturday, December 17th @ 12pm, 2070 Allston Way, Suite #205 in Berkeley, CA
(anyone who wants to participate on the facilitation committee should meet at 11:15)
~Goals: set up working groups and plan next steps; generate a way for all of us to coordinate and stay in touch
~Call/Stream In: Organizers will try to make this meeting accessible through establishing a call in # or streaming the meeting

REPORT BACKS
~Occupy Cal: following the forceful crackdown on the OC encampment on 11/9, OC hosted a mass General Assembly of thousands who voted to approve an Open Letter calling for a sequence of mass actions beginning early next semester: http://www.change.org/petitions/open-letter-defend-ca-public-education
~Against Cuts: plan to march to Sacramento on March 5th as part of a large mobilization for public education
~Campaign for Millionaires' Tax: filed for a ballot measure to tax the superrich; will need to gather many signatures in January
~Local 1481/Jefferson High School District: currently organizing students to go to board meetings in an attempt to block massive spending cuts
~Occupy UCSC: interested in forging UC-wide network
~UAW 2865: achieved statewide endorsement for the Occupy Cal Open Letter; working to restructure and democratize the education system across the state as well as the Regents (several seats will be vacant in the next few years)
~BFT/Occupy Oakland: the education sector will play a major role in mobilizing for the port shut down on 12/12 in solidarity with port workers' and truckers' unions
~SF State/Statewide Employee Union: working with Re-Fund Cal; believe we need to move beyond lobbying
~CA Faculty Association: were able to shut down Cal State East Bay through mass strike action
~CFT: Peralta is currently fighting against Morgan Stanley for issuing a bad loan
~KPFA/KPFK: will host a statewide show about the privatization of and assault on public education; get in touch if interested in helping
~Oakland Education Association: facing several school closures, and teachers have been very active in movements and strikes
~EDU/United Educators of SF: concerned about Gov. Brown's "trigger cuts" and his stance on no concessions or raises for teachers;
~Occupy SF: planning an action on the date that Gov. Brown's "trigger cuts" are announced
~City College SF: hope to host a more permanent occupation in the spring to activate more community college students
~Occupy UC Davis: interested in organizing with larger networks cross-sectorally; in it for the long haul; email info@occupyucdavis.org
~Occupy Stanford: have been occupying library for last two weeks and hosting teach-ins
~UPTE: working with other unions; large support for this movement
~Occupy Oakland Education Committee: in protest of the Oakland school closures, there will be a rally at Laney College this coming Wednesday beginning at 4:30, where people will march to the school board meeting at 5
~BAMN: in support of those who were arrested at Berkeley on 11/9, there will be an arraignment rally on Monday Dec. 12 at 8:30 am at Wiley Manuel Courthouse
~Student Action for Education/De Anza College: working to build community college network

Monday December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown

2011-12-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

The December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown.
For more information, see http://westcoastportshutdown.org/

Monday 12/12 Oakland Schedule (at bottom of poster as well):

5:30am: West Oakland BART, March to Port
3pm: Rally at 14th and Broadway (Oscar Grant Plaza)
4pm: March to Port from Oscar Grant Plaza
5pm: West Oakland BART, March to Port

From Noon to 3pm, there will be performances at Oscar Grant Plaza.

This will be the biggest move the Occupy Wall Street Movement has embarked on.

12 Reasons To Shut Down The Port of Oakland on December 12.

From "Occupy vs. Big Labor" by Emily Loftis

"On Dec. 12, general assemblies (the decentralized governing bodies of OWS) in Los Angeles, Oakland, Calif., Tacoma, Wash., Santa Barbara, Calif., Portland, Ore., Seattle, Longview, Wash., San Diego, Anchorage, California’s Port Hueneme region, and dozens of smaller camps plan to blockade ports and halt commerce for a day. There is a combined Dallas-Houston effort to demonstrate at the port in Houston. Japanese rail workers, who are sympathetic to longshoremen, who work a partner company of Bunge — the company Occupy is protesting — will be demonstrating in Japan.

Farther inland, Denver will try to shut down a Walmart distribution center. Occupy Bellingham may block coal trains; and landlocked California occupiers will bus to the coast."

De-Provincializing Police Violence: on the recent events at UC Davis

2011-12-09T11:04:00.000-08:00

UC Riverside Dylan Rodriguez on "(historically white) university campuses as places of presumed innocence":

University of California, Davis police officer pepper spraying protesting students, November 18, 2011

I. Beyond “police brutality”...

We should be clear: the UC Davis police used caustic “nonlethal” spray on those student protestors because they could. The institutional entitlement to use such police force, however ill-advised it may seem in hindsight, is neither incidental nor ad hoc—it is systemic, legally supported, and absolutely normal. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the acquittal of five Los Angeles Police Department officers in the street torture of Rodney King, it is urgent to once again examine how police violence shapes our everyday realities in different and contradictory ways.

(A note on the prevailing language: “police brutality” has become a vastly misused term. While the phrase intends to communicate a sharp criticism of state power that has presumably violated its own self-defined laws and regulations, it is often used to refer to violent police practices that are utterly, ritually sanctioned by law.)

The public response to the display of police violence at UC Davis has been predictably characterized by a combination of righteous outrage and institutional shaming, accompanied by somewhat more muted and unconvincing—though equally predictable—defenses of the UC Davis police department and chancellor. Two facts are not in question: first, the campus deployed an armed police force to squash a conventional act of civil disobedience that was, in the recent historical scheme of things, quite institutionally polite and undisruptive; second, that same armed police force was authorized to use nonlethal weapons on nonviolent student protestors. (We must also remember that the spraying of such chemicals has been widely known to cause death in many instances.)

What does remain in question, however, is how and why these facts are being translated into a liberal-progressive political reaction that seems to naturalize—that takes for granted and/or completely obscures—the fundamentally racial and racist structure of US policing, which finds its modern roots in slave patrols, US colonial military outfits (in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere), Texas Rangers (killers of Apaches, Cherokees, and Comanches), and white citizens’ militias throughout the post-Civil War era North and South. In other words, is it possible that much of the critical response to the scene at UC Davis is actually condoning racist police violence rather than challenging it, and if so, what is enabling such critically-minded people to do so?

II. The liberal racial sensibility

The video evidence of police repression widely circulated from the UC Davis campus via YouTube (etc.) has quickly taken hold of a liberal racial sensibility that absolutely abhors “police brutality” when it is waged on peaceful and/or nonviolent student protestors. (Progressives, radicals, anarchists, and other leftists often share in this liberal racial sensibility despite their left-of-liberal self-identifications.) We must be willing to acknowledge that the political and moral indignation over such excessive displays of nonlethal state violence (that is, pepper spray rather than bullets) is quite openly amplified when such tactics are used on white students, in the space of historically white institutions (as of Fall 2010, Davis had more white students enrolled than any UC campus besides UCLA).

There is something structurally white supremacist about this very indignation: the political expressions of outrage and institutional shaming over the spectacle at UC Davis are fueled by an over-identification with (historically white) university campuses as places of presumed innocence, wherein enrolled and employed (white) bodies are also presumed to presume innocence. If we are to be honest in this moment, we must also recognize that many have only now been provoked into talking and thinking critically about the violence of the police because they are moved to defend the presumption of white bodily and spatial innocence, and are not necessarily concerned about police violence against those whose bodies (and the spaces they inhabit) are presumed guilty, or something close to it.

III. De-provincializing UC Davis

As the dust begins to settle from the spectacle and outrage surrounding the campus police’s use of chemical weapons on those students at UC Davis, it becomes ever more necessary to de-provincialize this form of state violence. By this, I mean something beyond the self-evident assertion that the acts of the UC Davis police and chancellor are “not isolated incidents”: the question is whether we adequately understand how they are not isolated incidents. The installation of militarized police forces on US college and university campuses—a practice several decades old—must be understood within the general social and historical context of domestic policing, and the specific policing imperative to engage in undisguised modalities of domestic racialized warfare, by way of wars on gangs, drugs, migrants, terror(ists), and so forth.

To de-provincialize the police violence at UC Davis is to take seriously the notion that the nonlethal (though no less repugnant) violence of those particular university-based police officers would have been impossible without the absolutely lethal and regular exercises of police violence in places (and on bodies) nowhere near that grassy campus quad. My more fundamental concern thus lies with the policed, human raw material that precedes and exceeds those pepper sprayed students at Davis.
Apolitically policed Black and Brown bodies—young and old, urban and rural, transgender, queer, and straight—are incapable of extracting anything remotely like the consensus of liberal outrage surrounding (and ultimately protecting) the openly political policing of white, able-bodied college youth. While all policing is fundamentally “political,” only a select few of its forms are addressed as such.

This political abyss, the one that allows for acute indignation to be reserved for the policing of those presumed racially innocent (white), reflects a political and spatial provincialism that some of us simply cannot afford to stomach, and which gets to the heart of a racial antagonism that structures major strains of many progressive, social-justice oriented struggles, including the domestic Occupy movement.

Despite the outpouring of righteous and anxious statements from university administrators and other public officials disavowing this allegedly isolated instance of excessive state violence, there was a reason why those riot-geared UC Davis officers—who had to know they were performing for the cameras—did not hesitate to (nonlethally) fire. It is not difficult to see that in the post-1960’s period, militarized police repression of actual and potential political disorder is as American as the atom bomb. However, what is too quickly taken for granted is that the primary places in which such police power is exercised are the very same that are least likely to send their young people to places like UC Davis, and which are the primary sites for which the state has trained its police to engage in domestic, low-intensity warfare by way of drug sweeps, no-knock warrants, street harassment, traffic stops, and justified use of (deadly) force. What is to be made of the UC Davis police action of November 18, 2011, once we understand that the foundation of those officers’ presumed right to violence is not in some failure of bureaucratic protocol, nor in the obvious evidence of poor administrative leadership, but instead derives from the generalized legal, political, and cultural mandate of the US policing apparatus to dispense force as it sees fit?

Whether or not the officers and administrators implicated in these latest exercises of campus police violence are kept on the job, we can be certain that they will not face legal or criminal sanction, a fact that is so broadly and preemptively assumed that any possibility to the contrary is almost never mentioned in public discourse. The insulation of policing from the very criminal legal apparatus that it supposedly serves (and many would contend that the relation of service is the other way around) is what constitutes the operational premise for such exercises of state violence. It is this relation—and not the alleged excessiveness, illegality, or “brutality” of the police violence itself—that must be confronted if the goal is to be something more than just another piecemeal expression of localized shock and awe.

The diverse and complex practices of police violence are not only inseparable from the institutional evolution of policing in the last half-century, they are essential to the very institutional integrity and identity of the US police regime writ large. All of which begs a fundamental question: if the policing apparatus cannot be corrected, punished, or reformed against its own institutional entitlement to exercise violence more or less at will, in accordance with the law, and “within policy”—that is, if the solution is not simply to get the cops to “do their jobs better,” since in most everyday exercises of police violence (including fatal ones) they are generally affirmed as having done their jobs pretty damn well—then what political responses are available, and toward what ends?

IV. Yudof and Bratton: the case for (low-intensity) war

Now that University of California President Mark Yudof has called in domestic war expert and current LAPD Chief of Police William Bratton and his high-tech Kroll Security Group to conduct a “truthful and objective” (Bratton’s words) investigation of the mess at UC Davis, the lesson should be clear: the site of the (public) university is as much a focus of strategic state (and police) militarization and repressive mobilization as it is of budgetary “crisis” and de-funding.

Let us not forget that this is the same Bratton who pioneered “zero tolerance” (or “broken windows”) policing as a method to surveil, terrorize, and criminalize Black, Brown, and poor people in New York City throughout the 1990s. Bratton’s policing strategy during this period facilitated a dense climate of police harassment and violence against Black and Latino/a youth, based on often flimsy suspicion of such offenses as loitering, public noise, avoiding subway fees, and truancy. His name remains a Satan-like reference for the many who experienced (survived) the grip of his regime in NYC.

It was also Bratton who, as the Los Angeles police chief, endorsed a rather incredible 2007 study by the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Group that concluded that despite more than 300 official complaints filed by LA residents, LAPD officers had not once stopped, detained, questioned, or otherwise engaged a civilian as a result of their perceived racial identity (about 80% of these racial profiling complaints were dismissed out of hand by Internal Affairs as “unfounded”). This was the sixth consecutive year in which Bratton would proudly assert that there was not a single example of racially-based misconduct among his officers. Further, despite the explosive and recent revelations of the Ramparts Division scandal in the late-1990s, the videotaped police beating of disabled Black teenager Donovan Jackson near the beginning of Bratton’s first LAPD term in 2002, the now infamous 2007 police riot at the MacArthur Park immigrant rights rally, the rampant use of “gang injunctions” to detain, humiliate, and physically violate Black and Brown children and youth, and myriad other instances of police violence, it was the same Bratton who stated in 2008 that the LAPD “is not a racist department. It is not a homophobic department. It is not a brutal department.” (LA Times, April 30, 2008) In addition to all of this, it is also Bratton who has advocated hiring police officers from communities of color in order to magically make “policing more attractive to a changing population.” (The Guardian, August 13, 2011)

Without belaboring the point, the fact that Bratton has been hired by Yudof, will be paid with public funds to conduct the UC Davis investigation, and retains even a shred of credibility as an impartial or “objective” investigator of police violence/brutality is somewhere beyond absurd. It is no less than a pronouncement that the University of California is a place of toxic hostility for those who rationally (and self-defensively) view Bratton—and, for that matter, the police—as the diametric opposite of peace and security. Some would venture to say that Bratton’s entry is merely the crystallization of an institutionalized racial hostility that has aggressively inclined since the passing of Proposition 209 in 1996, which exterminated affirmative action initiatives, dramatically shifted the racial and socioeconomic demographics of the UC student body, and brought even more suspicion on those Black and Brown bodies walking across campus.

