Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Student Protest

Our compañeros over at thosewhouseit mentioned this interview the other day, but we hadn't seen the video. For some reason, the whole interview didn't make it into the transcript. Anyway, we've been meaning to write something about it for awhile, but today there's an op-ed by English postdoc Brendan Prawdzik in the Daily Cal that beat us to it. The piece does a good job of taking down the language used both by Newsom and by Chancellor Bobby Birgeneau on the day of the protest, which, if you'll remember, was coded in typical administrative bureaucracy-speak. Anyway, here's a chunk of the piece:

When on the afternoon of March 3 student protesters took to the roof of Wheeler Hall to challenge repeated cuts to their education coupled with repeated "fee" increases (in "Truespeak," don't we really mean "tuition"?) Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who, in my experience, has never appeared afraid of email prolixity, issued to students and faculty the following two-sentence pronouncement: "The campus is dealing with a health and safety issue in Wheeler Hall and the building is closed. All classes and events scheduled in Wheeler Hall for this afternoon/evening are cancelled until further notice."

The email is both deceptive and insulting. It is a clear sign of the disconnect between the university's privileged administrators, answerable to no democratic process, and the university's students, upon whose backs our bloody budgets continue to be carved.

The email is inaccurate because administrators and police, and not students, made the choice to close down Wheeler Hall. When there was a real threat to public safety, this came from the police themselves, who (we all know) have upon several recent occasions beaten students taking action against the administration. We are all familiar with their barricades and batons: ironic symbols of "free speech" at Berkeley these days. (I say nothing about the UCPD officer who pointed a loaded gun at protesters in November.) I must assume that Birgeneau is an intelligent man with a strong command of the English language. As such, I must also assume that he was intent on deceiving the Berkeley community by sparsely referring to a "health and safety issue." For those unaware of the protests, the email works against awareness. For those aware, it implies that the protesters were solely responsible for the "health and safety" issue, for classes being cancelled and office hours cut short (as were mine, by a bevy of officers).

Regent Gavin Newsom certainly comprehends the situation this way, as evidenced by an interview published March 31, in The Daily Californian. Therein, Newsom declares that he "completely understand(s)" student frustration but that "when people start locking themselves in and denying other people access that are innocent in terms of the debate and when people start to incite behavior that can actually start tipping and losing support, that's when I just want to pause and say, 'Hey guys, you don't need to go this far.'"

Thanks for the fatherly advice, Regent Newsom. But you see, it was the police who locked everybody out, not the protesters. It was the police who "den(ied) other ('innocent') people access." Moreover, it was certainly the police who "start(ed) to incite behavior ... tipping" students not against the protesters but rather against the police and the administration. From widespread local and national news reports, it was clear to me that the administration embarrassed itself that day: the protesters held the high ground at night, and were celebrated by their fellow students. The victory proudly adorned the front page of the next morning's Daily Californian. With such extensive coverage, I expected more words from our Chancellor. I guess that he was content with his two-line, absurdly euphemistic dismissal.

Read the rest here. As for the "health and safety issue," we'd like to once again recommend our piece "Health and Safety on the Wheeler Ledge."

Students' Rights

Today the Daily Cal published an op-ed by the author of the blog post we linked to here, which builds on and develops a number of the ideas in the original. For us, the key question here is the nature of "students' rights." Check it out:

On Thursday March 4, I went to Wheeler Hall to teach section for Legal Studies 140 "Property and Liberty" -- a subject about which we learned a lot more than we expected that day!

Students were protesting in front of and on the balcony of the building, and police were standing around, but nobody stopped me from going inside. Students in my section showed up and we started the discussion.

Twenty minutes later, two police officers came and told us "the chancellor is closing the building."

But by what right does the chancellor get to close Wheeler Hall?

This campus exists because the land was donated by the state legislature to the university in exchange for its providing education to the citizens of California.

