Chancellor's Response to Durant Hall Occupation is Full of Crap

 "Oh, the Humanity!"  We had a little fun picking apart the Chancellor's recent letter to the Campus Community.  Enjoy.

From: Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor

[mailto:CALmessages@berkeley.edu]
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 11:09 AM
To: Academic Senate Faculty, Staff, All Academic Titles, Other Members
of the Campus Community, Emeriti, Students,
Subject: Vandalism at Durant Hall

Dear Campus Community:

We are writing to condemn in the strongest terms the overnight criminal vandalism in Durant Hall that spilled over onto Bancroft and Telegraph avenues.  Initial investigation indicates that about 100
people came onto campus with clear intent to break into at Durant Hall which is currently a construction site.  
Initial investigation = recycled press reports.  This administration doesn't do any original thinking.
 
At this time we believe that the majority of those involved in the vandalism were not Berkeley students.  

Ah, the dreaded "outside agitators" strike again.  This line is borrowed from the last press release, and the last chancellor, the last student movement, and the last century of unimaginative university administration.
 
We call on any of our students or other campus members who may have observed last night's criminal vandalism and violence to come forward and help police identify those responsible for these reprehensible actions.
"Calling all snitches, Calling all snitches".  At first glance, you might think there's some irony in this, that they ask the victims of their police and their policies to help further their own oppression.  However, when you dig a little deeper, you see that this is a reflex.  Our mind-addled Administrators don't know any better.  See, the Administration outsources everything, precisely because they are overpaid and incompetent, and because they simply can't imagine a world in which they actually have to work to produce anything. 

So this call for snitches is no different than when they outsourced the job of efficiency to high-priced consultants Bain and Co. for $3 million.  Or when they hired a detective to investigate the protest at the Chancellor's house despite the fact that they run a whole police department, and then they even had the nerve to complain because the Guv wouldn't pay for their private dick.   The guiding principle here is don't do any work that you can hire another person to do for you, as long as you aren't paying with your own money.

But there is real irony here.  It is that the Administration has not offered to pay any money to the suckers students they want to rat out their friends.  Come on, you cheap, privatization-happy bastards, put up some freaking reward money.  Don't ask us to do this for "honor", or some other old-fashioned principle that you don't remotely believe in.  Stay true to your own principles.  If you want to shape students in your image, you have to give us a chance to sell ourselves out for cold hard cash.

Sadly, such action does incredible damage to our advocacy efforts with Sacramento and with the California public to preserve public higher education.  We call on our campus community to work together to express our support for State reinvestment in public higher education in ways that uphold Berkeley's values of peaceful protest and freedom of expression.
This level of stupidity falls somewhere between cute and annoying.  Our hapless Administrators actually think that they still have some credibility in Sacramento!  Maybe they forgot how to read the newspaper (they probably outsourced that too).  Maybe their hypnotherapists helped them forget the UC compensation scandal?  Maybe they are fooled by the fact that politicians they go to dinner with make nicey-nice.  Maybe noone told them that this is how politicians operate: press the flesh, smile, say something polite, and then when you get up to leave the table, they smirk and talk about what a bunch of lazy, greedy, incompetent douches UC Administrators are.

So c'mon silly Administrators, just leave the Sacramento advocacy to us. You already made your half-assed appeals, remember?  And then you begged us - the campus community - to take over yet another job that we pay you for (to secure funding from Sacramento).  It's a challenge that we accepted (not least because we're also lobbying to get rid of you).   Go back to the office and get a massage, burn a 100-dollar bill, or skype that neo-con buddy you've been meaning to catch up with.  Do whatever it is you do to pass the time at California hall while your generously paid army of administrative underlings mucks about doing the real work of harassing activists, typing into those mystifying "computer" machines, and attaching your names to the old emails they are recycling.  

Seriously?  Your job was to taking care of the University.  Administration FAIL.  Now we are stepping up and doing it.  We've done a much better job in one semester than you have done in years.  So don't get mad when we drive a hard bargain, like we did on Thursday night.
 
Robert J. Birgeneau
soon to be ex- Chancellor

George Breslauer
soon to be ex- Executive Vice-Chancellor & Provost

Harry Le Grande
soon to be ex- Vice-Chancellor Student Affairs

UCB Banner Drop in Solidarity with UCSD

(via occupyca)

Durant Hall Is Occupied!