There is something else about the UC President’s hiring of Bratton and the Kroll Group that is worth considering. State and campus administrators seem to clearly understand that in the history of progressive, leftist, radical, and revolutionary social movements, university and college campuses worldwide have consistently played central roles as on-the-ground think tanks, centers of massive political mobilization, and major catalysts for the initiation, sustenance, and fulfillment of world-altering visions of political insurgency and social change. American apartheid was dismantled in significant part due to the political organizing undertaken by and with students, on and adjacent to college and university campuses. The recent emergence of the anti-prison industrial complex and prison abolitionist movement has been fueled by major public gatherings and consistent political actions at places like Columbia Law School, Laney College (Oakland, CA), and UC Berkeley. Recently, Occupy sites have sprouted up at colleges and universities all over the US, though perhaps most conspicuously on UC campuses (thanks to the UCD police). This history is further reason why the recent UC Davis police violence must be deprovincialized: because campus police and their administrators already view themselves within a global and historical context of managing, containing, co-opting, and repressing the potentially explosive and disordering political mobilizations that can happen just outside their office windows.

Allow me to briefly mention a recent development at my own place of work to illustrate the point in detail: on November 22, 2011, a mere four days after the pepper spray had cleared at Davis, the UC Riverside Office of Student Affairs, led by the Dean of Students, issued a declaration of “Protest Guidelines.” The document is framed by the affirmation, at once paternalistic and Orwellian, that “FREE SPEECH IS WELCOME HERE.” (All caps in the original.) It proceeds by providing a detailed protocol for “How to have a successful protest at UCR.”

What follows reads more like amateur political satire than serious university policy. First, the “CHECKLIST TO PLAN YOUR PROTEST” dictates that a registered UCR student organization or campus department must “sponsor your protest” at least a month before the event. Then, at least 2 weeks prior to the event, protest organizers must contact the Assistant Dean of Students and meet with an “Event Review Committee” that will “preview your preliminary plans.” In the meantime, potential protest organizers are put on notice that “protests with multiple risk factors, and/or an expected audience of over 100 will take more time to approve.” During the actual event, protestors are directed to appoint a “contact person” who will “consult with the Assistant Dean of Students or UCR designee throughout the event.” To top it off, this protest contact person and the Assistant Dean/UCR designee are instructed to “Exchange cell phone numbers.” (The entire document is available here: http://deanofstudents.ucr.edu/SiteCollectionDocuments/Policies_Procedures/protestguidelines.pdf)

Such are not simply small-minded rules conceived in the friendliest spirit of political intimidation (the consequences for not following the protocol are never mentioned in the document). We must recognize that they comprise a particular tactic within the framework of low-intensity domestic war. Implicit threats of student suspension and expulsion, faculty subjection to conduct and disciplinary procedures (via the Committee on Charges, to which a case against the author was brought and dismissed in 2002-2003), and police intervention hover over the UCR Protest Guidelines and similar campus protocols elsewhere. While none of this is to be confused with the worst of Bratton’s NYPD or LAPD, the UCR document’s criminalization of potential political disorder (“free speech” run amuck, without permission or approval) is not far from the police chief’s “zero tolerance” philosophy of social control.

V. If they’ll do that to them…

The galling ease with which the UC Davis cops sprayed those students—as if they were exterminators treating an ant infestation—is not best understood as primary evidence of mentally unstable, corrupt, or evil individual police officers who must be individually punished and held accountable for their actions. Rather, it is the very casualness of their violence that provides insight as to the historical depth and institutional reach of the late-20th and early 21st century US racist state. The bare fact that armed police officers at an elite public university can douse (white) students with clouds of pepper spray provokes some of us to translate that scene into a language of deeper alienation and terror: If the cops are willing to do that to white college kids, what are they willing—and probably eager—to do to us? Of course, the “us” cannot be homogenized here, because anyone remotely familiar with the history of racist US state violence recognizes that the police consistently deploy different strategies and intensities of force on different bodies, based on geographic location, racial profile, perceived gender and sexual identity, presumed non-citizen status, and so forth.

Nonetheless, the point should be clear: if we are to treat the UC Davis scenario as something more than an isolated incident of officers gone wild—and many students, activists, teachers, journalists, and other thinkers clearly wish to do so—we cannot help but come face-to-face with the enduring and complicated machinery of the racist state. If they’ll do this to upwardly mobile white people on a liberal Northern California college campus, what will they do to the rest of us, especially those whose guilt is more or less presumed in the eyes of the police as well as their recent critics?

-Dylan Rodriguez, UC Riverside

Debt, Democracy, and the Public University

2011-12-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

How to Contact the Regents by Email

2011-12-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

From Charlie Schwartz's University Probe, an email thread on bureaucratic impunity and the UC regents:

On the official web site of the Regents of the University of California it says, “If you would like to email the Regents, please address your comments to Regents Office (regentsoffice@ucop.edu).” Alternatively, you can find that Marsha Kelman is the Secretary and Chief of Staff to The Regents and her email address is marsha.kelman@ucop.edu.

Here is my recent experience with that channel of communication.

- - - - - - - - - -
9/16/2011
Marsha Kelman
Secretary and Chief of Staff to The Regents

Dear Marsha;

Please forward the attached letter (via email, so as to retain
electronic links therein) to each member of the Board of Regents.

Thank you,
Charlie

- - - - - - - - - -
11/3/11
Marsha Kelman
Secretary and Chief of Staff to The Regents
UC Office of the President

Dear Marsha;

... On September 16 I sent you some material... which I asked to be distributed to the regents. Was that distribution carried out? And if so, in what manner?

Thank you,
Charles Schwartz

Professor Emeritus
UC Berkeley

- - - - - - - - - -
11/9/11

Professor Schwartz,

... We have not located the email you sent on September 16. If you will send it again, I’m happy to make it available to the Regents through our normal correspondence process.

Marsha

- - - - - - - - - -
11/9/11

Marsha;

Here is the email I sent you on September 16. Please acknowledge immediately that you have received this.

I cannot imagine how the original email did not reach you.

Charlie

- - - - - - - - - -
11/9/11
Charlie,

I have received your email with the attachment.

Marsha

- - - - - - - - - -
11/10/11

Marsha;

My original request was that you forward my letter (which was the attachment) to each regent by email. Will this be done? When?

Charlie

- - - - - - - - - -
11/10/11

Charlie,

Our process is the same one we’ve had in place for many years. We list the
correspondence we have received and ask the Regents what they would like copies of for review...

Marsha

- - - - - - - - - -
11/10/11

Marsha;

Thank you for FINALLY acknowledging what I had feared: That it is almost impossible for an ordinary person to communicate with members of the Board!

Charlie

Keep Calm and Study On

2011-12-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

If Yudof thinks of us as corpses, Katehi wants to see us as cows. "Keep calm and study on."

(via fb)

From "Pepper spray nation"

2011-12-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

Original post by Paul Rosenberg here.

"Behind the headline-grabbing brutality of the pepper-spray video lies a decades-long story of the gradual privatisation of California's public college and university system - even as resources shifted to building a massive prison system instead. On the one hand, students face skyrocketing tuition costs - up more than 1,000 per cent in just over two decades, if current plans go forward - while tax increases on the wealthy are anathema.

[...]

Exhibit A on the latter point is UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, on whose orders the riot police were deployed. Katehi is both a member of the 1% and an overt supporter of police repression on campus. Although she has tried to disavow any responsibility for the pepper spraying of students, it has quickly emerged that she was a co-author of a report used to justify the recent repeal of a 1974 law, banning the police from Greek universities. That law was passed following the overthrow of a military junta. The repeal came just in time, earlier this year, to help suppress Greek protests against the imposition of harsh austerity measures.

As for her economic status, Katehi was hired in 2009 at $400,000 per year plus substantial benefits. That's the same base pay as the American President, and well more than double the pay of California's governor, who makes less than $175,000. Katehi holds numerous patents and her husband also teaches at UC Davis - more than enough to place her solidly in the 1%. Her salary represented a massive 27 per cent increase over the pay for the previous chancellor - the very same year that student fees were being hiked by 32 per cent, while classes were being cut. The reasoning was... well, it's not reasoning, really. It's just how things are done within the 1% - a procedure based on comparing pay for the heads of various different colleges, public and private, including Johns Hopkins, Yale and the University of Chicago.

[...]

Now UC Davis is a very good school, but even UC Berkeley isn't Yale. It's not so much a question of educational quality - it's a question of founding mission and purpose... which are not very well served by the sorts of people sitting on the Board of Regents, none of whom has a distinctive educational background. The UC system is part of a three-tiered college system - universities, state colleges and community colleges - that according to California's 1960 Education Master Plan is supposed to provide affordable higher education to every high school graduate in the state who wants a public college education. Indeed, technically, it's supposed to be tuition-free. But student "fees" now make a mockery of that. The 32 per cent fee increase mentioned above was just a tiny fraction of the enormous fee increases since 1992 - roughly 1/16 of the 534 per cent total increase in dollars through 2009 - or 1/10 of the total when adjusted for inflation. It's now even higher, and current plans would jack that increase up to more than 1,200 per cent over 1992 levels in just the next few years.

Fee hikes haven't been smooth. They've skyrocketed in stages as public funding from California's state budget has plunged in a series of successive budget crises. But the dynamics are more complicated than first meets the eye, as UC Santa Cruz politics professor Bob Meister explained back in 2009. There are actually incentives for university officials to welcome state budget cuts, explained Meister, President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations. State budget money comes with strings attached, prioritising education. But money from student, ironically, has no such restrictions, and hence is perfect for empire-building, he explained.

"How does UC sell $1.3bn in construction bonds immediately after declaring an 'extreme financial emergency,' slashing funds for teaching and research and cutting staff and faculty pay? By using your tuition as collateral," Meister wrote online at KeepCaliforniasPromise.org. "Higher tuition lets UC borrow more for construction even while it cuts instruction and research." And this is only the beginning, he explained.

"UC's most recent (post-"emergency") construction bonds are just the beginning of a long-term (10-15 year) plan to borrow very much more against very much higher tuition in order to fund individual projects that no longer have to be approved by the state or paid for out of each project's own revenue."

In short, rather than the university existing to serve the students, it's the other way round. From the Board of Regents' point of view, the students are - above all else - a revenue stream to secure Wall Street funding. Hardly a surprise, really, when you consider the makeup of the Board."

This is What the Privatization of Education Looks Like

2011-12-04T14:03:00.000-08:00

Santiago, Chile -- A riot cop punches a student protester in the face on September 29, 2011.

New Protest Guidelines From UCR

2011-12-03T14:48:00.000-08:00

["This sign is larger than 30" x 30," you're under arrest"]

New UC Riverside Protest Guidelines:

- Protest must be planned a month+ ahead, and communicated to admin
- An admin representative must be present
- Admin must approve march routes, chalking messages
- All protest must be sponsored by a department or registered organization
- No signs on sticks

Just in time for a Regents meeting at UCR on January 18.

Meet the Snakes

2011-12-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

Calls for the resignation of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi have come from the Occupy Davis GA, the online petition which currently has over 110,000 signatures, and numerous academic departments on campus. The English Department has called for not only Katehi's resignation but also, in the interest of student health and safety, the disbanding of UCPD. But some faculty, it seems, are privileged enough to feel differently. They signed a nauseatingly disingenuous letter of support for Chancellor Katehi:

We, the undersigned UC Davis faculty, support the free exchange of ideas on campus and students’ right to peaceful protests. We are appalled by the events of Friday, Nov. 18, on the Quad, but heartened by the chancellor’s apology and her commitment to listen to and work on the students’ concerns.

We strongly believe that Linda Katehi is well-qualified to lead our university through this difficult healing process and oppose the premature calls for her resignation; this is not in the best interest of our university.

Who are these people? How could they be so ignorant about the history of police violence at UC Davis and across the UC system? A quick glance is all it takes to see that they overwhelmingly represent professional schools and the hard sciences, departments which tend to benefit most from the UC administration's privatization agenda. But a compañero went even further and compiled the following list: "Meet the Snakes: Salaries of Faculty who Support Katehi."

It's a long list so we're putting it below the fold, but we recommend taking a look. The bottom line, however, is this: the average salary of the signatories is $151,111.50.

