Update on the Hunger Strike: Day 14

Today marks two full weeks since the hunger strike at UC Berkeley officially began. Yesterday, the Daily Cal published an article on the protest action, but for some reason claimed that the strikers were only in their tenth day without food. What, weekends don't count? The least they can do is get the numbers right! [Update: Our bad -- we got confused because the article was published on Monday with the headline that said the strike was in its tenth day, but in fact it was referring to the rally last Friday. Sorry about that.]

As we've reported here, the strikers' demands revolve around the UC administration's decision to consolidate three departments -- Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and African American Studies -- under the umbrella of their austerity program "Operational Excellence." In this case, "consolidation" means cuts, including staff layoffs and what looks like it could turn into something like speed-up for faculty. While the administration has struck all the right rhetorical tones (equality, inclusion, diversity, etc), they refuse to do anything material to respond to the demands. And this when the university is selling billions of dollars worth of construction bonds to engage in massive and secretive building projects that, in at least some cases, have gone millions of dollars over budget.

The above video was filmed on May 6, the actual tenth day of the hunger strike. In addition to giving an update on the (almost) current state of the strike, some of the speakers provide some really helpful context about the history of ethnic studies. This is useful for those folks who don't know much about the Third World Liberation Front and the story of student strikes and protests (and, of course, police repression) at SF State and Berkeley that led to the establishment of Ethnic Studies as a department. Here's a pretty detailed timeline of the protests of 1968-69 at SF State.

Update from the Hunger Strike: Day 8

On Wednesday hunger strike in defense of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley has concluded its eighth day -- Thursday will be the ninth day without food for the six remaining strikers. Yesterday, after basically ignoring the strikers for a full week, the administration finally agreed to meet with them. The strikers met with two members of the UC Berkeley administration, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and Dean of Social Science Carla Hesse, and once again presented their demands. Of the four demands, two are more symbolic (basically involving the university making a statement) and two are more material (rehiring several laid-off staff members and ending UC Berkeley's austerity program called "Operational Excellence"). Guess which ones the administrators agreed to? Yes, the purely symbolic ones!

After the meeting, the university issued the following statement:


As usual, the administrators' deploy a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand, hiding behind patently false displays of affect. "We are moved by and are supportive of the concern that students have shown for the consequences of the current budget crisis." They make clear that they "respect" the students and go on to "reassure" them that everything will be alright. They note that talking with the students has helped them to "better appreciate" the negative effects of these budget cuts.

Don't worry about those staff members we just fired, Basri and Hesse declare. We'll take great care of them. Don't even think about them. See, we're working really hard to get them new jobs -- though they might be temporary or part time, that is, without benefits. But don't you worry about it, because did we mention that we really appreciate your concerns? Also, to replace those staff positions we've eliminated, we'll simply create two new faculty advising positions! See, it's easy -- we just shift that work onto the plates of the faculty members! We're sure they won't mind -- what else do they have going on anyway? And of course, in conclusion, we'll be happy to issue a statement about whatever you want, just as long as they don't have to actually do anything about it.

If these administrators actually cared about the protesters, their well-being, and their concerns, why would it take them a week to agree to sit down to discuss their demands? If they were actually moved, they wouldn't have had the sprinkler system system in front of California Hall turned on for the past two nights in order to force the hunger strikers to abandon their position.

The strikers understand that. Today, they participated in a protest in support of AFSCME workers at the International House, where workers earn $22,000 a year, are facing speed-up, and experience intimidation by management. During the protest, they were able to hand deliver the following letter directly to Chancellor Birgeneau himself, who has yet to make a single appearance at the hunger strike.

Dear Chancellor Birgeneau,

It is with steadfast commitment and fearless determination that we write again. We have sacrificed our own bodily nourishment for 193+ hours and counting to move you to reconsider the current cuts made in Gender & Women's, African American, and Ethnic Studies. The pain we continue to endure as marginalized students and students of Color, fighting for our histories to be taught in an institution which claims to foster diversity, is a pain as constant and gnawing as hunger itself. It has been 7 days since the first meeting with Administrators, and the University has yet to show they are concerned about the physical health of the strikers who have put their lives on the line to defend a department historically attacked, marginalized, and discredited. In order for you to reconsider these cuts we would like to restate and clarify our demands.