So who owns the university? If the labor of teachers is part of the educational mission, at what point do teachers get to decide what happens on school property? If you believe, as I do, that student labor is also part of education -- helping to create what is learned by all in the classroom, what right do students have to make use of the spaces whose existence is justified by an educational mission? If there is disagreement or diversity of opinion, who or what should arbitrate these rights?

I later got an e-mail from the chancellor saying that a "health and safety issue" in Wheeler Hall required its closing.

Immediately afterwards, a friend who was outside Wheeler Hall told me about police pepper-spraying and beating protesters with batons while attempting to remove them from the area. Was that the health and safety issue?

In November 2009, a police officer smashed the hand of and nearly took off the finger of a student participating in the protests, while at the November 2010 Regents' meeting, police pepper-sprayed nonviolent students in the face. On March 4, police prevented people from bringing water to those protesters who were thirsty and had requested it. Police presence appears to be a leading cause of these "health and safety issues," and yet they are still allowed on campus.

Another issue raised during previous protests was concern over damage to the building. But is damaging human bodies preferable to damaging buildings? Also, has anyone seen the bathrooms in Wheeler Hall? If police were to start beating people over building damage, 20 percent of students there on a regular day would need ambulances. Hiring back the laid-off janitorial staff would be a better response to this concern and a better expenditure of university resources than paying the wages of police who beat students.

Whose rights are being protected by the beatings, the pepper-sprayings, the denial of water to protesters?

Let's consider students' rights to pursue an education without disruption. We were carrying on our section without a problem until closure of Wheeler Hall happened, it was the police who kicked us out.

What of the rights of the students who have dropped out because of fee hikes (many of whom are locked into crushing debt), or the janitors and other staff members who will no longer be on campus because of the policies like fee hikes and the layoffs like those dictated by Operational Excellence? Did they have any rights to pursue an education? The founders of the UC system would have said that they did.

How do we measure these rights alongside those of students, protesting or not, currently attending UC Berkeley? Non-protesting students' rights to pursue an education have already been affected: Despite massive fee increases, the resulting funds have not gone towards actual education: Class sizes are increasing, labs are cut, libraries are closed or have shorter hours, teaching resources are cut, class sessions are cut -- my own course has four fewer classes than usual because of the cuts! Meanwhile, endless construction projects disrupt the campus more than any protest has, to date.

We all learned a tremendous amount about the power and meaning of property rights on March 4. We saw how the campus put property rights in objects over people's property rights in their own bodies.

Students' rights to bodily integrity, to pursue an education and to have a voice in University of California policy were less important than the chancellor's right to absolute control over the goings-on inside Wheeler Hall. But what, besides force of arms, supports the chancellor's right? What about the UC's mission as an educational institution?

On the Edge

Marika Iyer and Alex Barnett, two of the nine protesters on the Wheeler ledge, take to the Daily Cal:

On March 2, a national day of action to defend public education, 17 people were arrested for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall. Less than 24 hours later, nine students locked themselves to a ledge atop the building, four stories above ground, with four demands:

1. Stop the $1.4 billion in cuts to California public education.
2. Allow democratic decision making in the budgetary process.
3. An end to student repression through a politically motivated student conduct process.
4. An immediate end to Operational Excellence (OE), the campus's budget cut program.

UC Berkeley sophomore Jessica Astillero recounts her experience: "I was sitting in one of the doorways studying, when all of a sudden riot police rushed up the steps and told us to move. As we did, they started shoving us and the next thing I know, I get hit with a baton in the face and then another officer maced me right in the eyes ... it was a ridiculously excessive use of force for such a peaceful demonstration."

Several questions have been raised about last Thursday's action:

What was accomplished? What does this demonstrate? This action witnessed the first concrete victories since protests began in fall 2009; specifically: one, a decisive end to past and present conduct charges which the campus has used to intimidate students from engaging in political action, and two, a meeting between Chancellor Birgeneau, the chair of Operational Excellence, and the students and workers on campus who are directly affected by its proposed implementation. The events of March 3 also clearly demonstrated the value and necessity of direct action. The administration has proven that they will not respond to anything but the most spectacular expressions of student dissent. Once again, this has exposed the administration's complete disregard for the collective will and well-being of students and workers and has brought to attention the authoritarian logic governing the campus.