From reclaimuc.org:

Architecture has, like other growing phenomena, to go to school before it can wisely be emancipated. It is a distinctly promising sign of future power, for a young people . . . to forget self for the time being in the quiet, assiduous acquisition of knowledge already established by others. The time for fresh personal expression will come later.
--John Galen Howard, 1913

Accelerate: we are here to help architecture make the leap to emancipation. The architect John Galen Howard, who designed and oversaw the construction of what is now called Durant Hall at the beginning of the last century, was a hesitant man. We say: the time for fresh personal expression is now! There is no question that we are already the product of other people's assiduously accumulated knowledges, so many that they become impossible to catalog exhaustively. The accumulation of knowledge is a library, perhaps, but it is also a struggle, a movement, a tactic. Likewise, the acquisition of knowledge does not have to be quiet -- next to the sound system, self is forgotten and the commune emerges. The dance party: a distinctly promising sign of present power.

Future power too. On March 4, UC Berkeley students, workers, and faculty will march in solidarity with those from other UCs, CSUs, community colleges, and K-12 schools across California and the country as a whole. Like this building, reclaimed from the graveyard of financial speculation, we will reclaim the streets of Oakland in conjunction with an international day of action for public education to be free and democratic.

For the last two years, Durant Hall has been little more than a shell, surrounded by piles of rubble and heavy machinery, themselves surrounded by uneven rows of chain-link fencing. No longer is there any trace of the library it once was -- the East Asian Library, now moved across campus to a new building named after an insurance mogul who founded the notorious AIG. Language has been uprooted, pruned, and replanted as well. The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures went with the library, and in the process lost half its Japanese, Korean, and Chinese classes as well as the faculty that taught them -- over 1,500 curious students will be turned away this year. Subtracted from the flow of campus life, Durant Hall has existed only as a barrier, an inconvenience, a silent witness to the frustration of the thousands of students, workers, and faculty protesters who surrounded the neighboring Wheeler Hall and clashed with police last November.

But apparent emptiness conceals the movement beneath the surface, behind its fenced-off walls: capital flows through its veins. "Capital Projects," the administration of the University of California calls them. As we now know, the UC administration has used not only students' tuition, but also the promise of future tuition increases, to secure the bonds and bond ratings necessary to channel ever increasing resources into construction projects. They will always need more money, and it will always be our money. A general concern that changes the way we see the campus that surrounds us. But if there is one building in particular that exemplifies this process, it is Durant Hall: its renovation was halted in 2008 for lack of funds, and only started up again after the administration sold $1.3 billion in construction bonds last May backed by our fee hike as collateral. Its melancholy fate is to become yet another administration building. Durant Hall will be inhabited by deans and staff of the College of Letters and Science, but it has already been occupied by a bloated administration with private capital on its mind.

Capital, like architecture, is a growing phenomenon, but one that never matures. It pushes outward continuously in all directions, always presupposing an endless, spiraling expansion. New endpoints replace old ones in smooth succession, projecting themselves onto the grid of the future, erasing languages, knowledges, and histories that do not fit easily into the right angles of its blueprints. But we will not let their future bulldoze our present. We have our own bulldozers: dance parties to reclaim dead buildings, marches to reclaim the streets. On March 4, fight back!

ESCALATE-OCCUPY-RECLAIM

Signed,

The College of Debtors in Defiance.

Update: For more information check out The Durant Riot: Initial Brief and this email from previous occupants of Durant Hall.

Banner Drops

At SF State and UC Santa Cruz:



Get ready for March 4.

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UCI: Sit-In Turns Into Occupation

Beginning at 9:30am, 20 students held a sit-in at the UCI administration building, Aldrich Hall. A rally started up outside. The police arrived around 9:45. Then this:

11:00am: Sources from on the ground report that the police are preparing to arrest the students.

11:25am: Sources say that people outside the building are barricading the doors to Aldrich Hall in an attempt to circumvent the police from arresting and moving the students sitting-in the building!

11:45am: Sources state that a, “giant cage is being built around Aldrich Hall.” and that, “things are heating up.” Photos to come! Police, administrators, and sit-in participants are barricaded inside Aldrich Hall.

Stay tuned for more information. Demands are also posted at the link.

Update: 17 arrested, including students and workers. More analysis up at occupyUCI.

Mapping Corporate Influence at UC Berkeley

More here.

Also, don't forget to sign the strike pledge for March 4 at ucstrike.com.

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