1. To reinstate the FTE staff positions in Ethnic Studies/Gender & Women's Studies/African American Studies cut by organizational simplification under Operational Excellence (OE). [That is,] 2.5 FTE's in Ethnic Studies, .5 FTE in Gender & Women's Studies, and .1 FTE in African American Studies.

2. To end the process of Operational Excellence, specifically the "organizational simplification of OE that is threatening to cut and marginalizes the Ethnic Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and African American Studies departments.

3. To publicly support the Legislative Resolution ACR 34, co-authored by Assembly members Ricardo Lara and Luis A. Alejo in support of Ethnic Studies in California.

(...)

4. We demand that the Administration publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley, again.

We acknowledge that you considered the last two demands most feasible, however, to agree to symbolic gestures without solid actions to back up your investment in our departments is to make empty promises.

We will continue striking until we see acknowledgment that all 4 demands which are both well within reach off the UC Berkeley administration and are acted upon in good faith.

In the words of Mario Savio:

"There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Chancellor, Our bodies will continue to grind against this machine until you and your administration take action to stop it. We will not be silenced, we will not allow ourselves to get pushed aside, we will not stop until we are able to study, work and learn as equals to our peers.

We urge you to make a strong material, not just symbolic, offer to our negotiation team.

There will be a rally in front of California Hall on Friday at noon. Come out and support the strikers and their demands!

Hunger Strike Update: Day 7

The hunger strike at UC Berkeley to defend Ethnic Studies is still going strong. After more or less ignoring them for a week, the administration finally agreed to negotiations with the strikers this morning. We'll bring updates as we receive them.

Yesterday, UC Berkeley Professor of Ethnic Studies Carlos Muñoz sent out the following email which lays out some of the immediate stakes and concrete effects of the administration's unilateral decision to merge Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and African American Studies together under the umbrella of its austerity program "Operational Excellence." The email also includes a statement from California Assemblyman Ricardo Lara in solidarity with the hunger strike.

From: Carlos Munoz, Jr. [cmjr@berkeley.edu]
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 12:45 PM
Subject: 10 University of California, Berkeley, students are on hunger strike due to Ethnic Studies Department staff layoffs

Dear Friends,

Budget cuts are in the process of being made in most departments on our campus. But, although it cannot be documented at this point, I agree with our students that our Ethnic Studies Department has suffered more than other departments. Last week, we lost 2.5 staff FTE. One full time and one part time (50%) member of our staff were terminated. Two other full time staff members were cut to 50% time. In addition to these recent cuts, the department previously lost two full time staff members to retirement. Those positions were never replaced. Therefore, it can be said that the department has lost a total of 4.5 staff positions.

Last week Ethnic Studies students and faculty protested the staff cuts. Ten students went on hunger strike last Tuesday. Today marks the 6th day of their strike.

I am pleased to report that Assemblyman Ricardo Lara has sent out a Press Release and a personal letter of solidarity to our students on hunger strike. His letter is attached and his PR is below. Peace, Profe

-------

For Immediate Release
Contact: Julia Juarez
(562) 445-7716

LARA'S ETHNIC STUDIES RESOLUTION SUBJECT OF HUNGER STRIKE AT UC BERKELEY

SACRAMENTO -Assembly Concurrent Resolution 34, authored by Assembly Member Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), is at the center of a hunger strike at the University of California Berkeley where students are protesting the university's lack of commitment to Ethnic Studies. ACR 34 highlights the importance of ethnic studies as an academic discipline and recognizes its research, scholarship and programs that study and teach the experiences, history, culture and heritage of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, Native Americans, and other persons of color in the United States.

"At a time when Ethnic Studies programs throughout the nation are under attack, it is imperative that we take a stand and recognize the important contributions of California's Ethnic Studies departments and programs, including their faculty, staff and students," said Assembly Member Lara.

This student led hunger strike is demanding:

1. Reinstate the FTE staff positions in Ethnic Studies cut by organizational simplification under the UC's plan for Operational Excellence
2. End the current process of Operational Excellence which seeks to consolidate Ethnic Studies with Gender and Women's Studies and African American Studies into a single department
3. Publicly support Assembly Member Lara's Legislative Resolution ACR 34
4. Publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at the University of California Berkeley

Support the Hunger Strike

Rally Friday Noon California Hall!