2010 Salary info was retrieved from ucpay.globl.org. Names without salaries showed no search results.

Walter S. Leal, Professor, Entomology - $201,014.56
Nina Amenta, Professor, Computer Science - $112,297.12
Francisco J. Samaniego, Distinguished Professor, Statistics - $188,962.48
Ricardo H. R. Castro, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering - $102,666.66
Kevin Johnson, Professor and Dean, Law School - $287,070.00
Eduardo Blumwald, Professor, Plant Sciences -$150,989.88
Miguel A. Mendez, Professor, Law School - $260,400.00
Maureen Stanton, Professor, Evolution and Ecology - $170,282.07
Miguel A. Marino, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Hydrologic Sciences, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Biological & Agricultural Engineering
Adela De La Torre, Professor, Chicano/a Studies - $196,470.64
James B. Ames, Professor, Chemistry - $122,165.90
John E. Bolander, Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering - $107,033.40
Charles L. Judson, Emeritus Professor, Entomology
Joaquim Silvestre, Professor, Economics - $134,498.44
Satya Dandekar, Professor and Chair, Medical Microbiology and Immunology - $251,584.98
James R. Carey, Professor of Entomology and Director - $185,071.79
Emanual Maverakis, Assistant Professor, Dermatology - $46,683.86
Abhaya M. Dandekar, Professor, Plant Sciences - $139,257.04
Renee Tsolis, Associate Professor, Medical Microbiology and Immunology - $95,314.82
R Holland Cheng, Professor, Molecular & Cellular Biology - $92,016.00
Robert H. Rice, Professor, Environmental Toxicology - $123,816.44
Susan Rivera, Professor, Psychology - $98,925.15
Andre Knoesen, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering - $132,645.33
Lorena Garcia, Assistant Professor, Public Health Science - $86,432.92
Angela Gelli, Associate Professor, Pharmacology - $91,185.05
Susan E. Ebeler, Professor, Viticulture & Enology - $103,620.14
George Bruening, Professor Emeritus, Plant Pathology - $156,071.16
Anh-Vu Pham, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering - $112,237.19
Xiaoguang Liu, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
M. Saif Islam, Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering - $123,728.24
S. Geoffrey Schladow, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering - $152,383.99
Venkatesh Akella, Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering - $111,218.68
Judith S Stern, Distinguished Professor, Nutrition and Internal Medicine - $169,353.20
Fu-Tong Liu, Distinguished Professor and Chair, Dermatology - $324,741.70
Neville Luhmann Jr., Distinguished Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering - $221,942.35
William J. Murphy, Professor and Vice Chair of Research, Dermatology and Internal Medicine - $295,710.74
Susan Kauzlarich, Professor, Chemistry - $157,379.46
Alan Hastings, Distinguished Professor, Environmental Science and Policy - $206,448.79
Richard Michelmore, Professor and Director, The Genome Center - $229,263.70
Sebastian Schreiber, Professor, Evolution and Ecology - $128,807.02
John S. Werner, Distinguished Professor, Ophthalmology & Vision Science - $341,554.61
Terence M. Murphy, Professor Emeritus, Plant Biology - $133,588.04
Judy Callis, Professor, Molecular and Cellular Biology - $116,760.72
Frank McNally, Professor, Molecular and Cellular Biology - $100,748.67
Susan L. Keen, Senior Lecturer SOE, Evolution and Ecology - $87,471.94
Kimberley McAllister, Professor, Center for Neuroscience, Neurology, and NPB
Joseph F. Antognini, Clinical Professor, Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine - $296,213.15
Charles A. Fuller, Professor, Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior - $155,985.56
W. Martin Usrey, Professor, Center for Neuroscience - $160,353.78
Kyriacos A. Athanasiou, Distinguished Professor & Chair, Biomedical Engineering - $370,795.82
Sue C. Bodine, Professor, Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior - $163,608.94
David M. Rocke, Distinguished Professor, Public Health Sciences - $355,985.43
Scott I. Simon Professor and Vice Chair, Biomedical Engineering - $158,881.38
Leah Krubitzer Professor and MacArthur Fellow, Psychology - $166,273.30
Yong Duan, Professor. UC Davis Genome Center - $132,086.17
Emanuel Epstein, Research Professor, Land, Air and Water Resources; Member, National Academy of Sciences
Subhash H. Risbud, Distinguished Professor, Materials Science - $250,343.44
David P. Fyhrie, Professor, David Linn Endowed Chair, Biomedical Engineering - $161,095.80
Thomas R. Gordon, Professor and Chair, Plant Pathology - $140,222.76
Pam Ronald, Professor, Plant Pathology and Genome Center - $225,170.01
Douglas Cook, Professor, Plant Pathology - $168,028.13
Charles W. Bamforth, Professor, Food Science and Technology - $159,479.14
Michael R. Hill, Professor and Vice Chair, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - $95,834.01
Diane M. Beckles, Associate Professor, Plant Sciences - $71,351.32
Sashi K. Kunnath, Professor and Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering - $164,822.24
Mary L. Cadenasso, Associate Professor, Plant Sciences - $96,896.96
Mary Louise Flint, Extension Entomologist, Entomology
John I. Yoder, Professor, Plant Sciences - $127,664.78
Bryce W. Falk, Professor, Plant Pathology - $150,559.56
Douglas A. Kelt, Professor, Wildlife, Fish, & Conservation Biology - $117,301.17
Benjamin J. McCoy, Professor Emeritus, Chemical Engineering
Bo Lonnerdal, Distinguished Professor, Nutrition & Internal Medicine - $181,329.90
J. Bruce German, Professor, Food Science & Technology - $123,816.44
Janet F. Roser, Professor, Animal Science - $50,982.86
Robert K. Washino, Emeritus Professor, Entomology
Iannis E. Adamopoulos, Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine
Kathryn Dewey, Distinguished Professor, Nutrition - $176,046.38
Tina Jeoh, Assistant Professor, Biological and Agricultural Engineering - $88,099.21
Harry H. Cheng, Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - $101,422.04
Michael Denison, Professor, Environmental Toxicology - $168,476.24
Ye Chen-Izu, Assistant Professor, Pharmacology - $97,639.73
Trish Berger, Professor, Animal Science - $133,812.93
Linda J. Harris, Cooperative Extension Specialist, Food Science and Technology - $141,987.27
Stefan Wuertz, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering - $136,511.16
Rob Y. H. Chai, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering - $95,877.36
Stephen Kowalczykowski, Distinguished Professor, Microbiology, and of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Member, National Academy of Sciences - $292,531.90
James F. Shackelford, Professor, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science - $180,914.74
Deb Niemeier, Professor, Civil Engineering - $158,177.72
Maria Marco, Assistant Professor, Food Science & Technology - $73,086.16
Brian Mulloney, Distinguished Professor, Neurobiology, Physiology - $188,381.49
Katherine Ferrara, Professor, Biomedical Engineering - $215,109.13
William D. Ristenpart, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering - $111,199.67
Jean-Jacques Chattot, Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - $150,738.74
Anita M. Oberbauer, Professor, Animal Science - $125,600.60
David Gilchrist, Professor Emeritus, Plant Pathology - $123,816.36
Jay R. Lund, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering - $157,973.97
Carlos E. Puente, Professor, Land Air and Water Resources - $98,737.32
David Biale, Distinguished Professor, History - $174,510.82
Lynn Kimsey, Professor, Entomology - $118,906.66
David Horsley, Associate Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - $118,800.00
Valerie Williamson, Professor, Entomology and Nematology - $118,906.69
Kyaw Tha Paw U, Professor, Atmospheric Science - $126,656.44
Matthew J. Wood, Associate Professor, Environmental Toxicology - $80,010.64
Eduardo A. Silva, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Ning Pan, Professor, Textiles, Biological & Agricultural Engineering - $118,774.60
Debra Long, Professor and Chair, Psychology - $135,690.10
Robert Emmons, Professor, Psychology - $151,402.62
Brian Trainor, Associate Professor, Psychology - $97,144.52
Shelley A. Blozis, Associate Professor, Psychology - $87,516.68
John P. Capitanio, Research Psychologist, Psychology - $126,867.16
Joy Geng, Assistant Professor, Psychology - $73,605.88
Valley Stewart, Professor, Microbiology - $123,816.36
Ann Huff Stevens, Professor, Economics - $144,389.64
Lisa Oakes, Professor, Psychology - $120,328.67
Kristin H. Lagattuta, Associate Professor, Psychology - $84,237.16
Robert Feenstra, Distinguished Professor, Economics - $215,076.10
Gregory Clark, Professor, Economics - $158,101.81
George A. Barnett, Professor & Chair, Communication - $164,724.52
Fadi A. Fathallah, Professor, Biological and Agricultural Engineering - $110,985.40
Jeff Sherman, Professor, Psychology - $131,650.50
James E. K. Hildreth, Professor and Dean, College of Biological Sciences (signing in his individual capacity); Member, Institute of Medicine
Sally P. Mendoza, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Staff Scientist, California National Primate Research Center – 2004 as “Professor”: $118,246.59, 2010 as “Research”: $49,235.04
Peter H. Lindert, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics - $180,337.33
Scott E. Carrell, Associate Professor, Economics - $104,777.74
Steven J. Luck, Professor, Psychology, Director, Center for Mind & Brain - $168,144.45
Robert A. Bell, Professor, Communication - $137,266.60
Dean Keith Simonton, Distinguished Professor, Psychology - $158,124.00
Ahmet Palazoglu, Professor & Chair, Chemical Engineering - $164,521.73
Stephen Lewis, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering - $160,333.44
Delmar Larsen, Assistant Professor, Chemistry - $70,872.76
Gary N. Cherr, Professor and Interim Director, Bodega Marine Laboratory - $135,821.59
Mario Biagioli, Distinguished Professor of Science and Technology Studies & Law Director, Center for Science & Innovation Studies - $147,777.85
Michael D. Toney, Professor, Chemistry - $102,246.40
Shota Atsumi, Assistant Professor, Chemistry - $93,327.86
Kirill Kovnir, Assistant Professor, Chemistry
Thomas W. Schoener, Distinguished Professor, Evolution and Ecology - $231,509.79
Simon R. Cherry, Professor, Biomedical Engineering - $296,150.29
Alyson Mitchell, Professor, Food Science & Technology - $85,990.87
Kent J. Bradford, Professor, Plant Sciences - $173,673.53
T. M. DeJong, Professor, Plant Sciences - $156,379.00
Carlos H. Crisosto, Specialist, Plant Sciences - $113,883.16
Neil E. Schore, Professor and Vice-chair, Chemistry - $160,550.04
Louis W. Botsford, Professor, Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology - $144,402.64
Marylynn Barkley, Emeritus, Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior
Joseph M. DiTomaso, Cooperative Extension Specialist, Plant Sciences - $140,661.90
Bruce C. Kirkpatrick, Professor, Plant Pathology - $105,837.39
Jay A. Rosenheim, Professor, Entomology - $142,562.76
Hildegarde Heymann, Professor, Viticulture and Enology - $166,661.68
Douglas Nelson, Professor, Microbiology -
$122,901.55
Richard Grotjahn, Atmospheric Science and Climate Dynamics - $113,410.68
David Simpson, Professor, English - $181,957.19
Frederic Chedin, Associate Professor, Molecular and Cellular Biology - $96,298.59
Alan L. Balch. Distinguished Professor, Chemistry - $180,400.62
J. Edward Taylor, Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics - $162,363.27
Bruce Hartsough, Professor, Biological and Agricultural Engineering - $144,408.00
Jacquelyn Gervay-Hague, Professor and Chair, Chemistry - $142,386.32
Nael H. El-Farra, Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering & Materials Science - $88,209.00
Giovanni Peri, Professor, Economics - $73,001.28
Carlton Larson, Professor, School of Law - $138,481.40
Athena Soulika, Assistant Professor, Dermatology - $7,500.00
Gabriel J. Chin, Professor, Law School
Matt Traxler, Professor, Psychology - $74,471.44
Alan Brownstein, Distinguished Professor, Law School - $229,257.28
Evelyn Lewis, Professor, Law School - $138,481.40
Dennis Ventry, Professor, Law School - $139,882.60
Barbara A. Burrall, Health Sciences Clinical Professor, Dermatology - $279,166.64
Robert Hillman, Professor, Law School - $250,593.28
Lovell (Tu) Jarvis, Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics - $157,593.95
Donna Shestowsky, Professor, Law School - $167,336.96
Margaret Johns, Senior Lecturer, Law School - $91,261.30
Albert Lin, Professor, Law School - $147,243.40
Rex Perschbacher, Professor, Law School - $210,061.40
Edward Imwinkelried, Professor, Law School - $233,480.40
Marilynn Etzler, Professor, Biochemistry - $156,263.20
Andrea Bjorklund, Professor, Law School - $150,393.40
Elizabeth Joh, Professor, Law School - $146,793.40
Tilahun Yilma, Distinguished Professor of Virology - $210,590.85
Ashutosh Bhagwat, Professor, Law School
Frank Osterloh, Professor, Chemistry - $88,934.66
Richard M. Frank, Professor, Law School
Leslie Kurtz, Professor, Law School - $152,129.40
Yoko Ono, Assistant Researcher, Dermatology
Jinyi Qi, Professor, Biomedical Engineering - $162,266.68
Courtney G. Joslin, Professor, Law School - $137,171.32
Isao Fujimoto, Emeritus Senior Lecturer, Community & Regional Development & Asian American Studies - $14,230.00
R. Paul Singh, Distinguished Professor, Food Engineering - $203,526.04
Wendy Silk, Professor, Land, Air, and Water Resources - $134,313.24
Jared T. Shaw, Assistant Professor, Chemistry - $96,306.99
Joel C. Dobris, Professor of Law, Emeritus - $12,000.00 (made atleast 170K annually ‘04 to ‘07)
Madhavi Sunder, Professor, Law School - $184,025.68
Donald P. Land, Professor, Chemistry - $99,754.63
Anupam Chander, Professor, Law School - $187,843.60
Kit S. Lam, Professor and Chair, Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine - $281,388.12
Peter B. Moyle, Professor, Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology - $144,802.64
John M. Labavitch, Professor, Plant Sciences - $152,659.51
Anthony Wexler, Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - $179,980.32
Robyn M. Rodriguez, Associate Professor, Asian American Studies
Robert H Smiley, Dean and Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Management - $137,069.15
Daniel L. Simmons, Professor, Law School - $287,260.84
Annaliese K. Franz, Assistant Professor, Chemistry - $92,266.09
Eric E. Conn, Professor Emeritus, Plant Biochemistry; Member, National Academy of Sciences
Carlito Lebrilla, Distinguished Professor, Chemistry - $206,183.08
Clayton Tanaka, Professor, Law School - $70,013.04
Lisa Pruitt, Professor, Law School - $164,811.36
Sherman Stein, Professor Emeritus, Mathematics
Charles F. Shoemaker, Professor, Food Science and Technology - $109,730.76

Average Salary = $151,111.50

(pic)

Live blog of People's Police Review Board at UC Berkeley

2011-12-01T19:26:00.000-08:00

Please join us at 60 Barrows Hall....

7:28: We're working on starting the meeting now.

7:32: Meeting has been convened, someone from copwatch is giving us a history of the police review board. "...in 1980s, ASUC voted for independent police review board, modeled on the former city of berkeley police review board. now, the copley decision limits the power of these boards. but because the chief of police sits on this board, it's not independent. this board only meets once a year -- it's not anything like the berkeley police review board. here is the process of the ucpd and the uc police review board: it takes months to get anything back...."

7:37: "...the UCB review board can't initiate investigations. they can't review UCPD polices. but there are a lot of policies and procedures that the UCPD uses that are seriously problematic, they can use choke holds (this hasn't been allowed at the city of berkeley for some time)..."

7:38: The student rep on the PRB, laying it down about the PRB (off record).

7:42: Voting on whether to stay in 60 Barrows.... Vote passes. We're staying.

7:50: Proposal for three investigations: of pepper spray use, november 9th, ucpd shooting on November 15.

7:52: Next proposal: we know that the police shouldn't investigate themselves. we need a separate process to investigate police. also, this PRB isn't effective. we should be making a board to look into PRB, and start investigating police policies.