Why is there so much scrutiny on UC Berkeley administrative decision-making, when all energy could be directed towards the cuts coming out of Sacramento? The concrete situation we are experiencing on our campus and systemwide has as much to do with the administration's prioritization of funds as it does with cuts at the state level. Operational Excellence - our university's internal restructuring program - comes out of last year's $3 million contract with consulting firm Bain & Company. Not only is it irresponsible for our administration to pay out that much in contracting costs in these conditions but also the move emphasizes their utter inability to "administer" the campus (the job they claim requires a six-figure salary) as well as their exclusion of those most affected by the restructuring from important decision-making processes.

Additionally, OE is branded as eliminating excessive bureaucratic and managerial layers, yet staff have already buckled under the added strain resulting from last year's layoffs. Rather than eliminating unneeded positions, OE is eliminating vital positions and reallocating that work to the remaining staff members; this is nothing short of exploitation. Top administrative ranks, however, remain untouched. We also shouldn't be quick to forget the university administration's use of promised fee increases as construction collateral as well as their opting for riskier investments which cost the university $23 billion in the 2008 recession. The administration does not have its hands tied as it would like us all to think - it very much has control over the allocation of what funds are at its disposal.

What's next? Chancellor Birgeneau should be meeting regularly with concerned students, not least the departments and programs that are being affected by such unilateral decision-making. He must be accessible. He cannot hide in an office or a house - we must have these conversations, and they must be public. The administration's attitude echoes that of President of the University of California Mark Yudof - "being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: There are many people under you, but no one is listening ... "

We are here to tell the administration: We are not corpses. The chancellor, provost, vice chancellor, dean of students and any other unilateral decision-maker on our campus must realize: This action was a response to their consistent refusal to make themselves accountable to those who work and study on campus. As students, we will not tolerate this any longer.

For more information, check out reclaimuc.blogspot.com and thosewhouseit.wordpress.com.

Fuck You Mitch

Yesterday we mentioned the need to keep a careful eye on the UC administration and especially on UCPD and its chief Mitch Celaya to make them follow through with the concessions made to the protesters on the Wheeler ledge. Now we find:

Misdemeanor Charges Are Filed Against 14 UC Berkeley Protesters

BERKELEY, Calif. -- A total of 14 people were charged Monday with misdemeanor offenses for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall during a protest at the University of California at Berkeley last Wednesday, according to prosecutors.

However, Alameda County District Attorney spokeswoman Teresa Drenick said no charges have been filed so far against another group of nine protesters who chained themselves to the ledge on the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall in a second day of protests on Thursday.

Drenick said UC Berkeley police are still finishing their report on that incident and have not turned it in to prosecutors for possible charges.

Fuck you and your "recommendations" Mitch. You better start making phone calls to the DA.

[Update Wednesday, 9:48am]: Mitchell is apparently very upset that people think he didn't follow through on his end of the deal. He insists he's made two calls to the DA, and that he recommended that the DA not bring misdemeanor charges. And, apparently, the DA doesn't give a shit. So, to be clear: yes, Mitchell, you made your calls. But based on the DA's actions, we are left wondering whether your recommendations were persuasive enough. So we repeat our earlier recommendation to you: push harder.

Health and Safety on the Wheeler Ledge

Four stories below the ledge occupied by eight protesters (there had been nine, but one had been grabbed by the police earlier in the day), six of whom had locked themselves together with PVC pipes, Vice Chancellor Harry Le Grande nervously walked out in front of the hundreds of protesters who were supporting the occupiers above in order to read a statement from Chancellor Birgeneau. (Actually, Le Grande first attempted to read the statement from the second-floor window, like a king addressing his subjects -- the response from below were deafening boos and angry chants.) The statement, in part, reads:

Yesterday was a Day of Action for Public Education in which you and many others made your voices heard in support of public higher education. Like all of you, I am dismayed at the staggering size of a $1.4 billion cut to all sectors of public higher education. I am fully sympathetic with your concerns about the State’s disinvestment in public higher education and have been working hard in Sacramento to address this issue.