(thanks to bearcardo for the video)

Contextualizing the Hunger Strike: Operational Excellence

We wanted to post a couple quick thoughts and links in order to provide some context for the ongoing hunger strike at UC Berkeley right now. As we mentioned yesterday, protesters began the action in response to the administration's attempts to consolidate three departments -- Gender and Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies -- as part of an restructuring initiative called "Operational Excellence" (OE). OE, which has been the target of previous actions, is basically an austerity program developed by the UC Berkeley administration in collaboration with an outside consulting firm called Bain & Company (which was paid $7.5 million for its efforts) to cut campus costs. As the Daily Cal reported yesterday, this model has been exported to other UC campuses, complete with their own ridiculously bureaucratic variations on the OE acronym like "Operational Effectiveness" (at UC Santa Barbara) and "Organizational Excellence" (at UC Davis). UCSF couldn't come up with another OE name, so they just adopted Berkeley's.

The UC Berkeley Faculty Association has a set of documents about OE here. But we wanted to quote Chris Newfield's thoughts from last fall on Bain & Company's OE report, because he treats OE as an administrative apparatus instead of getting mired in the details:

The image is the bureaucratic version of the alien ship in Independence Day, a looming, inverted pyramid in which top dwarfs bottom and threatens to swallow it whole. Everything flows top-down, and the administrative content takes the form of goals-metrics-evaluation which are communicated to units (metrics -- assessment of performance), on down to supervisors (accountability functions) and then finally to individuals (performance metrics tied to unit goals.) Relationships are reduced to the abstract modalities of compliance embodied in assessment procedures. Management is not support for the university’s necessarily diverse creative functions but is a state of permanent evaluation. There is no respect here for the autonomy of the units -- departmental staff, student services, and technical staff for laboratories -- that are close to the “customer” (cf. “autonomous culture” as a source of inefficiency in procurement, slide 35). The tone is of control through communication, through finance, through even more of the endless audit and evaluations to which UC employees are already subject. The implicit diagnosis is that Berkeley’s employees are inefficient because they are insufficiently assessed, measured, and financially incentivized. The diagnosis is anti-humanist, at odds with current literature about both human motivation (intrinsic) and effective organizational behavior (collaboratively organized). It is also ungrounded in evidence from the Berkeley campus. The predictable effect, as I noted at the start, is that the model contained in the report is already making staff efficiency worse.

I don’t have first-hand knowledge of how the Berkeley campus process is unfolding this week or this month, but the public documents are not promising. There is the OE czar, central process managers, hand-picked committees making implementation decisions in smoke-free rooms, and roving HR bands hired from the outside. There is nothing there about collaborative implementation, protections for productive autonomy, bottom-up integration, non-intrusive coordination of the decentralization on which organizational creativity depends.

In an op-ed published last week in the Daily Cal, Robert Connell, a PhD student in Ethnic Studies, frames OE in terms of diversity and specifically the departmental consolidation that provoked the hunger strike. Like Newfield, he makes the point that instead of "wrangling over statistics" we should be paying attention to the broader context and the process through which OE has been formulated and is being implemented. But Connell also brings up another important point, one that is often left out of these discussions -- the centrality of staff for thinking about campus diversity:

What rarely gets acknowledged, however, is that staffers within these departments play a significant role in cultivating campus diversity. They mentor marginalized students from various departments, assist in recruitment efforts and generally help to build a diverse sense of community, doing much of this outside of their regular paid duties. Students from many departments, both undergraduate and graduate, can attest that the terminated staffers have been vital supports to them throughout their time at Berkeley.

Therefore, OE, whatever its successes, deals a heavy blow to campus diversity, equity and inclusion because of the loss of individuals who are key to actually maintaining those realities. Nowhere does our coalition see evidence that OE planners took this into account.

This is important in terms of building solidarity between students, faculty, and workers -- something that the administration hopes to prevent at all costs. This is one reason, for example, they don't want union members to accompany students in negotiations, that they literally slam the door in their faces. It is notable that this happened during last year's hunger strike, when two members of AFSCME actually joined the student protesters in refusing to eat. Diversity, in other words, isn't just a question of how many students of color are admitted, as it is often treated. It's also a question of solidarity with those workers and students especially whose lives are made increasingly precarious through the administration's top-down imposition of austerity measures.