7:54: Next proposal: investigate the investigation company (Kroll) charged (by Yudof) with investigating the police violence at ucd and ucb. william bratton, from the kroll security group, is the one charged with the investigation.

7:57: UCPD rep is telling us there will be a cop in the doorway till we're done.

8:01: Cop's here, being goofy. This is odd. Anyway.... getting back to the agenda.

8:02: Next proposal: Can we give concrete proposals for how cops should act, how they should be evaluated; would we recommend a 360 degree review process.

8:03: Next proposal: This body should put out reports regularly. There should be a way to hear complaints, and we should ask for complaints about recent months.

8:04: We should try to get similar boards going at other campuses, other places.

8:04: Proposal: That we investigate other events as well as Nov. 9.

8:05: Proposal: I think it would be awesome to actually gather the testimony and the evidence. That's easy. Also, I think we should draw up a list of folks who are credible and who have experience, professors and community-based people, students, etc. Also, the ASUC should make a way and a place for this independent body. If we do this, ppl would be amazed and shocked.

8:07: Proposal: I think we should also review the police review board.

8:09: Discussion of the PRB standards for Nov. 9 review: board will determine whether the violence exceeded campus norms, but we have to determine what those norms are... PRB can't accuse officers, just make recommendations to the admin about how the police can become more efficient. Please discuss what the standards of the PRB should be for this investigation.

8:16: The PRB is split. Most of them are for the police. The minority isn't listened to when we raise criticisms.

8:19: Proposal: Talk about how people who testify can be protected, especially journalists. Also, we should request that procedures of PRB and their investigation be open to the public.

8:20: Proposal: Approach CRP and Uncivil Procedure about how to coordinate the investigation.

8:22: We're moving toward self-organized committees: A group to constitute a space where people can bring complaints; a group to organize investigations...

8:24: Talking about proposals for how to create investigative bodies that are accountable to the general, people's police review board / general assembly

8:36: Proposal that we have stable standards and practices for the investigations.

8:40: Discussing when and where we'll have our next meeting.... Wednesday at 6pm, Sproul steps. Facilitation committee is at 5pm on Sproul steps.

9:05: We just decided to break into working groups (one for collecting testimony; one for organizing investigations)....

9:10: Gonna sign off for now. Come by next Wednesday, 6pm at Sproul if you want to get involved in the People's Police Review Board!

The Regency

2011-12-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

Reposted from Zunguzungu.

Most of the Regents of the University of California — whose very name gives you a good idea of the kind of power they wield over the direction and functioning of the University of California – are unelected, appointed to 12 year terms by the governor of California, and almost without exception, they have no real background or apparent interest in education. They are corporate moguls, the 1%, whatever you want to call them.

On Monday, they defied California’s open meeting laws by sort-of teleconferencing from four different campuses, voting to raise various administrative salaries by about $3.5 million, including the UC Davis chief campus counsel. Perhaps they suspected he would be busy in the near future? But as many are pointing out, at a time of across-the-board-cutbacks in the work of teaching and being a university, to find raising executive salaries to be “essential” — as UC president Mark Yudof put it, “We consider these retention efforts to be essential. I understand it’s not a great time, but we can’t really close down shop and say we’re not going to make any effort to retain our best people” — tells you a lot about their priorities.

The students still came. And this is still a temporary victory for the student protesters. The regents are trying to work towards an 81% tuition hike, but student protesters threw a sufficient scare into them that they had to make up bullshit warnings of violence and hide behind telephones and police. I predict they’ll raise tuition dramatically this summer; SOP is do the dirty stuff during summer break (though, of course, winter break is around the corner too). Anyway, here’s a column of peace police at UCLA, for example, protecting the regents from students:

As a scathing editorial in the San Jose Mercury put it:

The phone-it-in session conducted in four locations was an abuse of the spirit, if not the letter, of state open-meeting laws. And for the premier public university system of the state that leads the world in technology, it was a logistical embarrassment…Public comments were heard in rotation from each site — but heard only. There was an audio connection but no video. Students couldn’t see most of the people they were addressing — indeed, had no way of knowing if anyone outside the immediate room was seriously listening to them and not rolling their eyes, checking email or whispering among themselves. It was a recipe for frustration, and predictably, it all boiled over.

Angry students shut down the meeting. In the attempt to calm things, the regents had managed to increase the tensions.

After a break, it got worse. At three of the venues, the session was moved to smaller rooms. At UCSF, there was little room for the public beyond the press.

We cannot recall another state agency holding a public meeting by teleconference. It’s within the letter of the open-meeting law that governs the regents meetings; the Bagley-Keene Act allows for teleconferencing — but this is not how it was intended to be used. The provision was included to accommodate a board member who could not physically attend a meeting. That wasn’t the issue here.

Perhaps we’re old-fashioned, but we still believe that in adversarial situations, it’s important to be able to look people in the eye when talking with or listening to them. It shows respect and fosters better communication. And at a public meeting, all members of the public should be able to not only listen to board members but also see them. All of them. While staff can efficiently conduct business by voice and video conferences, policymakers like the regents need to meet openly in front of the people they govern.

The Monday experiment turned into a farce. Participants at the four venues could not see each other, any more than residents across the state monitoring the disembodied voices on the Internet could see any of them. It was no way to do the public’s business, and it better not happen again.

It will though. This wasn’t a blip; this is what they always do, every time. They are waging a war on their students. When students and faculty and workers try to make their voices heard, they hide behind closed doors and police. So we should now turn to look at the regents themselves. Who are these people who are entrusted with total power over the UC system?

There are 26 of them; one student is appointed to the board by the board — for a one-year term — and then there are 7 ex officio members, the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the state assembly, state superintendent of public instruction, president and vice president of the UC Alumni association, and also the president of the UC (appointed by the regents), Mark Yudof himself.

The other 18 are appointed by the governor, as I said, to 12 year terms (5 by Gray Davis, the other 13 by Schwarzenegger). The best reporting on the UC Regents is Peter Byrne’s “Investor’s Club,” from which I’ve liberally poached a lot of details. But I’ve spent some time profiling the appointed regents more briefly, just so we can get a sense for their overall makeup.

Some, like Richard Blum, are almost caricatures of everything the Occupy Wall Street movement is opposed to: a hyper-connected investment banker (founder of Blum Capital) who sits on the boards of all sorts of corporate and nonprofit firms, is married to a powerful congresswoman, and functions as a living and breathing embodiment of the phrase “conflict of interest.” Blum takes center stage in Byrne’s reporting, here, for example. Or this, from Changing Universities.

One tidbit from Byrne’s reporting, though you should read the whole thing if you’re interested; Blum oversees investment for the UC’s $63 billion portfolio, and is also the largest shareholder in two for-profit corporate-run universities, which the UC invests in. As Peter Byrne puts it,

“Marketing strategy aside, Mr. Blum has taken on two seemingly disparate roles— one as an advocate for a nonprofit university, and the other as an owner of two for-profit educational corporations. As a regent, Mr. Blum has approved cost-cutting policies for UC that appear to have enhanced the profitability of his vocational schools. And in 2007, Mr. Blum’s spouse, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), wrote federal legislation that benefited the for-profit college industry. For several years, Mr. Blum’s firm, Blum Capital Partners, has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services.”

But Blum is just one, and it’s the whole 18 that we need to look at. So the first thing you notice, is that quite a few have close Schwarzenegger connections. Most prominently, Bonnie Reiss and Paul Wachter (who both work in finance) are two of Schwarzenegger’s closest associates and advisors for decades, his ”anchors, the people who were with him before politics and will be with him after.” George Kieffer was Maria Shriver’s attorney, co-chaired Schwarzenegger’s reelection committee, and recruited staff for his administration. And Charlene Zettel was a two-time member of the California state assembly, before Schwarzenegger appointed her as his Director of the Department of Consumer Affairs from 2004-2007 And it won’t surprise you to learn that most have donated to Schwarzenegger campaigns over the years; Hadi Makarechian, for example, was one of the top 50 contributors to Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign (and was also national campaign finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential run); he’s a real estate developer (the founder, chairman, and CEO of Capital Pacific Holdings). He’s also Orange County aristocracy, his family the “closest thing Orange County has to the Rockefellers.”

Along with Reiss and Wachter, there are a lot of financiers. George M. Marcus is the founder and chairman of The Marcus & Millichap Company, whose mission ”is to help our clients create and preserve wealth by providing the best real estate investment sales, financing, research and advisory services available.” Leslie Tang Schilling is an investment banker, the founder of Union Square Investments Company, and Russell Gould was a Senior VP at Wachovia and is still president of Gould Financial Consulting.

Odessa Johnson is the only regent who has anything like a real education profile, having been a community college dean for two decades. Others, like David Crane, have spent some time doing stuff that looks like education — he’s a “lecturer” at Stanford, for example – but he spent twenty four years as a partner at Babcock and Brown, an octopus of an investment firm specializing in structured finance and spends a lot of time talking about how terrible it is that public sector employees are allowed to be in unions. Or William De La Peña, whose official UC Regent bio describes him, at the very top, as a professor of ophthalmology. In reality, he the founder and director of “De La Peña Eye Clinics” while the fact that he’s the owner and CEO of WDLP Broadcasting Company, Llc. and used to own a soccer club in Los Angeles is obliquely acknowledge by the sentence: “Other business interests include the media and soccer.” As far as I can tell, the biography’s statement that he “is” a professor refers to a position he held for for six years in the 80′s, but to which he has not returned.

The chair of the board, Sherry Lansing was the CEO of Paramount Pictures, but more recently (vi ReclaimUC) she’s created a thing called the “Encore Career Institute,” which will help unemployed Baby Boomers “rewire instead of retire.” Courses will be designed by and taught through UCLA Extension — a certificate program which will cost between $5,000 and $10,000 — and will accomplish the goal of ”deliver[ing] some of the fantastic intellectual property that UC has” to students in the state and the world. (Also worth noting (and noted by Byrne), she’s on the board of directors of Qualcomm Inc– annual director’s fee of $135,000, plus stock options, of which she owns “more than $1 million” and which came to a direct payment of $485,252 in 2009 — and after Ms. Lansing joined the Qualcomm board, UC quadrupled its investment in Qualcomm).

And then there’s your general captains of industry. Eddie Island was a vice president at McDonnell-Douglas, which used to be a gigantic defense contractor until it merged with Boeing in 1997, and became a behemoth defense contractor. Norman Pattiz was the founder and Chairman of Westwood One, “America’s largest radio network and one of the world’s leading media companies.” Monica Lozano is the publisher and CEO of La Opinión Newspaper, which she inherited from her father (and which he inherited from his father), and she makes almost a half million a year for sitting on the boards of directors at Bank of America and Walt Disney. And Frederick Ruiz is retired from being the CEO and founder of Ruiz Foods, “America’s top frozen Mexican food manufacturer.”

Finally, there’s prominent lawyer Bruce Varner. When he was appointed to the regency, UC Riverside’s Chancellor said that “He will be an excellent ambassador to the Regents about the growth, vitality, and promise of the Inland Empire,” which is a quote I can’t particularly make sense of.

The most important thing is just to recognize that these are the (mostly) men who are entrusted with almost complete power over one of the most important and valuable public resources the state of California has, an institution of higher learning that was built by the state of California for the good of the state of California. But one particular reason all of this matters so much is that the greatest loss of revenue to the UC was not, in fact, from state budget cuts, but from investment losses (though the privatization of the university was well on its way even before the financial crisis). And as Peter Byrne shows in his massive series, the UC investment strategy was radically shifted in the early 2000′s away from safe and reliable (and more modest) methods of investing into (ultimately disastrous) modes of investing that caused the UC’s finances to drop like a stone when the bubble burst:

“[After 2003] regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter—all financiers by trade—took control of UC’s investment strategy. Sitting on the board’s investment committee, the three men steered away from investing in more traditional instruments, such as blue-chip stocks and bonds, toward largely unregulated “alternative” investments, such as private equity and private real estate deals. According to UC internal reports, the dramatic investment change has led to an “overweighting” of investments in private equity. One concerned regent has likened the change to “gambling in Las Vegas.” [that's George Marcus, by the way, who objected to investing pension fund money in that way, to his credit (and to the discredit of the other regents who disagreed)]

This is important, because — as Bob Samuels pointed out a year ago, the UC’s funding shortfalls owe much more to investment losses than to state cutbacks:

…UC administration has argued that since the state reduced university funding by a combined $600 million in 2008 and 2009 (after we account for $718 million in federal recovery money), the system had to raise fees 41%, furlough employees, and layoff teachers. However, during this same time period, the UC lost over $23 billion in its investments.

This means that the investment losses were more than forty times greater than the state reductions, but the university administrators never talk about these huge investment losses. In fact, at the last UC Regents meeting, after I brought up the lack of discussion concerning the UC’s investment losses, the head regent, Russell Gould, exclaimed that, “Our investments have outperformed our peers in the last twenty years.” Not only was this statement incorrect, but it shows how the people overseeing the university do not want to deal with the real issues. Rather than looking at their own internal problems, the UC administration’s central strategy is to blame all problems on the state.

Former bank occupied in Santa Cruz -- immediate support needed

2011-11-30T17:26:00.000-08:00

Cross posted from Occupy CA:

The Former Bank
at 75 River Street in Santa Cruz
Has been occupied!

This building is being re-purposed in solidarity with Occupy Santa Cruz. Formerly a bank, the building was bought by Wells Fargo, closed, and has been vacant for the past three years. The company leasing the building manages foreclosures for Wells Fargo.

The building is being re-purposed under Federal and State laws surrounding “adverse possession.” This law states that space is most beneficial to the people who use it. Spaces like this one, reclaimed from the wealthiest 1%, are places where we can seek redress to our grievances.

In the years to come, this space will be used to organize humanitarian efforts, house a library, and provide a forum for discussion. The General Assembly of Occupy Santa Cruz is also invited to use this space.

This building will be a space for the expansion of our movement; please respect it as our new home.

Come join us now at 75 River Street!

If we want to keep this space for our movement it is critical that we have hundreds of people defending it today and tonight. Bring your sleeping bags and snacks and come see our new space. Call and text everyone you know and tell them to hurry down!