However, you have chosen a method of protest that I cannot support. I am very concerned about your health and safety and urge you to end this unsafe action. In the interest of your safety and that of others, we have closed Wheeler Hall. Please consider your fellow-students’ right to attend classes.

These are some very strange things to say. What jumps out first are the usual propaganda strategies deployed by the UC administration: shift the target of criticism to dodge the blame. "Like all of you," Birgeneau writes in a desperate attempt to conjure up a feeling of solidarity -- the demands of the protesters on the ledge included rolling back the $1.4 billion budget cuts but Sacramento was far from the only target. The key target, which Birgeneau clearly understands, is the UC administration. As we wrote here last fall,

California's economic devastation has little to do with the UC administration's decision to impose austerity on the university. One of the most important goals of the protests on UC campuses [in 2009] was precisely to combat this rhetorical maneuver, to focus attention back on the administration. It's hard work -- politics is synonymous with government, and so it seems that the natural outlet for political protest is Sacramento. But Sacramento is everywhere. The regents, the administration, the built environment of the university itself. Not that it was necessarily our goal, but the protests last year caught Sacramento's attention -- they were the "tipping point" in the state government's decision to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars more to the UC in this year's budget. But as we've been saying all along, more money from the state is irrelevant without regime change in the administration. And, effectively, we've been proven right: this year [i.e. 2010] the regents came together to raise our tuition once again.

UC administrators were the ones responsible for turning to risky Wall Street investments, which cost us $23 billion when the economic crisis hit; UC administrators were the ones who committed themselves to using student tuition -- and the promise of future tuition increases -- as collateral for construction bonds to feed an insatiable appetite for capital projects. For their part, the UC regents are appointed by the governor -- they are extensions of the political center of the state, nodes in a plutocratic constellation of corporate interests and exploitation that hides behind the aura of the country's most "liberal" university. Sacramento, it bears repeating, is everywhere.

But there's a lot more here than just dodging the blame. For starters, look at the language: lots of "I" sentences. "I am dismayed," "I am sympathetic," "I cannot support." We don't care how you feel -- we just care what you do. "I am very concerned," Birgeneau writes, "about your health and safety." Health and safety. What is that most bureaucratic formulation? Not health, not safety, but health-and-safety. What is this compound noun, and what does it mean?

On the Limits of Protest

From thosewhouseit:

We have just learned that Tuesday’s issue of the Daily Cal will feature an explanation and analysis of last Thursday’s occupation by its protagonists, including a first stab at next steps. Once again we commend our comrades for their excellent work and look forward to seeing what they have in store for us. We are confident that these students are conscious of the limits of their achievements, but by the same token we scoff at accusations of reformism. To those who would reject this action on the grounds that negotiations with administrators is a source of legitimation; that we must immediately transform social relations and not ask for partial concessions; that Thursday’s victory is no more substantial than liberal calls to “defend public education,” we wish you good luck in revolutionizing the relations of production by yourselves, purity tests and all.

We are under no illusion that the content of the administration’s concessions is in itself meaningful. The latest Wheeler occupation was a step forward for two primary reasons. First and most apparently, we haven’t had anything representable as a concrete victory for direct action at Berkeley since the October 2009 occupation of the anthropology library. Some might argue that the original Wheeler occupation led Schwarzenegger to restore previously cut funding to the UC, but there’s no definitive evidence to suggest this is the case, save for a lone quote from his chief of staff that appeared in the New York Times. In any case, with a moribund student-worker movement on March 2 revitalized by the following day’s victory, there’s something to be said for the necessity of re-moralization if we are to get anywhere in our fight against austerity.