Hunger Strike for Ethnic Studies Begins at UC Berkeley

This afternoon, after a joint teach-in on the administration's plans to consolidate Gender and Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies, a group of nine students began a hunger strike in front of California Hall. Some of the strikers are veterans of last year's hunger strike as well. Their demands are the following:

1. Reinstate the FTE staff positions in Ethnic Studies cut by organizational simplification under Operational Excellence
2. End the current process of Operational Excellence
3. Publicly support the Legislative Resolution ACR 34, co-authored by Ricardo Lara and Luis A. Alejo in Support of Ethnic Studies in California.
4. We demand that the administration publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley.

The administration has released an official response, which is available here. As expected, it not only treats the strikers like irrational children, but furthermore completely fails to respond to their demands. Instead, it tries to make them disappear by asserting that, despite all available evidence, the administration in fact shares the same goals: "Our hope is to understand one another better, given that we have the same ultimate goals for equity and inclusion." Oh really. Flashback to Yudof's recent comments on what he called the UC's "compass points":

Yudof said the university has long operated on three "compass points" -- access, affordability and excellence.

"We are moving dangerously close to having to say: pick two of the three. That’s my view, and the excellence is nonnegotiable," he said. "We are going to have to look at access and affordability."

But we don't need to pick over the statements of UC administrators -- we have enough evidence right before our eyes. The fact is that through "Operational Excellence" UC Berkeley paid millions of dollars to the consulting firm Bain & Company to identify areas to "streamline" (that is, cut). As thosewhouseit reported earlier today from the hunger strike:

This afternoon, over 100 members of a coalition in defense of Ethnic Studies gathered at Sather Gate against the impending consolidation of their departments as part of Operational Excellence. OE, it should be noted, has now been exported to UCSB, UCSF, UC Davis, and UCLA.  We now have “Organizational Excellence,” “Operational Efficiency,” and God knows how many other variants. If Berkeley shelled out a cool $7 million to Bain, UCLA is using Huron, Davis ScottMadden Management, and Santa Barbara an “individual consultant.” Against this affront to Ethnic Studies under the guise of austerity, the 100-200 students and their faculty allies marched to California Hall after announcing the inauguration of a hunger strike. Eight students are now on hunger strike and stationed in front of California Hall.

There's one more piece of the administration's response that's worth noting. The concluding paragraph reads:

We are concerned that some students would endanger their health [or safety!!?!] by a hunger strike, and/or negatively impact their academic performance at the end of the semester. We have offered to meet with a small representative group, and this offer remains on the table. In the meantime, you are able to exercise free speech and protest, but are also bound by the campus rules on time, place, and manner (http://police.berkeley.edu/about_UCPD/news/news_101006.html). These rules preclude overnight lodging or camping.

Behind austerity measures, the threat of riot cops. But the administration's discourse is inherently paternalistic, even when it's actively engaged in threatening its students. This is reflected, to begin with, in the concern over "health [and safety]," a keyword that's been deployed frequently against student protest over the last year and a half. It also appears in the notion of "time, place, and manner" regulations, which proclaim the importance of free speech while relegating it to geographically isolated and temporally restricted areas. This is the logic of the "free speech" or "first amendment zone." Time, place, and manner -- a subject for a future post.

The University is Coming to be a Shadow of its Former Self

by anonymous

Mice are eating away at our libraries, which smell faintly of rot. Accordions of police barricades stand in for public sculptures. They greet our puzzlement with cold handshakes. The buzz of helicopters interrupts the hum of AV machines: unwelcome ostinatos. We are being privatized; this is how it feels.

We now know that the first to be fired in the name of efficiency will be custodial and dining service workers. Tuition increases will continue, and will continue to push members of the working classes away from our classrooms. We know that the acceptance rates for black and latina/o students are dropping sharply, while we are opening our doors to relatively wealthy out-of-state students. Shared governance is shattered, professors are leaving, and the UC Commission on the Future envisions squadrons of GSIs 'teaching' online classes to a pool of undergraduates who will be ushered away after three years.

This is the future we are being asked to accept. But we are having no part of it.