---
Pictures on Indybay, here and here.

Letter From UC Davis

2011-11-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

Open Letter to the Public

I keep hearing, "Why can't Occupy UC Davis be like those great protests of our past? Like the peace protests? Everyone was behind those students at Kent State."

A Gallup Poll conducted one week after the Kent State shootings found that 58 percent of the public blamed the students themselves, while only 11 percent blamed the National Guardsmen. Newsweek, May 18, 1970, p. 30. They got what was coming to them.

We look into the past at successful social justice movements and idealize them. Of course the civil rights movement was right. Of course women should have the right to vote. Of course abolitionists would prevail. We take these things for granted; who could ever have disagreed with these sentiments? We forget that these movements had an uphill battle for a reason, that, in their time, their heroes were condemned as radicals, thugs, troublemakers, dirty bums, agitators, and more, just as protesters of today are condemned.

We also have a very selective memory. Many people mention Kent State, but have you ever heard anyone ever invoke the massacre at Jackson State University, just ten days later, where police indiscriminately barraged a student dormitory, killing two students of color? When creating our glorious narrative of that era of civil disobedience in the name of social justice, how easily we gloss over certain events and emphasize others. We must remember, after the pepper spray wears off and the necessary inconveniences of a protest continue, not to apply the standards of this idealized past to the activists of social conscience of today and tomorrow.

Bernie Goldsmith, Occupier

Behind Closed Doors, UC Regents Again Vote to Raise Admin Salaries

2011-11-28T22:41:00.000-08:00

From the Bay Citizen:

Regents of the University of California, meeting for the first time since campus police used pepper spray and riot batons to disperse student protests at Berkeley and Davis, listened to nearly three hours of public complaints about those incidents and tuition increases before chanting protesters disrupted the meeting and drove them from the room.

The Regents then reconvened in a smaller room down the hall from the protesters, where they voted to raise the salaries of nearly a dozen university administrators and lawyers by as much as 21.9 percent.

[...]

The regents also approved salary raises for 10 administrators and managers, including a 9.9 percent increase for Meredith Michaels, vice chancellor of planning and budget at UC Irvine, whose annual salary will increase to $247,275 from $225,000.

Six campus attorneys also received salary increases. The largest increase, 21.9 percent, went to Steven A. Drown, chief campus counsel and associate general counsel at UC Davis. His yearly salary will rise to $250,000 from $205,045.

(pic via Daily Cal)

Dutton Hall Occupied -- UC Davis

2011-11-28T21:11:00.000-08:00

From bicycle barricade:

The UCD general assembly inside occupied Dutton Hall has unanimously agreed to continue occupying the building for 2 weeks to blockade the university’s administrative and financial functions. Following UCSC’s lead, the GA also decided on 3 main demands:

1) The immediate resignation of Katehi

2) Cops off campus, replaced with an alternative safety group

3) Freeze on tuition increases

"Proceedings Conducted Openly"

2011-11-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

[Some Regents Arrive At UCLA Today]

CA GOVERNMENT CODE SECTION 11120

"It is the public policy of this state that public agencies exist to aid
in the conduct of the people's business and the proceedings of public agencies
be conducted openly so that the public may remain informed."

a few unexpected subjects of class struggle – notes on recent university strikes

2011-11-28T04:14:00.000-08:00

An entirely new word is being put forward by an entirely new subject. It only has to be uttered to be heard.
- Rivolta Femminile

Our universities are fraying at the seams. At schools throughout California, across the UK and in New York, we've seen waves of protest this November, including student walkouts and class cancellations unimaginable a month ago. As I write, another UC strike approaches, with others likely to follow over the coming weeks and months.

Our unsettled present is extraordinary, and unexpected. That much is clear to all. But there are different kinds of surprise, different reasons for shock. Some, particularly those speaking on national television, seem surprised above all at the severity of police attacks on our bodies and our encampments. They're shocked at images of seated students casually being pepper-sprayed, or at the unrelenting baton blows endured by those of us who linked arms around a small circle of tents. How, they ask, could such violence be visited upon students, especially when they acted non-violently, only wanted to set up a few tents, and issued little more than anodyne calls for universal public education?

Without question, we reply, the violence was severe, disproportionate, and hideous. Many of us are still hurting, and those videos are sickening. But those with whom I've spoken, those who endured violence, aren't particularly surprised at what they faced. After all, it's all happened before. At every single anti-privatization protest that's occurred in northern California since the fall of 2010, university police have shot pepper spray at students. Last year, a cop pulled a gun on a group of us. Our friends have had their hands crushed on police barricades, their ribs bruised and fractured by baton blows on the highway, and their partially-clothed bodies dragged from sleeping bags at five in the morning, first into the cold air and then to cold cells.

We knew what they were prepared to do to us. We just didn't know anyone would care this time. And neither did our assorted chancellors and police chiefs, who treated the initial round of protests in the same viciously perfunctory way they've treated other, recent actions. They are now shocked at mounting calls for their resignation; while we are surprised by – and at times unsure how to use -- our mounting collective power.

***

In navigating the current sequence of university protest, we've leaned heavily on each other, and have looked for words, however imperfect, from other sites of struggle. In particular, students in the bay area have followed, and have joined, recent uprisings in Oakland, from the street actions in response to the police murder of Oscar Grant, to the mobilizations this fall in defense of the Oakland Commune. When the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza was raided last month, dozens of university students participated in the march back to the Plaza, enduring waves of tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets. The following day, we joined thousands in retaking the Plaza and declaring a city-wide general strike for the following Wednesday. During the strike, students marched down Telegraph from UC Berkeley, and then, with tens of thousands, marched to shut down the Oakland port.

These mobilizations in defense of the Oakland Commune gave university students a striking vocabulary of resistance, a repertoire of text and image that we've drawn upon and revised in shaping recent campus actions. In Oakland, the image of the mass assembly was sutured with the term “general strike” – each of us had seen the picture of the evening assembly framed with the phrase: “strike while the iron is hot” – so, at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, the moment our assemblies expanded beyond the boundaries of our quads and plazas, we similarly called for general strikes.

It's worth asking, however, just how general these strikes have been, and relatedly, whether our strike calls have been properly-tailored to their political moment. Some on the left have accused us of misusing the term general strike, of diluting the meaning of the phrase insofar as absenteeism hasn't been universal. Their point is well taken, of course: we haven't yet organized a full-scale shutdown of a city or sector of social life. Many in Oakland went to work on November 2, while nearly all university employees (excepting instructors) carried out their jobs on November 15. Nevertheless, these strikes have been remarkably widespread and effective; they've blocked, for a time, the operations of particular industries and institutions. And our repeated use of the phrase general strike seems to have enabled, and rendered legible, certain important dimensions of these events – dimensions that other terms (i.e. shutdown, blockade, boycott, or student walkout) would have failed to capture or set off.

To call a strike general is to give it a predication that puts off, or qualifies, all particularizing predications it might otherwise be given. A general strike is not a strike carried out by a clearly-demarcated body of workers; it's not called in order to effect some particular change of policy or economic practice; in terms of tactics, the general strike is promiscuous, embracing flying pickets, occupations, wildcats, mutual aid, and widespread sabotage. A strike is general only if its limits are unsettled, expansive, indistinct: if it gives birth to unexpected subjects and sites of struggle.

Our recent strike actions are perhaps most notable for their expansive quality, for how they've inspired and enabled surprising lines of struggle. In calling for a general strike throughout the city of Oakland, for instance, those gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza didn't necessarily know they were calling for the shutting down of Oakland's port, since the shutdown was planned in the days following the strike resolution. Nor did they know that, a few weeks after the successful port action, a new call – for a general, west coast port shutdown on December 12 – would be crafted and endorsed by assemblies from Portland to Los Angeles. The call for a citywide general strike released a contagion at the ports that has not yet subsided.

A similar logic of contagion has animated recent university struggles. On November 9 – a statewide day of action for public education – university police attempted to repress with force a small encampment at UC Berkeley. Students (and a few faculty members) formed soft blockades around the tents and endured two rounds of severe baton blows. While the tents were ultimately taken from us, our numbers grew throughout the day and we were able at night to hold the Sproul steps and plaza – space enough for a mass general assembly. There, we called a November 15 general strike of higher education – a call that was taken up, to an uneven degree, at other university campuses. Students at UCLA established an encampment, while those at Davis held a mass rally on the 15th, which led into an extended building occupation. When they were forced out of the building, they established an outdoor encampment. The images of Lt. Pike casually pepper-spraying students as they surrounded this encampment have gone viral, just as the general strike call issued last week by the Davis assembly has set off a rash of solidarity actions throughout the state, set to intensify in the coming days.

Both Berkeley and Davis' general strike calls have been criticized for casting too wide a net. Why not call for campus-wide, rather than system-wide, strikes, we've been asked? While it would be easy enough to simply say in response that the expansive calls have enabled a kind of campus-to-campus relay that may have been foreclosed by more narrowly-tailored calls, it's also worth noting that narrower calls might have fractured our assemblies. At Berkeley, an initial call for a system-wide UC strike was challenged by CSU and community college students, who pushed for an expansion of the call to all of higher education. Similarly, students from other UC campuses edited the strike call so that it would be more legible on their home campuses, while activists with Occupy Oakland worked to compose a supplementary call to encourage east bay residents – students and non-students alike – to march up to UC Berkeley for the November 15 general assembly. What these anecdotes reveal is the cross-sectoral heterogeneity of our assemblies – a heterogeneity that effectively disallows more conventional, narrowly-focused strike calls.

The openness of our assemblies and encampments to all is a large part of what makes them politically effective. Not only does this openness compel those who keep up the encampments to face the need for ever more meaningful forms of mutual aid, thus allowing our encampments to become actual sites of social reproduction, this openness also strengthens regional solidarities. The lesson of the 1969 TWLF strike at UC Berkeley – which succeeded only when east bay municipal workers initiated a sympathy strike – is that student movements are most effective when they are supported by, and coordinated with, social struggles outside the universities. Campus administrators are aware of this fact, and work assiduously to re-assert, through various disciplinary techniques, the political disarticulation of students from non-students. Most recently, at UC Berkeley, we've been informed by our chancellors that we might be able to keep a few tents up on Sproul if we can figure out a way to ensure that only students will sleep in them. We've yet to honor this grotesque declaration with a response.

Our insistence that occupations remain open to all and that everybody should have the capacity to reproduce their lives, free of financial exchange, within and beyond the bounds of our campuses, is not capricious; rather, this insistence is aligned with the politics of recent university struggles, insofar as these struggles have challenged prevailing, privatized regimes of social reproduction. It's worth remembering, for instance, that one of the demands advanced by the Wheeler occupiers in November 2009 was that the university renew its essentially rent-free lease with the Rochdale student housing cooperative. Or that a recent makeshift tent on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall bore a sign that read: “affordable student housing.” Ours is a struggle for autonomous social reproduction, and as such, it shares much with revolutionary feminist movements.

In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James call for strikes in the sphere of social reproduction, rolling refusals of unwaged domestic labor that bear certain resonances with recent university strikes and occupations:

We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all situations which presume that women will stay at home, to link ourselves to the struggles of all those who are in ghettos, whether that ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age home, or a slum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until now be thrown squarely where it belongs – onto the shoulders of capital.... The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman's expense against the class itself.... Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he or she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial (41).

What Dalla Costa and James indicate in this passage is that strikes in the sphere of social reproduction, while similar to 'conventional' labor strikes insofar as they directly counter exploitative forms of work discipline, appear different from such strikes in two crucial, and seemingly contradictory, respects – first, that they seem to directly undermine the survival of working class subjects, and second, that they carry with them the promise of liberating the working class from the requirement to labor in order to survive. If we translate this analysis into the university context (something that Dalla Costa and James also do, at times, in their essays), we can see certain resonances with recent student strikes. On the one hand, such strikes appear self-defeating, as evidenced by the ubiquitous refrain that a walkout in support of public education is a self-contradictory gesture. How, we are asked, can one defend public education by refusing to teach class or to attend lecture? On the other hand, such strikes appear to promise the liberation of the student from her social and economic role: such liberation would entail the abolition of student debt; the decomposition of hierarchical relations between students, professors, and university workers (which we saw hints of during the November 15 open university); and ultimately the realization of her capacity to live free of the requirement to work for wages.

What we saw with the open university at Berkeley on November 15, and what we will likely see in coming days at Davis, was a form of learning that emerged out of our collective refusal to participate in official university schedules. Our strike gave us time to meet together and to discuss, without the usual formalities or hierarchies, theoretical questions of direct relevance to our lives. This experience confirmed for us the falsity of the notion that a strike in support of public education is self-contradictory – now we know from experience that a better form of education is possible, that it lingers in the shadows of our universities, and that only through concerted strike actions will it reemerge.

If the open university made apparent the fact that we don't need grades or rigid course schedules in order to learn, in doing so it implicitly showed what these administrative forms accomplish: the sifting, training, and credentialing of future workers. Of course, we've known this about the universities, at least unconsciously, since the student movements of the 1960s, during which activists insisted that universities existed to train the next generation of technocrats and managers, and thus to enable the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This “reproductive” function of the university has itself been reproduced into the present, to be sure, but now there is another, more direct and consequential way that universities reproduce capitalist social relations – namely, through the saddling of students with massive debt burdens. As George Caffentzis has recently argued (in writing as well as at a workshop he convened at the Occupy Cal open university):

Student debt is a work-discipline issue because it represents a way of mortgaging many workers’ future, of deciding which jobs and wages they will seek and their ability to resist exploitation and/or to fight for better conditions. The overarching goal of capital with respect to student loan debt is to shift the costs of socially necessary education to the workers themselves at a time when a world market for cognitive labor-power is forming and a tremendous competition is already developing between workers. Employers’ refusal to massively invest in education in the US is not, in fact, a misreading of its class interests as theorists like Michael Hardt maintain. It is the result of a clear-cut assessment of the new possibilities opened up by globalization, starting with the harvesting of educated brains as well as muscles from every part of the world. Capital’s strategic use of student loan debts to enforce a harsher work-discipline and to force workers to take on more of the cost of their reproduction makes the struggle for debt abolition one that necessarily affects all workers. Accepting student debt is accepting a class defeat...