Second, as we’ve suggested before, militant confrontation with the cops should never be considered as an end in itself, but it is certainly desirable as a means of radicalizing students and workers whose consciousness remains to be developed in the process of struggle. The violent confrontation with the state’s first line of defense allows the dispossessed to experience firsthand just how far the administrative-managerial class is willing to go to protect its interests. As one student told the Daily Cal,

“The police hit us with the batons in the stomach with the tip of their stick. Absolutely full, full force,” said Khademi, a professional violinist who said he now suffers injuries to his left arm, making it difficult to play.

The number of students who were, or at least witnessed, their friends and comrades-in-struggle being pepper-sprayed and beaten with nightsticks is pretty alarming given that this was a nonviolent protest in the center of an elite establishment if there ever was one. No longer can these students deny how far the UCB administration is willing to go to suppress criticism of its austerity measures, nor will many of them likely remain dormant as before. When we build for the next action (and the one after that), we will have a community-in-struggle waiting in the wings.

We had something similar (though obviously to a much larger extent) after the first Wheeler occupation; we all remember how militant the student movement was that December. We’re not quite there yet, but we will hopefully be soon. Let’s use this recent victory -- and it must be represented as a victory -- to build a mass militant student movement. We’re not talking about some hypothetical notion of “mass” in which we have to wait around for a consecrated criterion that will never actually materialize, nor do we fetishize “militancy” as identical to spontaneous acts of violence. As we move forward, let’s be sure to remain conscious of the limitations of Thursday’s action without slipping into the morass of maximalist pessimism. It was unconditionally a victory, even if merely a means of building for the next more substantial action.

And P.S.: Fuck the Daily Cal for the most reactionary editorial we’ve seen it publish in years. This cryptic horseshit about the necessity of finding a “true leader” is laughable, especially given that one of their possible candidates was ASUC President Noah Stern. The most indicative sentence in the entire column was the following:

Protests should have a more cohesive message and be directed at legislators and other state officials who are actually making the cuts to public education.

And there we have it: typical Democratic politics masquerading as objective analysis. What a joke. We hereby challenge the Daily Cal to identify a single instance of American civil disobedience in which the targeting of legislators yielded success. If you still haven’t gotten the memo, the anti-austerity movement is not interested in asking Jerry Brown to change his mind, nor any of these technocrats. They have nothing to give us. Do you really think that a mass march with a couple dozen nonviolent arrests will convince these administrators to change their minds? We can’t ask for what’s already owed to us; we have to take it.

XOXO,

TWUI

Direct Action Works: Some Follow Up

A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. The protesters who locked themselves down on the Wheeler Ledge won the following concessions from the UC administration:

1. A meeting to discuss Operational Excellence (OE) will be held with Chancellor Birgeneau, the chair of OE, and a group of students and workers;
2. Basically no action will be taken to punish the protesters on the Wheeler ledge: they will receive only a "notification" from the Office of Student Conduct (OSC) and trespassing charges will be treated as an infraction instead of a misdemeanor;
3. Occupiers of Wheeler Hall in 2009 will receive a new offer ("administrative disposition," in bureaucratic lingo) from OSC to resolve their cases: instead of a "stayed suspension" (which basically means that if you get in trouble for literally anything you're automatically suspended) they offer will be for "disciplinary probation" (a somewhat milder version, but that entails an entirely new hearing process) until the end of the spring 2011 semester.

So far, the administration is following up on the deal. But what's important to remember here is that the administration would never have negotiated under normal circumstances -- they did so only because we made them, because they were forced to. Even after this agreement, then, we can't let our guard down -- the administration must always be kept in check. On that note, we're posting the following emails sent by key administrators who will be responsible for turning these negotiating points into concrete results. (Daniela Urban is a member of the Campus Rights Project and was the primary negotiator for the protesters on the ledge.)