Our acts of refusal this past year have been varied, and have had various effects. Two such acts at UC Berkeley, my place of employment, have shown us our strength, and have helped set the agenda for the coming year: the occupation of Wheeler Hall in the fall, and the Hunger Strike in the spring.

The day after the Regents raised tuition by 32 percent, consigning our generation to a few thousand more years of debt, we opened up a vortex on campus by locking ourselves in Wheeler Hall and demanding that the University rehire laid off workers. Early in the morning, the chancellor emailed the campus claiming that the police were taking care of us; but late in the afternoon, we still hadn't left the building. We remained inside only because of the hundreds who were outside; chanting, pressing against police barricades, getting soaked, enduring beatings, refusing to leave. Our vortex had drawn out the passions of students and the solidarity of workers, who felt, perhaps unconsciously, that reclaiming space on campus was the proper response to the theft of our time.

Since then, those of us who locked ourselves in Wheeler Hall have been threatened with seven month suspensions. We are told that being suspended will be good for our personal growth and education. We are told that there are strict regulations on when, how, and where protests can take place. There is a Code of Student Conduct. We violated the Code. We are to be punished, re-educated, developed, fixed.

Remarkably though, the Administration is the only body on campus that seems to believe in this Code and its enforcement. In re-education. In a one hour window, per day, for amplified protest. The faculty, through the divisional council; the workers, through the unions; and the students, through the ASUC, have all called for our charges to be dropped. Those who work, study, and teach in the buildings on campus have thus begun to assert their own anti-code of conduct -- a 'code' that nurtures our capacity to protest and that treats buildings not as property to be guarded or capital to be efficiently employed but as public goods to be put to use in ways that are determined by, and that call forth, our collective passions.

Engaged students, workers, and professors are starting to formulate the principles of a free University -- a University that remains merely spectral at the moment. A shadow University. Traces of its possible realization inhabit our present; it's time for us to seize, turn over, and extrapolate these traces.

Late in the spring, another vortex opened up on campus. This one lasted ten days, and centered on the empty stomachs and wan faces of students & workers on hunger strike. The strikers began by demanding that the Administration demonstrate a bit of leadership by denouncing Arizona's recent anti-immigrant legislation, by declaring UC Berkeley a sanctuary campus, by rehiring workers, and by dropping conduct charges. But by the end of the strike, those who danced with empty stomachs saw the recalcitrant chancellors' mealy-mouthed words for the dead letters they were. A hand-drawn sign lingered in the branches of a tree: “fire admin” it read. We were done with them.

Our definitive break from the administration occurred a week into the strike, minutes before dawn. Police came to evict the hunger strikers. Yellow tape was stretched around the lawn in front of California Hall. The vice chancellor sent a mass email declaring that the strike had ended and that we were dispersed. But students and workers still weren't eating. And we were beginning to mass on the edge of the cordon.

From then on our presence was spectral, yet our force was real.

That day we blocked the doors of California Hall, held hands around the building, chanted, read aloud a faculty petition that “reject[ed] police interference into a non-violent protest,” marched across campus, sat and danced in front of the chancellors house. All day our numbers grew. All day we felt our collective power, and improvised with confidence. And in our practice we went beyond our words: we encircled California Hall not because we wanted crumbs from the chancellor, but to block the building; to shut it down. We were done with them; done with their bloated salaries and their fear of democracy; done with their hatred of organized labor, their plans to privatize us, and their cynical invocations of 'diversity.' We were done being ruled by capital's bureaucrats. We had different plans.

If the hunger strike put on the agenda the closure of California Hall, it also articulated a principle of student/worker protest that we will need to take seriously in the coming months: if it is to be emancipatory, such protest will necessarily look beyond the walls of the University. The strikers saw their protest as part of a regional struggle against racism and the criminalization of immigrants. They acted in concert with those in LA, Tucson, and Phoenix taking direct actions against SB1070 and the militarization of the border.

More solidarity actions of this sort are on the agenda for the coming year.

The governor of California has recently declared that, while higher education should be funded, welfare, childcare, mental health services, and services for people with disabilities should be eviscerated. This is not the 'victory' we were fighting for, and not only because it won't stop the Regents from raising our tuition. Our struggle is against privatization; against austerity measures that re-segregate the state and that make it harder for poor and working class people to get by. Such measures will continue to grind us down until, through collective struggle, we render them inoperative. And we will not stop fighting.