Caffentzis here offers us essentially half of the story of how student loan debt reproduces contemporary capitalist relations – the half pertaining to the reproduction of labor-power. The other half of the story – the story of how student debt enables the accumulation of capital – has been gradually filled in over the past two years through a series of open letters written by Robert Meister. Meister has shown how those who govern the university profit from rising student debt levels (both because student fees finance lucrative building projects, and because university regents have a stake in for-profit education firms), as well as how student debt – which now exceeds a trillion dollars nationally – is increasingly bundled and profitably traded by the financial services industry. Such debt now fuels a speculative bubble that is threatened by the specter of mass student loan default.

There are two ways that ongoing university struggles have begun to, and could yet more effectively, counter the reign of student debt, and thus directly impinge upon the reproduction of capitalist relations: first, by halting increases in tuition, and even perhaps rolling tuition levels back, we'd deactivate the primary cause of rising student debt burdens. At the UCs, we've already effectively stalled tuition increases this year, and seem to have turned back the 81% fee hike proposed by President Yudof. Further strike actions would allow us to put on the agenda the reduction of student fees. And second, by formulating and disseminating a call for mass, coordinated student debt resistance, general assemblies in New York and California have already encouraged hundreds of debtors to sign a pledge of refusal, and thus have made possible a future debtor's strike. Ongoing university struggles could make thousands of student debtors confident enough to brave default, knowing that legions of other debtors in defiance would have their back.

Given that these are the stakes of current university struggles, it's not terribly surprising that our strikes and encampments have been met with such severe police repression. But each time we're struck, we return again, stronger than before.

We're new subjects of class struggle, uttering unexpected words with ever more confidence.

Unexpected Sub Zine

CUCFA Letter to President Yudof objecting to hiring William Bratton to investigate UC Davis pepper-spray incident

2011-11-27T21:25:00.000-08:00

November 27, 2011

President Mark G. Yudof
University of California
1111 Franklin St., 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607
Fax: (510) 987-9086

Dear President Yudof,

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) protests your decision to hire the Kroll Security Group, and its Chairman William Bratton, to conduct what you call an independent investigation of police violence at UC Davis. We take no position here on Mr. Bratton's personal qualifications; our objection is to the conflicts of interest of Kroll Security itself, which is already a major contractor with UC on security matters. According to its website, Kroll's services are not confined to securing databases and facilities from attacks by criminals and terrorists. It also protects many global financial institutions and other multinationals against threats to "operations" that may come from public criticism and direct political action.

By deepening UC's links to Kroll, you would be illustrating the kinds of connection between public higher education and Wall Street that the Occupy UC movement is protesting. Kroll's parent company, Altegrity, provides data-mining, intelligence and on-the-ground security to financial institutions and governments seeking to head off and defeat both private sabotage and public protest. In addition, Altegrity's parent company, Providence Private Equity, is a major global investor in for-profit higher education companies that benefit from the decline of publicly funded higher education.

We already know that Kroll has provided security services to at least three UC campuses for the past several years. This in itself would disqualify Mr. Bratton from participating in the investigation you propose, even if the role of Kroll and its affiliated companies in defending the financial sector against OWS did not raise further questions about its pro-Wall Street and pro-privatization bias.

A truly independent investigation that would allow UC to provide a credible response to the events at Davis (and the other campuses) needs to address several questions that would not be seriously considered if you hire Kroll.

What was your role and that of UC General Counsel in the events at Davis? Did you, as a distinguished first amendment scholar, tell chancellors and campus police chiefs that protests (especially protests against UC's own policies) are "part of the DNA of this University" that should not be addressed using the same techniques that UC has developed (likely with the help of Kroll) to deal with terrorists, shooters, and cyber-saboteurs? (Even if you have been a zealous defender of the rising student movement to restore public higher education, such a conclusion would not be credible coming from an investigation tainted by Kroll's conflicts of interest outlined above.)
What was and is the role of Kroll in helping banks and public institutions (including UC) investigate and defeat movements such as OWS and their campus counterparts? Is Kroll now acting as a liaison between universities, city governments and the Department of Homeland Security in defending the financial sector against protests occurring on what used to be considered public spaces? Are protests against Wall Street in such spaces now considered a threat to the security of the nation, the city and the public university? (The growing securitization of public space has been a major obstacle to first amendment activity since 9-11.)
How much money has UC and its individual campuses paid to Kroll for security services? Were these contracts issued as sole source contracts or was there open bidding? Were Kroll's services confined to protecting, for example, the privacy and integrity of data systems and faculty and staff conducting animal research or did they extended to what Kroll's website calls "organizational threats" arising from "the dynamic and sometimes conflicting needs of the entire campus population?" (This could be a description of the student protests that you rightly regard as "central to our history" as a university.)
What led to the issuance of false and misleading statements by University of California officials (Chancellors and their assistants, spokespeople, and police chiefs) in the aftermath of police violence at Berkeley and Davis? Did you encourage these efforts at spin control? (Dishonest statements seriously damage the university as an institution devoted to truth and protect only the individuals whose decisions are in question.)

The broader issue is how protest can be part of what you characterized as "our university's DNA" when the right to protest is not formally recognized within the university's own codes of student and faculty conduct. It could be and should be. The CSU student code states explicitly that "[n]othing in this Code may conflict with Education Code Section 66301 that prohibits disciplinary action against students based on behavior protected by the first amendment." If such language were included in the UC code of conduct, students would have a clear first amendment defense against disciplinary action arising from peaceful political protest-and there would be strong grounds for questioning the legality of a police order to disperse a peaceful protest from a public site on a public university campus. The explicit incorporation of constitutional limits on UC's power to break up demonstrations that threaten its march toward privatization would go a long way toward recovering UC as a public, rather than a private, space. We urge you to see that the UC codes of conduct are amended to parallel those in place at CSU.

Events at Davis and the other campuses have shown the University of California in a negative light, and we agree strongly with the need for an independent investigation. We believe, however, that your appointment of Kroll to investigate the university's response to last week's protest could itself become a basis for new protests, and that you should ask Speaker Perez (or someone unaffiliated with the University) to appoint a genuinely independent committee with representatives from student, faculty, staff and civil liberties groups. Such a committee should be given a specific charge to investigate and report on all of the questions set forth above.

Robert Meister,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
Professor History of Consciousness and Political and Social Thought, UC Santa Cruz

For Safer Campuses (UC Davis Teachouts And UC Berkeley CRP Investigation)

2011-11-27T10:55:00.001-08:00

+

The Campus Rights Project (CRP), a student-led clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, obtained over 300 pages of internal University communications between top administrators relating to the Fall 2009 student protests. These documents provide an unusually candid look at how top University officials have responded to past incidents of police violence on campus. In light of the Faculty’s upcoming “no confidence” vote, CRP is releasing these documents and a new summary of their contents. See "BEHIND THE CURTAIN: BIRGENEAU, BRESLAUER, and LE GRANDE’S PAST RESPONSE TO STUDENT PROTEST AND POLICE VIOLENCE."

Call for silent demonstration at UCB -- Monday the 28th

2011-11-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

This Monday, November 28th, the UC Berkeley Academic Senate will be holding a special session, during which professors will consider the following resolution:

“The Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate has lost confidence in the ability of Chancellor Birgeneau, EVC Breslauer and VC LeGrande to respond appropriately to non-violent campus protests, to secure student welfare amidst these protests, to minimize the deployment of force and to respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus.”

The resolution was proposed by a group of professors in the immediate aftermath of the November 9th Occupy Cal action, at which students, workers and professors were brutally beaten by police officers for constructing, and linking arms around, a small group of tents. Protesters were acting in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and were trying to create a space on campus for discussion and organizing in response to fee hikes, the laying off of campus workers, growing student indebtedness, and attacks on public education generally.

While the police violence that occurred on the 9th inspired the campus to strike the following week, and while Occupy Cal has effectively opened space for critical discussion and debate on campus, the chancellors and the chief of police have not yet been held accountable for their use of indiscriminate force on the 9th, and they have taken no concrete steps to ensure that such police aggression won’t occur in the future. A faculty no-confidence vote would begin to hold our chancellors accountable for the violence they authorized, oversaw, and subsequently justified.

In order to show that the campus community stands in solidarity with members of the faculty who are bringing the no-confidence resolution, we call on all those who were brutalized on November 9th, as well as all whose friends and classmates were hurt that day, to attend a silent demonstration outside of the Faculty Senate meeting. Please join us as we gather this Monday, beginning at 2pm, in front of the International House.

We’ll compose and wear placards that declare, in simple terms, either what happened to us and our friends on the 9th, or what the movement for public education means to us. Then, we’ll line up and stand silently as faculty and administrators enter the International House for their 3pm meeting.

We take our inspiration for this action from the students at UC Davis, who linked arms and silently watched as their chancellor walked from a press conference to her waiting car. This powerful action was a symbolic turning point at UC Davis, and helped strengthen calls for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation. Please join us as we echo the silent power demonstrated by the students of UC Davis.

Letter to Yudof and Regents from California Scholars for Academic Freedom

2011-11-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

November 23, 2011

Dear President Yudof , Chancellors, Academic Senate Chairs, and Regents:

We write on behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom** to condemn in the strongest possible terms the egregious attacks by police forces on protestors at UC Davis and UC Berkeley in these last weeks, to object to the violation of their rights of protest, free assembly, free speech, and academic freedom. We have watched with great concern as waves of revulsion and shock have swept across the global media at the violent and injurious actions on the University of California campuses. We propose the following immediate steps.

We petition for an independent investigation of these actions to be conducted by faculty senate members and student representatives appointed by their own assemblies from the UC system free of administrative intervention or oversight. The mandate of such an investigation should establish who has authorized the police to unleash such brutal tactics of suppression and injury on protestors, and to establish a precise chain of command so that subsequent and appropriate actions, which would include censure demands for suspension and resignation, can be brought to bear on all those responsible.

It is completely unacceptable to appoint a former LAPD police chief to investigate police brutality within the UC system. William Bratton’s role as police chief during instances of police brutality against those at an immigrants’ rights rally in Los Angeles in 2007 hardly qualifies him to oversee an independent investigation into police brutality. In terms of Bratton's approach to "excessive force," he specializes in training police to deploy space-cordoning and crowd-control methods that are less violent, but which end up eliminating the idea of public space and public visibility altogether. This kind of vision is problematic for public spaces, but utterly incompatible with the notion of common spaces in public universities. More importantly, such an investigation should be led by those whose interests were directly affected by such police violence, and those whom this University is designed to serve, namely its students and faculty.

These attacks on students, staff, and faculty have been repeated over the last few years against peaceful demonstrations that have objected to the privatization of the public university system, the devastating hikes in student tuition and fees, the extreme burdens of student debt, the cutting of long-term and essential staff positions, and the increasing precariousness suffered by part-time laborers in the university system.

In particular, we object to the use of police forces with weapons to quell peaceful protests and civil disobedience actions. Protestors have a constitutional right to free speech under the US constitution, but they also have, as members of the university community, specific rights to exercise their academic freedom unimpeded and free of violent attacks.

At the time of this writing, it remains unclear who precisely authorized the violent attacks on student demonstrators during the weeks in November, 2011. It will not do to say, as President Mark Yudof does in his missive of November 20th, that he is “appalled by images of University of California students being doused with pepper spray and jabbed with police batons on our campuses,” without taking any responsibility for these acts of police violence against peaceful protestors. Nor will it be sufficient for the President to initiate reviews of these incidences at all campuses, or to propose engaging in “discussions’ with all of the chancellors. Vague gestures designed to give the impression of administrative action—without any assignation of responsibility or any revision of policy- remain both implausible and inadequate. Although Chancellor Katehi of UC Davis claims not to have anticipated the use of pepper spray, she nevertheless takes full responsibility for her action. If she did not authorize those actions, who did? And the Chancellor of UC Merced claims that she “will neither order nor condone police aggression or force during a protest on campus in the absence of an imminent and substantial threat of harm to persons or property” (11/20/11). If this is so, does she break with UC system-wide policy in making this claim?

If the UC administration claims that it was following “established procedure,” and that established procedure violates the academic rights of students, staff, and faculty engaged in peaceful protest, then that established procedure must also come under scrutiny. The Regulations Governing Conduct passed recently by the UC Regents provoked many objections from faculty and students in the notice and comment period. The justifications offered by the administration for much of the violence of the last few weeks are spurious, citing the university’s prohibition of (among other things) structures and tents on campus (something that happens regularly for sports events, freshman receptions, and large parties). In defending the police brutality at UC Berkeley, Chancellor Robert Birgenau disqualified the linking of arms as a “nonviolent” act. Do President Yudof and the Regents endorse these blatant attempts to cast peaceful protestors as violent thugs and terrorists, by twisting the very definition of nonviolence? In the absence of any response to the contrary, these assertions suggest that the UC administration needs reminding of what kinds of actions constitute peaceful, nonviolent, and morally-motivated political protest, and require protection as such. The definitions of civil disobedience and non-violent protest are well-established and cannot be subject to ignorant or strategic interpretations of police or administrators.

It is unacceptable for any campus to criminalize free speech, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. It is unacceptable to unleash police to commit criminal acts of violence against those who are exercising constitutionally protected rights or who are expressing viewpoints that are critical of the UC administration. It is unacceptable to pretend as though police officials who are hostile to the idea of public visibility, with records of involvement in instances of police violence, can “independently” oversee any investigation of such matters. And, it is unacceptable to distort the very meaning of nonviolent protest in order to justify such acts of institutional violence.

Finally, we propose that if the chain of command is clearly established and those responsible for authorizing the use of police force to injure protesters can be clearly documented and named, that (a) those responsible be relieved from their official duties, and (b) that the UC system, in tandem with the CSU system, develop a policy that requires police to forego the use of any weapons in the monitoring of free and peaceful demonstrations on any of our campus.