The first email is from Associate Dean of Students Christina Gonzales, who oversees student conduct issues:

From: Christina Gonzales
Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:47 AM
Subject: RE: Follow Up on March 3 Wheeler Ledge Sit-In
To: Daniela Urban
Cc: Jonathan Poullard , Mitchell Celaya , vcsa@berkeley.edu

Dear Daniela

The Center for Student Conduct [i.e. OSC] has sent out a new administrative disposition (they went out on Thursday night) to students facing conduct charges from November 20, 2009. We received the signed copies of the new disposition by the participants of the ledge sit-in.

The notifications that were agreed upon for March 2 & 3, 2011 will go to students by the end of this week, I sent the names you shared with the Center for Student Conduct so that the letters could be drafted and sent out.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you
Christina

Christina Gonzales
Associate Dean of Students

The next email is from Mitch Celaya, the chief of UCPD. Note that he has not confirmed anything, but has merely made a "recommendation" to the DA. Criminal charges will most likely be minimal in any case, but this is definitely something to keep our eyes on -- Celaya is notoriously sketchy:

From: Mitchell Celaya
Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:37 AM
Subject: RE: Follow Up on March 3 Wheeler Ledge Sit-In
To: Daniela Urban, poullard@berkeley.edu, Christina Gonzales , vcsa@berkeley.edu

Daniela,

I made the recommendation to the charging DA, because we field cited out the 9 students on Thursday I don't expect to get a reply from the DA until the end of the week at the earliest. I will advise you of the DA's response as soon as I get it. Mitch

Thanks, Mitch. More from the Daily Cal here.

[Update Tuesday, 1:12am]: Either Mitch didn't follow through, or his "recommendation" isn't worth shit.

Whose Wheeler Hall?

A UC Berkeley grad student who teaches a class in Wheeler Hall sent the following reflections on property, the police, and the administration to her students:

The same questions I ask about the claims over "intellectual property" have always been worth asking about physical property. By what right do people claim the right to exclude? What rights do people who labor and create have to define access and share what they have?

Those of you who tried to come on Thursday, I apologize -- the police let several of us in and we were inside the building until police came and told us the chancellor was closing the building at which point we had to leave.

A question this course should lead you to ask is: by what right does the chancellor get to close Wheeler Hall? Whose property is it?

Know that this university exists because the land was donated by the state to the university in exchange for it providing free education to the citizens of California. In terms of labor theories of value, if the labor of teachers is part of the educational mission, at what point do teachers get to decide what happens on school property? If you believe, as I do, that students' labor is also part of education -- helping create what is learned by all in the classroom, what right do students have to make use of the spaces that were given as sites of education? If there is disagreement or diversity of opinion, who or what should arbitrate these rights?

I later got an email from the chancellor saying there was a "health and safety issue" in Wheeler which necessitated closing it. This seems odd to me. I also heard from a friend who was stopping by Wheeler (a volunteer medic) that police had pepper-sprayed and beaten protesters with batons while attempting to remove them from the area. (Was that the health and safety issue? If so, I can think of a few ways short of closing the building that could have protected people.)

I encourage you to think about the primacy of property rights in what happened at Wheeler Hall. Property rights in objects were supreme over rights over people's own bodies. The rights to bodily integrity of the students were not as important as the rights of the chancellor to control what happens in Wheeler Hall. It's true there may have been a concern about damage to the building -- but during the first occupation a police officer smashed the hand (and nearly took off the finger) of a student who was participating in the protests (nonviolently and not causing property damage), and yet police are still allowed on campus. The costs and the harm of  batons and pepper spray are not as much concern to the university as the right of the university to control property.

Whose rights are being protected by this? (Note that we were carrying on our section without a problem until this happened, it was the police who were limiting access.)

Of course there is the question of [a] student's right to pursue an education without protest. As above, who should be the arbiter between those different opinions about educational priorities in situations where protesters ARE disrupting classes?

But also, what happens if you include the rights of the students and former students, and also the janitors (speaking of keeping the building in good shape) who are no longer on campus because of the policies like fee hikes and the layoffs dictated by Operational Excellence? Did they have any rights? Milton Friedman (whom we read this week) would say no. But what about the founders of the UC system and its mission?