On campus, we will reclaim the spaces and times of our lives. On October 7th, our next day of action, we will initiate an indefinite strike, to be maintained until our shadow University has been made real.

Off campus, we will act in solidarity with those who are striking back against neoliberalism and mass racialized incarceration. We look forward to a statewide general strike, when the words on all our lips will be: “Let's get free.” When such a strike comes, we'll turn the Universities into ghost towns.

We'll be there in the streets,
and will see you there...

Hella Cops @ Hunger Strike

... defending Birgeneau's house. All East Bay jurisdictions (UCPD, BPD, OPD, Alameda County Sheriffs) present and accounted for.

Hungry For Justice

Solidarity with the Hunger Strike!

"We've protested, we've held rallies, and now we have to go to an extreme form of protest," Corona said. "We were placed in an extreme position as a community, and we had to respond in an extreme manner."

(From the Chronicle)

AFSCME Workers Join Hunger Strike

Two members of AFSCME have joined the hunger strike at UC Berkeley, currently in its fourth day. This is especially significant given that student-worker solidarity seems to be one of the administration's greatest fears:

On Wednesday evening, it appeared a resolution was within reach to end the three-day hunger strike by students, workers and other members of the UC Berkeley community. The strike began Monday with demands of denouncing racist legislation in Arizona, creating a sanctuary campus and ending retaliation against student and worker activists (see next page for complete demands). As five negotiators were entering California Hall; Tanya Smith, the lone UC employee on the team, was denied entry into the building. “The police blocked the door and indicated that no union members would be allowed to enter,” said Smith; who also is the campus President of U.P.T.E., a UC union. “Then Isaac Castro, a fellow negotiator, came to join me outside and the police lost control”.

“When I saw that they blocked Tanya’s entrance, I decided to leave the building”, said Isaac Castro a fifth year student who is participating in the strike. “I guess they thought I was trying to prop the door open because they immediately brought me to the floor. After being detained for a few minutes they realized their mistake and let me leave. But I’m still shocked at how quick they were to restrain me when all I wanted to do was stand in solidarity with a worker on my campus. Why are they so afraid of students and workers joining together for this hunger strike?”

“Our demands are very reasonable and there is no need for these intimidation tactics by Vice Chancellor Breslauer and Chancellor Birgeneau”, says Kathy Vega, a 3rd year student majoring in Political Science. ”They have shown they never intended to discuss our demands. Our hunger strike is a completely non-violent act which will continue until all of our demands are met. From now on we will only negotiate with the Administration with our complete team, including UC workers”.

This is how UCB administrators treat students who haven't eaten in three days. Classy.

Let Me Inform You...

Shorter Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s statement to UC Berkeley students involved in the hunger strike:

Let me inform you that not eating for 3 days might not be great for your health, and that I love diversity. Now, to your demands:

1. I'm happy to vaguely express displeasure with laws that are motivated by racis... i mean "deep racial divides." I will be sure to express my displeasure at some unspecified later date.

2. I could make it safe for undocumented students to come here, but that would make it unsafe for undocumented students to come here.

3. F.U. PS: I know all ya'll locked in Wheeler secretly pulled the Dwinelle fire alarms -- my magic-detecting cat told me so.

4. We are careful to only lay people off in humane ways.

5. If by "student-led" you meant "administration-led," then sure, you're on.

6. We put ads in the Daily Cal teaching you how not to get randomly beat up by cops, but you didn't learn.

Ok we're cool, right? So how about you get off my lawn so we can all get back to patenting more famine-inducing biofuel crops, k?

Statement from UC Berkeley Hunger Strike

Via email:

We, the hunger strikers of UC Berkeley, are calling out to all people of color, to our communities of color, to take a stand this Friday, May 7th at noon against racism and all the many forms that this oppression takes in our society. We call upon communities of color and all our allies to protest at locations of power, wherever it may be that you are best able to protest, whether that be an administration building or city hall. We must unite and let those in power know that we are standing together to oppose the criminalization of our communities. Let them know that we will not allow them to target workers for firings on our campuses through the misguided privatization policies of our campus administrations. Let them know that we will not allow them to target our fellow students that have stood up to them in past, that stand up to them in the present, and that will stand against them in future protests. Let them know that we are all one: workers, students, community members. Let it be known that we will not be divided.