Sincerely,

California Scholars for Academic Freedom**

CONTACT PEOPLE:

Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor
Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
510-642-1415
Email: jb_crittheory@berkeley.edu

Lisa Rofel
Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Phone: 831-459-3615
Email: lrofel@ucsc.edu

Carole H. Browner
Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles
Tel: 310 825 4119
email: browner@ucla.edu

Suad Joseph
Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
Phone 530-752-1593
Email: sjoseph@ucdavis.edu

Julia Elyachar
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
UC Irvine
elyachar@uci.edu
949 824-1489.

Beshara Doumani
Professor, Middle East History
Dept. of History
University of California, Berkeley
bdoumani@berkeley.edu
510 643-3147

Paul Amar
Associate Professor
Global & International Studies Program
University of California, Santa Barbara
Email: amar@global.ucsb.edu
Fax: 805-893-8003

**CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR FREEDOM is a four-year old group of more than 150 academics who teach in 20 California institutions of higher education. The group formed as a response to rash violations of academic freedom that were arising from both the 9/11/2001 climate of civil rights violation and to the increasing attacks on progressive educators by neo-conservatives. Many attacks were aimed at scholars of Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern descent or at scholars researching and teaching about the Middle East, Arab and Muslim communities. Our goal of protecting California Scholars and students based mainly in institutions of higher education has grown broader in scope. We recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.

Photo from flashmobyoga.

Yudof's Privatization of the UCPD Investigation

2011-11-23T10:37:00.000-08:00

From Rei Terada (on fb):

In appointing LA Police Chief William Bratton to investigate UCPD police brutality and Berkeley law school's Dean Christopher Edley to "to lead an examination of police policies in handling student protests at all 10 UC campuses" (LA Times), Mark Yudof travesties the independent thought and autonomy that students and faculty are now calling for. Bratton has made his career as an advocate of less physically violent police tactics that control and diminish public space in precisely neoliberal terms. The last thing the UC system needs right now is advice on how to make UCPD even more like a contemporary municipal police force. Similarly, Dean Christopher Edley is one of Yudof's closest companions, best known for his end-run against the expansion of online classes in the face of faculty governance policies. A commission run by Edley is the opposite of an independent commission. Everyone who signed the petitions of outrage against the police violence at Davis and Berkeley ought to mobilize against this. (I hope the owners of the petitions can use any emails attached to the petition process to re-contact literally everybody.)

There is one thing that is good about Yudof's move: it makes in the most public of circumstances the same move that he has made throughout his career as a privatizer of public goods. Yudof has done to the UC at every level and in detail the same thing he is doing now: passing off as reform what is actually vulgar cronyism on behalf of the 1%. Now this will be visible to everybody, even far outside the UC -- if we make it so.

Nathan Brown at UC Davis Rally

2011-11-21T22:25:00.000-08:00

What will depose this authoritarian administrator is not letters or petitions; it is your direct action on this campus. That direct action must continue until the Chancellor resigns. The Chancellor has said that it is not appropriate for her to resign at this time. We know that the Chancellor is not a very good judge of what is appropriate.

I propose two demands moving forward:

1) The immediate resignation of Chancellor Katehi;

2) All police forces ordered permanently off of UC campuses.

Chancellor Katehi and police forces are the primary threat to the health and safety of our university community.

UC Davis Strike Call

2011-11-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

The UC Board of Regents, who not only represent but actually are this state’s richest one percent, has repeatedly shown itself to be utterly unfit to manage and represent the interests of the students, faculty, and workers who constitute the University of California.

Following two successive years of sharp tuition increases, accompanied by millions in department and resource cuts, layoffs, and furloughs, the board had the audacity to propose a new 81% fee increase and drastic budget reductions.

Undergraduate student fees have tripled over the past ten years, as we have seen an unprecedented explosion of student debt; and departmental budgets have shrunk, as academic and non-academic workers experience diminishing benefits, swelling workloads, and non-existent job security.

In the midst of the economic crisis, the Regents have intensified their pursuit of the project of privatization and de-funding that diminish the quality of education and quality of life for those across the UC, while consigning students’ futures to greater and greater sums of debt.

The Regents’ theft of an ostensibly public resource to fund “capital projects” such as construction projects and private research initiatives, demonstrate a clear conflict of interests that benefits a narrow administrative elite—both the Regents and their local appointees (chancellors and vice chancellors)—at the expense of the greater faculty, staff, and student body.

The familiar rhetoric of austerity demands our resigned compliance, as our learning and working conditions progressively deteriorate. We have seen recently and in years past that political dissent is met with increasingly violent displays of force and repression by University police.

The continued destruction of higher education in California, and the repressive forms of police violence that sustain it, cannot be viewed apart from larger economic and political systems that concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the few.

Since the university has long served as one of the few means of social mobility and for the proliferation of knowledge critical to and outside of existing structures of power, the vital role it plays as one of the few truly public resources is beyond question.

The necessity of reclaiming the UC has never demanded such urgency, as it continues to shift towards the corporate model, pursues dubious fiscal partnerships (such as those with the defense department and international agribusiness), and engages in disturbing collusion with financial institutions like US Bank (which is one of the largest profiteers from student loans).

As such, I propose that in light of the upcoming Regents’ vote [concerning the possible 81% student fee hike] on Monday the 28th, (which will be occurring on four campuses simultaneously, one of which being UC Davis), that we call for a general strike this same day, with the aim of shutting down campuses across the state and preventing the Regents from holding their vote.

In response to the intolerable effects privatization and austerity and the horrific repression of student dissent that has occurred throughout the last month, the GA, as a governing body of all concerned UC Davis students, will prevent the Board of Regents from continuing its unbridled assault upon higher education in the state of California.

This will entail total campus participation in shutting down the operations of the university on the 28th, including teaching, working, learning, and transportation, as we will collectively divert our efforts to blocking their vote[s]. In doing so students, faculty and workers assert the power—and the will—to effectively represent and manage ourselves.

UC Davis English Department Calls for Disbanding UCPD

2011-11-21T13:17:00.000-08:00

The following statement was read to a crowd of thousands during today's rally at UC Davis and posted on the front page of the UCD English Department's website:

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi's immediate resignation and for "a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus."

Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuine collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the UC Davis campus community.

Aerial View of UC Davis Today From http://publiclaboratory.org/home

No Cops, No Bosses

2011-11-21T01:04:00.000-08:00

Original post here.

Posted on November 20, 2011 by crank

By now much of the world has seen video and photos of Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police department as he discharged a canister of burning chemicals into the faces of students seated in the center of the university quad. Most viewers are outraged, and justifiably so. Much of the outrage has been directed at John Pike. He deserves it. But we should remind ourselves that Friday’s police violence was only an aberration because it happened on a university campus not easily assimilable to the stereotype of “Berkeley radicals” and to students who are perceived or portrayed as mostly white and as resisting passively. Whiteness is brought up here, not to chastise those who only now denounce police violence that has been routinely applied to non-white communities and individuals—this itself is a misperception of Friday’s events: a majority of those arrested were not white—but to invite readers, new and old, to extend the critique of police violence beyond the walls of the university to the communities whose life it damages every single day.

Friday’s punitive violence, as terrible as it was, is not an example of bad policing. It is an example of policing.

We’ve seen this kind of violence used before on California campuses, and not just in response to the anti-privatization protests and occupations of the past two years. We’re seeing it used now to suppress dissent in cities across the world, from Oakland to Cairo.

When UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza says she is “very proud” of her officers, who “did a great job,” she is convinced that this is true. It’s not simply a public relations strategy, it’s a reflection of the fact that her officers did what cops are expected to do: employ violence against those who challenge authority.

This is why we do not demand the dismissal of Lt. John Pike, although it would be welcome.

Our demand is COPS OFF CAMPUS. Period.

Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi is working feverishly to control the media narrative about Friday’s police attack on protesters. She tried to hold a press conference yesterday, but we shut it down with our voices and bodies. It’s telling that the press conference was held in a building meant to accommodate satellite trucks and internet broadcasting, but whose size and peripheral location bar students from attending. Katehi’s press conference was meant to calm a national public outraged by her use of force against students. Addressing students and, more importantly, listening to them, was not part of her agenda. We were locked out of the building yesterday, but we let ourselves in and stopped the propaganda session.

Although we posed no danger to her, Katehi refused to leave the building for two hours, perhaps waiting for rain, or nightfall, before walking past a silent wall of students and ducking into her luxury automobile. She could have addressed students there, of course, but she preferred the leather-lined cocoon of the car and the comforts of a phone interview with CNN, conducted immediately after she left.

For Katehi, students are a nuisance, an obstacle standing in the way of her plans to privatize and internationalize the campus. This is apparent in the email missives that she sends to everyone, trying to justify her use of force. She invokes safety and health concerns.

[T]he encampment violated regulations designed to protect the health and safety of students, staff and faculty.

Here, the health and safety OF STUDENTS become empty abstractions that must be protected FROM STUDENTS.

Similarly, in the Chancellor’s tiresome rhetoric about the university’s mission and standards, the word EXCELLENCE loses any educational significance it may have had; it becomes a quantifiable property of the university, indistinguishable from reputation or ranking. “Excellence must be maintained,” recite the administrators. Like health and safety, it must be protected from students, whose disruptive protests mar the university’s image. The careful construction of this image often takes the form of actual construction—the so called capital projects, the gleaming buildings featured so prominently on university websites.

The fee increases, pepper spray, beatings, arrests, and student disciplinary procedures of the last two years are not the unfortunate consequences of a dismal budgetary situation. They are the primary vehicles for maintaining “excellence.”

Katehi makes repeated references to the presence of non-students among the protesters who were attacked by police, as if community members and alumni had no right to set foot on the campus of a PUBLIC university, as if they had no stake in the fate of a PUBLIC university. Our administrators prefer the university’s connections to the public to be mediated by formal contracts with agribusiness giants. They prefer alumni to mail checks from a distance. They prefer that the city not interfere with its project to increase the size of the student body and expand its physical footprint. They prefer visitors to be chaperoned through campus on tours that highlight statistics, amenities and, most of all, the buildings—the shiny new buildings and construction projects financed by student debt. Against the administration’s attempts to keep the community at a distance, the students of the University of California, Davis invite alumni, community members, and everyone else to the Quad on Monday, November 21 at noon, for a conversation about the university’s future. We ask Davis residents to support us in our struggle against a university administration at war with students and with the notion of a public university.

We second calls for Katehi’s resignation. She must go. But we don’t want to replace her with another Regental appointee or an interim chancellor. We don’t want to replace her.

The administration, as a managerial class for whom the ideal university is a massive corporation in imperialist partnership with other massive corporations and banks, will never accede to our demands for self-management, greater student and community participation in university governance, and better working conditions. The administration at UC Davis and every other UC campus has proven that, when faced with these demands, they will unleash violence in our learning spaces.

We demand the abolition of the administration and the transfer of all their functions to workers, students, and faculty.

As a necessary precondition to self-management and for our safety, we demand that UCPD be disbanded and that the University be declared a sanctuary space, free of interference from law enforcement personnel. Universities outside the United States already enjoy this freedom. We must demand it here.

Cops and administrators off campus!

Monday: UCB Open University, UC Davis Accepting Donations

2011-11-20T19:30:00.000-08:00

@UCD

From Occupy UC Davis: accepting donations of pizza and tents for the rally on Monday. Those wishing to donate pizza can order some for delivery at Woodstocks, (530) 757-2525. Those wishing to donate tents can order them online through this link http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3T6Z62WIDOER7/ref=ord_cart_shr . Tents ordered in this way will be automatically shipped to a donation site and used for our continuous occupation of the quad.

@UCB

From Occupy Cal: Open University. Monday, November 21: Noon -2pm, Sproul Plaza. (If it is raining, follow the signs and join us in the Multicultural Center (MCC) in MLK.)

Why the Open University at Occupy Cal?: Coalitions and the Open Classroom
How can we think about the classroom and the University as spaces to build coalitional politics? How can we link questions of sexuality, immigration status, age, disability, race, gender, and class in our political actions?

Open University Teachers for the day:
Jeff Chang: Cal alumnus; founding member of CalServe; author of award-winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, founding editor of Colorlines magazine; Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts + Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University.

Juana María Rodríguez: PhD in Ethnic Studies, UC-Berkeley; Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies; Director of the LGBT minor; author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces.

Monday’s Schedule:
12:00: Introduction and Welcome to the Open University
12:15: Presentations by Jeff and Juana
12:45-2pm: Open Discussion

2:30: Meeting of the Open University Working Group, all are welcome!

2 Year Anniversary Wheeler Hall November 20 Occupation

2011-11-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

Occupying Everything Since 2009.

Gayatri Spivak On UC Davis Lt. Pike and Chancellor Katehi

2011-11-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

[Update 2, 11/27, 10:11pm: In the comments below, the person who originally posted the statement on their blog as having been written by Spivak notes that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Spivak apparently had forwarded the statement in an email, but had not in fact written it. We apologize for the confusion. See the original post, which has been updated, here.]

[Update: As the title of this post mentions, this was not written by Reclaim UC ~~but rather by the well-known postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak and posted here.~~ Thanks to those commenters who have pointed out some errors in her observations. Most important is the fact that the person who accompanies Katehi as she leaves the building is not, in fact, the chief of police. Please keep this in mind as you read.]

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi

Lt. John Pike

From trinketization:

It has now been covered in the NY Times, USA Today, Time Magazine, CBS, CNN, and across the entire mediasphere. The various UC Davis police assault videos have been watched hundreds of thousands of times. Various searches related to UC Davis and pepper spraying were the *top searches on Google* in the US today — think of what that means. By mid-afternoon, UC Davis had already backed down and the Chancellor had released a damage-controlling and mealy-mouthed promise to investigate. But it was too late.

By monday, millions will know about Lt. Pike and his chemical assault squad, and the $400K per year (plus free housing, travel, and vehicle) Chancellor who gave the order to cut the protesters down to the point that some were hospitalized, and including forcing open students’ mouths and spraying directly into them. I kid you not.

And something remarkable happened at Davis tonight. I’ve been watching the live streams and following the blogs since late this afternoon. It was a very important moment.

Chancellor Katehi was preparing to give a news conference to take another crack at spinning this story and controlling the growing, viral character it has acquired.