Also, the rights of nonprotesting students to pursue an education are affected anyway, because even despite the massive fee increases the resulting funds have not gone to education: class sizes are increasing, labs are cut, teaching resources are cut, class sessions are cut (this course has four fewer classes than usual because of the cuts), libraries are closed, construction disrupts the campus as much as protests.

I hope this is food for thought and future discussion!

The Wheeler Ledge

We're too tired to write anything right now, but we wanted to post a few links anyway. Also, check out our twitter feed for a minute-by-minute account of the day, and this twitter list from Student Activism for tweets from many of those on the scene.

Links:
- "Wheeler Locked Down Once Again" (thosewhouseit)
- "A Victory for Direct Action" (thosewhouseit)
- "Roof of Wheeler Hall Occupied" (occupyca)
- "Berkeley Students Occupy Ledge at Wheeler Hall" (student activism)
- "Wheeler Hall Occupied" (zunguzungu)

Occupation at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

The kids in Milwaukee just published a press release on their webpage:

75 University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM) students are currently occupying the Peck School of the Arts Theater Building.

Milwaukee, WI March 2, 2011 -- There are currently about 75 University of Wisconsin Milwaukee students occupying the Peck School of the Arts Theater Building. The occupiers adopted this solidarity statement: “We stand in solidarity with the workers and students striking and occupying the Wisconsin State Capitol building.  We demand immunity for all occupiers and strikers involved in these actions.”

“Students and workers across Wisconsin are fighting back against Governor Walker’s attacks on education, public services, and underrepresented groups. UWM students are occupying in solidarity with students and workers from Egypt to Madison,” said Jacob Flom.

Contacts:

Jenna Pope
608-751-4527

Jacob Flom
262-573-7185

UWMoccupied.wordpress.com
UWMoccupied@yahoo.com

Solidarity with the occupiers in Wisconsin!



More photos, thoughts at the Burnt Bookmobile.

March 3 [Updated]

(via @jpanzar)

The fallout: 17 students were arrested at last night at the Wheeler Hall sit-in. They were taken to Berkeley City Jail, probably to be cited and released. No update yet as of Thursday morning though, will post as soon as we hear something.

Meanwhile, students at the sit-in at UC Santa Cruz apparently decided to stay overnight.


[Update Thursday 8:47am]:

March 2 [Updated with images]

(pdf here)

State-wide actions are listed here (via Mobilize Berkeley).

[Updates Wednesday 5:32pm]: Pictures from the rally that's happening now in front of Wheeler Hall.

(via @jpanzar)

... and, as always, the cops are hovering in the background...


Images from UC Davis here. Some details from earlier in the day are here.

Statement on Benefits Decentralization Plan

From the email:

The Berkeley Unit of UAW 2865 has recently learned of a draft, campus-wide Benefits Decentralization plan, which has been presented by the Budget Office as follows:

With this change, the Campus Budget Office will no longer process monthly transactions reimbursing campus departments for the actual cost of academic and staff benefits, including graduate student fee remission expense. Instead, departments will receive an allocation of central funding for this expense. The campus will, simultaneously with the decentralization of expense, establish permanent base budgets for units fully offsetting the initial cost and, assuming incremental funds are available, expects to provide annual budget adjustments to departments in response to changes in benefits costs. [emphasis added]

Among the main reasons for this change, the Budget Office mentions funding reductions from UCOP, and a desire to increase budgetary flexibility at the department level. While certain important details of the Benefits Decentralization plan remain undisclosed, based on the draft proposal circulated by the Budget Office, we feel a need to express strenuous opposition to this plan, and to make plain our intention to block this proposed reform.

Getting Ready for March 2

Planning meeting tonight at UC Berkeley in 370 Dwinelle, 6pm. More details at thosewhouseit.

March 2011 Month of Action

March 2011 -- National Month of Actions to Defend Public Education. Kicked off March 1st, March 2nd actions in Cali, March 3rd actions in defense of ethnic studies.

(via millions of fragments)