The people in power do not think that we are a force to be reckoned with, they do not believe that our people will come together to oppose them. We began our hunger strike at noon on Monday and were met with abusive police tactics throughout the night. We were subjected to sleep deprivation, with threats of arrest if we were caught sleeping. The police would drive in circles around us throughout the night revving their engines and flashing their lights at our strikers as they huddled together for warmth. We did not break and will not break under these practices of torture.

Our administration told us that they would enter into discussions with us, but when we tried to bring in a representative of the workers, a member of our community, the doors were closed before her face. When one of the hunger strikers turned to leave in disgust, to leave this so called meeting, he was met with police force. One cop threw him to the steps twisting his arm behind him, while another cop knelt on his legs. We shall not be treated this way. As we sit here and see yet another hour pass of not eating, we now see that the police are coming out in numbers not yet seen, all armed with riot sticks...

As you read this know that students in a Los Angeles area high school have also begun a hunger strike in solidarity with the struggles of our communities in Arizona. They have decided that they will not end their hunger strike until we end the hunger strike at UC Berkeley. Know that the city of Oakland voted unanimously to boycott Arizona on May the 4th. Let us all come together and hold protests throughout the state, let our people in Arizona hear our cries of protest, that we will stand with them and not take this oppression any longer.

This is why we are calling upon our sisters and brothers, why we are encouraging everyone to protest and initiate hunger strikes at the offices of your campus administrations. The administration is afraid. They are afraid of our power as a community. On Friday at noon let us all stand together and show them our communities united in struggle.

In Solidarity & In Struggle,
the students on hunger strike at UC Berkeley

Rally Friday Noon California Hall.

La Raza Hunger Strike Begins at UC Berkeley

[See updates below]

In front of California Hall. Here's the current word on demands:

- Rehire the 21 laid off janitors
- Formally denounce SB 1070
- Drop all conduct charges against student protesters
- Make Berkeley a sanctuary campus

More to come...

Update: Rally at 7pm in front of California Hall! Spread the word.

Update II: Here's a more complete list (via email):

Hey all,

As of Noon today the Chican@/Latin@ community at Cal, which includes RAZA, Mecha, Xinaxtli etc have called for a Hunger Strike in front of California Hall in response to the new Arizona SB1070 Law and to the charges imposed on student protesters this year (many of whom will be suspended starting next semester). There will be a rally at 7PM and an organizing meeting at 4PM. We will be needing the most support TONIGHT as they plan to camp out and police will most likely be involved.

The demands are as follows:

1) Publicly denounce Arizona’s SB1070 Law and ask President Yudof and other UC Chancellors to do the same as such blatant signs of racism are not representative of the values of the UC education system.

2) Implement the promised AB540 Taskforce to begin Fall 2010 and to include student representation.

3) Drop ALL the charges against student activists in the year 2009-2010, particularly those charged with student conduct beginning in November 20th and December 11th 2009. Drop any and all student conduct charges related to protest actions that occurred during the academic year 2009-10.

4) Stop cuts to low-wage workers on campus and stop attacks against union activists; rehire all AFSCME service workers and UPTE union activists and Cal performances employees.

5) Suspend the Student code of conduct and initiate a democratic student-led process to review the code. Those participating in this process should be charged with attending particularly to concerns about students’ due process rights and to free speech considerations. If, through this review, it is determined that a new code can be written in any way that adequately addresses these concerns, a new code should be written by a democratic, student-led body. If not, the student code of conduct should be abolished.

6) Accept responsibility for the violence and escalation of the confrontation surrounding Wheeler Hall on November 20th and December 11th 2009 that resulted in injuries to many students and jeopardized the safety and security of AB540 students. Additionally, commit to using non-violent means of ensuring safety at student demonstrations in the future.

Come provide your support and bring plenty of water!

Update III- 11pm, Monday: About 20 students are participating in the hunger strike, with about 20-30 more supporting them. UCPD officers on the scene are apparently saying that strikers will be arrested if they fall asleep. Stay strong!

Here's an initial report in the Chronicle.