UC Davis students showed up in large numbers to this conference, and were kept out of the small building (Surge 2, for those who know the campus) for lack of press passes (ha ha). They surrounded the building and their numbers grew over several hours to over 1000 student protesters. Reports came that Chancellor Katehi was afraid to leave and go through the student protesters, or even that she was being kept from leaving, as if it were a hostage situation. Cops were *not* summoned, however — or at least they were kept back. UC Davis appears to have learned at least a tactical lesson already.

Through patient OWS style organizing, worked out over dozens of mic checks, they arranged to clear a wide path, determined that they would be silent and respectful when she came out, and sent word that they were not keeping her hostage in the building, just there to call for her resignation. Hours went by as the situation got more and more tense, but the students showed remarkable discipline and organization as their numbers kept growing. Finally, they negotiated with Chancellor Katehi’s people and she left the building to walk to her taxpayer-paid $70,000 Lexus SUV with one aide. The students maintained *absolute, total order and silence* — really, not a word — and stood aside, except for the couple of journalists asking her questions on the livestream feed. It was eerie and powerful and Chancellor Pepper Spray was clearly feeling the shame of a thousands of eyes on her around the nation (the livestreams were overloaded as they were joined by students across California and then the nation).

Only once she began to pull away did the crowd erupt into a roar: WHOSE UNIVERSITY? OUR UNIVERSITY! dozens of times as they marched off to consume the pizza ordered for them by people around the nation.

It was so powerful — and remember this all happened on a day when virtually no news (except Demi and Ashton’s divorce or the 30 year old Natalie Wood death investigation) gets reported on mainstream outlets. This *all* happened online, and drew a huge national audience in the process, enough so to force a major university into damage control freakout.

Last night’s video now has nearly 25,000 views. A better one has now been released of Katehi’s “Walk of Shame.” Turns out that was not just any “aide” — it was the UC Davis police chief (Spicuzzi) walking with her [Update: we've heard that the person accompanying Katehi was actually Kristin Stoneking, a minister who wrote a brief analysis of her role in the walk of shame here]. This new video shows the final mic check to get everyone to be silent and stand back before Katehi and Spicuzzi leave the building. If you are sending this story around, this video is better in that it shows how deliberate and well orchestrated the silence was:

Protesters Plan a National 'Student-Debt Refusal' Campaign

2011-11-19T21:00:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2011

By Eric Hoover

Original Post Here.

Occupy Wall Street protesters are poised to announce a national "student-debt refusal" campaign that would begin next week, says a prominent scholar within the movement.

On Wednesday night, Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, said members of an Occupy Wall Street working group were finalizing drafts of three "pledges" related to student debt, including a debtors' pledge, whose signers would refuse to make payments on their loans after one million signatures have been collected.

The other pledges are one for faculty members who support those who refuse to pay, and another for nondebtors, including parents and sympathizers, who also want to show their support.

The pledges, Mr. Ross said, are to be based on four beliefs: that student loans should be interest-free; that tuition at all public institutions should be federally funded; that private and for-profit colleges should open their financial records to the public; and that students' "debt burden" should be written off.

Mr. Ross, an expert in academic-labor issues, is a member of Occupy Wall Street's Education and Empowerment working group. On Wednesday, he described how his personal interest in student-debt issues had developed.

"Like many faculty, I see a lot of suffering and humiliation among students in taking on this debt," Mr. Ross said. "There was the recognition that my own salary is debt-financed. ... There's an element of complicity. It's an incredible burden for faculty to bear."

The campaign is scheduled to begin with an event at Zuccotti Park, in New York, on Monday afternoon, followed by a protest at the City University of New York's Baruch College.

Davis Faculty Association steps up again, demands Katehi's resignation

2011-11-19T13:09:00.001-08:00

After endorsing the November 15th higher education strike, the UC Davis Faculty association has now come out in support of Chancellor Katehi's resignation. The chancellor ordered the police to repress those encamping at UC Davis, which they tried to do by dousing seated protesters with massive amounts of pepper spray, and then she publicly defended their brutality. The letter:

The DFA Board calls for the immediate resignation of Chancellor Katehi. The Chancellor’s authorization of the use of police force to suppress the protests by students and community members speaking out on behalf of our university and public higher education generally represents a gross failure of leadership.

Given the recent use of excessive force by police against “occupy” protestors at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, the Chancellor must have anticipated that, by authorizing police action, she was effectively authorizing their use of excessive force against peaceful UCD student protestors. The Chancellor’s role is to enable open and free inquiry, not to suppress it.

We also call for a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protestors by police on the UC Davis campus. The University of California should be taking a leadership role in encouraging the exercise of free speech, not in suppressing it.

Race and Occupy Cal - A personal journal as the 'movement' heads to Berkeley

2011-11-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

Cecil Brown Sat, 19 Nov at 7:40am

Original Post Here.

Occupy Sproul hoto by Rami Taibah, http://www.flickr.com/photos/22663008@N04/6355698267/in/photostream/

God could not have sent us a more fitting setting for Occupy Cal at the University of California, Berkeley, as the sun rising, yellow and warm. I was going devote today to observing and reporting on the social movement Occupy Cal.

Before I headed out on my jaunt, I phoned Ruben Elias Sanchez, a student organizer that I had met at the last Berkeley rally.

“Today, we are going to reconstruct the Occupation to focus on people of color,” he informed me.

Being a person of color, I was down with that.

“We are going to talk about Prop 13, how it put a cap on the amount that corporations have to pay.” I’m down with that too. “We are going to talk about getting rid of Prop 209, the affirmative action ban.” Now, I’m really down with that.

At the entrance of Barrows Hall, I see the chair of the African American Studies Charles Henry, and three of his colleagues, Sam Mchombo (who teaches Swahili), Ula Taylor, (who teaches American History) and Leigh Raiford (who teaches American Studies.) Raiford told me that she was going to give a Teach Out. There were going to be more than 20 Teach Outs, including George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Science, who was going to discuss framing public education and the Occupy Movement. At 8 p.m. that evening, Professor of Public Policy and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich would bring it all to a close with a speech honoring the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture.

With the African American Studies delegation, I marched down into the plaza, which was packed to the gills with people. Everybody was in a great and zesty mood, more like a rock concert than a political rally. I saw several people I knew. There was professor Linda Williams snapping pictures with her iPhone. There was the chair of the English Department, Sam Otter, in a suit, smiling. There was other distinct members of the faculty. My impression was that the powers that be wanted to be on the scene, because they agreed with the message that the university is fumbling the ball.

We had arrived on the Sproul steps and at that moment, soothing and ebullient gospel music caressed our eardrums and lifted our emotions high to the blue sky. People were chanting to the music of the University Gospel Choir singing social justice songs.

The leader of the choir was Rev. Doctor Mark Wilson, UC adjunct professor. A stout, energetic, hefty individual, Wilson, with his cap turned backwards and wearing a CAL T-shirt, was energetic and effective. He waved his invisible baton to his choir, which consisted of Cal students.

“Another day’s journey, and I'm glad 'bout it!” This traditional African American song fitted perfectly in with the optimistic mood. “Im so happy to be alive,” the choir sings, and we sang with them, about 1,500 of us. Indeed, with the music, and the sky, and the packed Sproul Plaza, the song captured the moment in time - a true zeitgeist.

Then, they sang a classic song from The Staples Singers, “Move Along.” The mood of the people was at its height when Rev. Wilson, turned to the keyboard player, an Asian with a long pony tail, and gestured for him to bring the chords up higher. And higher. And higher than that.

“I’m going to stand. I can’t bow to racism, injustice,” he said, leading the choir and the rest of us in his deep tenor voice, “I’m going to stand!”

The reverend did several songs that kept our spirits high. The last one was by the famous gospel composer Hezekiah Walker, “I Need You To Survive and You Need Me.” He had the audience turn to the next person and say these words, “I need you to survive!”

Each member of the audience turned to the person next to him and said, “I need you to survive.”

The input of the black gospel tradition, here administrated by an African American, set the tone for a movement that is fueled by black people and black concerns, even though nobody mentions it.

Before he was finished, Wilson invited Carol Walker, assistant at the financial aid and scholarship office at the UC to come up. Also, African American, she sang a beautiful song.

If Occupy Cal had ended right after this performance, it would have all been worth it. Even though, no one had mentioned race, it was obvious that blacks contributed a lot to the movement already.

I asked a few questions about the songs right after Wilson's performance.

“Most of them adapted well to the Occupation Movement. I started to change the word ‘racism’ to ‘capitalism’ to fit the theme. But then, I decided to leave it the way the Staples Sisters wrote it.”

Good choice.

Wilson, who is a Harvard graduate, said he wished that these students had been as enthusiastic 20 years ago when we were fighting for Proposition 209 that banned African Americans from the campus.

“They didn’t come out 20 years ago,” he told me. “When Amos Brown and others were fighting against anti-affirmative action.”

At the end of the gospel performance, Yvette Felarce took the mic. A member of the BAMN - By Any Means Necessary - she reminded the audience why the ban on Affirmative Action 209 must be dismantled. The audience was happy to listen to her and gave her a roaring response of hands and cheers.

Gradually, the rally broke up into groups. The Teach Outs began to form on various parts of Sproul Plaza.

Seated on a bench near the plaza, Professor Raiford lead a discussion on what she suggested as “the possibility of decolonizing and reclaiming space and funding within the university.” Traditional disciplines (like English, Rhetoric, History) dominate the funding still. Funding for minorities studies is still scarce and unavailable.

I wandered up the path from Sproul and found Michael Cohen, lecturer in American and African-American studies, under a tree, pacing the green grass as he expounded on the connection to the “Prison Industrial Complex” and “the Current Crisis.”

The prison complex in California spends more money on keeping young blacks locked up in San Quentin (where as it turns out, Professor Cohen teaches a class) than it does on Cal Students. He traced the history of this back to the '70s, when Ronald Reagan was elected to governor and then to the presidency. According to Cohen, there has been a policy by the state to keep blacks out of the classroom by putting them into prison.

As I left to check my car (ticket maids are particularly sneaky in Berkeley), I was accompanied by Zackery Manditch-Prottas, a white graduate student in the African American Studies department, who engaged me in an insightful commentary on the current state of hip-hop.

Next, I visited the American Studies group lead by Kathy Moran, the associate director, who sat with a small group of students. This group, like almost all of them, had no black students.

This, of course, was very disappointing. When I asked, Moran, why were there so few African American students or African American professors, she said, turning the palms of her hands upside down, no money.

I went looking for Professor George Lakoff’s Teach Out. A few days ago, I ran into him on campus walking with the aid of a cane. He had had back surgery and was recovering nicely. I walked with him to the elevator in Wheeler Hall.

“The problem with the Occupy movement,” he explained with a smile, “is that they don’t know how to frame their arguments.”

At around 3 p.m., the rally reunited into a march, exiting Telegraph at Bancroft, and headed west to Berkeley High School. After picking up an additional girth of students, it headed to the banks at downtown Berkeley.

As night fell, the students began to gather en masse around 8 p.m. to hear the long anticipated speech from Robert Reich.

For all of the anticipation, Reich’s speech was very short, about 15 minutes. In the first five minutes, he summarized what he took to be the students attitude towards Occupy movements.

“Some of you are here because you have a problem with the banks, but some of you are here because you have a problem with the university. But you are all here for a good reason. I am so proud to be a faculty member of the best university in the world.”

Big thunderous applauses. “When I was a boy,” he said, getting into something very personal - his height. “As a kid I was short,” he joked. He said kids use to bully him; and the audience sighed loudly. “The solution I had to prevent the bullies from beating me up was to hang out with the guys bigger than they were. One of these guys was named Mike. His full name was Michael Schwerner. Then in 1964, the summer of Freedom Riders, he went down to Mississippi to help sign up minorities. He was caught by white Southern men and murdered.”

Reich didn’t mention that one of the other men was a black man. When he finished the anecdote he waited for applause. Few of the thousand of young Berkeley students knew that he was making reference to one of the most historical events in American History. They were killed by members of the KKK. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman disappeared June 21, 1964.

A few minutes before, he had congratulated them on being students at that best university in the world and now it was like watching Jay Leno. “Who were Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman?” (Answer: “They ran an Ice Cream Company?”)

Then Reich was gone, swallowed up by a crowd of admirers. Thousand of students milled around, not knowing quite what to do. Then, somebody put on some music from the '60s.

A young woman named Amanda told me that she had come all the way from Australia to study Hip-hop but ran, unexpectedly, into the Occupation Movement instead. After she left, I ended up having a conversation with Dylan, a young white boy about 20. He said he had been to all of the Occupy movements in California: San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa and Oakland. He said the race relations was improving. The main reason, he said, is that most white kids have no contact with black people. Their parents saw to that, I suggested, and he agreed. Like the generation represented by Reich, they blew smoke up their children's behind about being the best and going to the best schools, but they shelter them from the real world, where there are lots of poor people and black people. By working in Occupy Oakland, he said he had met so many black people he liked. He had to learn all kinds of stuff, about how to get food, and how to stay warm, and how to - well, basically - to survive.

I turned and looked at Dylan. He had the most gentle eyes.

Wow, I'm thinking, maybe he is right: things are looking up for young white people. Maybe they will use the Occupy to soul search, and maybe they will pull themselves out of their trance their parents have put them in.

I said goodnight to Dylan, finally, and walked past the crowd, headed back to my car, and drove home. It was about 10 p.m. and it had been a long day.

And Then UCPD Did It All Over Again At UC Davis

2011-11-18T20:34:00.000-08:00

Chancellor Linda Katehi calls in riot police to remove peaceful student protestors. Seated students are maced at close range. At about min. 6 students encircle police and then force them off campus. UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Davis officers are present.

Davis Chancellor’s office (530) 752-2065, UC Davis police (530) 752-1727, The officer who pulled out the pepper spray was Lieutenant John Pike. 530-752-3989 japikeiii@ucdavis.edu.

And after the pepper spray, the batons, and the 10 arrests, an open letter is written to UC Davis Chancellor Katehi:

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

[...]

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Before the Raid

2011-11-18T11:03:00.001-08:00