Anti-racism Occupations at UCSD, UCLA

From UC Regent Live

This morning, students with the Black Student Union at UCSD and allies
began a sit-in at their Chancellor’s office demanding action, after a
noose was found in Geisel Library. Students are demanding that the
campus be closed down for the safety of students.

Beginning around 1:50pm, Afrikan Student Union and at least 100 people
are occupying Murphy Hall, the administrative building of UCLA. They are
meeting with the chancellor as we speak in order to call for the
following, in light of the racist incidents at UCSD:

1. Closure of UCSD until there is a full investigation of events
surrounding Compton Cook Out and the noose left hanging in
Library.

2. Expulsion of offending students and dismantling of The Koala newspaper.

3. Diversity needs be met by March 4th. (see BSU demands from UCSD)

Statement from UCSD Black Student Union

(From Occupy California)

5:10pm: The UCSD sit-in has turned into a civil disobedience action. Chancellor Fox apparently has not attempted to meet the demands of the students. Some students have left the office to support outside, but estimates of 80-100 students inside are willing to be arrested. So far no word of police action or likelihood of arrests.

5:20pm: Drum circle forming outside Chancellor’s office. Police are threatening arrests. Students: “We will stay until BSU demands are met.”

5:23pm: According to one source, as many as 300 people still inside the office. A live audio stream is available here.

5:35pm: Students meeting with Chancellor Fox return to the sit-in to discuss the letter they received from the admin, describing it as, “bullshit.” They plan to return on Monday with their response. The student(s) involved in the noose incident is being suspended, although a time frame hasn’t been established. The protesters are not satisfied with this weak response by the administration, considering this new document from the Chancellor to have no new concrete improvements over previous ones.

Video available on CNN ireport: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-413766

The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

“If you’re scared today you’ll be scared tomorrow as well and always and so you’ve got to make a start now right away we must show that in this school we aren’t slaves we have to do it so we can do what they’re doing in all other schools to show that we’re the ones to decide because the school is ours.”

The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!” When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the university not only belonged to the students who were forcefully reasserting their claim but also to the faculty, to every professor and TA who wishes they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can’t wait for their shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the daily functioning of the school.

Last week, the actualization of our communal will gave us a new clarity. The usual divisiveness of proprietorship was forcefully challenged; cascades of hidden meaning rush onto rigid notions of possession and our eyes look past surface appearances. So now when asked, “who does the university belong to?” we can’t fail to recognize that the college itself was built by labor from generations past, the notebook paper is produced by workers in South America, the campus computers are the output of work in Chinese factories, the food in the student cafe is touched by innumerable hands before it reaches the plates, and all the furniture at UC Berkeley is produced by the incarcerated at San Quentin. Thus the university, its normal operation and existence, ought to be attributed to far more than it regularly is. To claim that the school is ours requires our definition of ownership to not only shatter the repressive myth that the college belongs to the State of California and the Regents but to also extend belonging past national and state borders and throughout time. It’s clear, the entire university, for that matter, every university belongs to everyone, employed and unemployed, all students and all workers, to everyone of the global class that produces and reproduces the world as we now know it. The school is ours because it’s everyone’s and the destruction of the property relation, with all its damaging and limiting consequences, is implicit in the affirmation of this truth. It’s our university…

Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police

via Counterpunch – By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

Berkeley.

This was bound to be a big week in California regardless, as the threat of a 32 percent tuition and fee increase across the University of California system made a crashing entrance into reality with Wednesday’s vote by the UC Board of Regents. Perhaps the Regents and UC President Mark Yudof expected that their diversionary tactics–lament the crisis and direct blame to Sacramento’s budget cuts–would pay off. But this was not to be.

Aided in no small part by the explosive exposé published by UC Santa Cruz Professor of Political Science Bob Meister, the student, faculty, and workers’ movements the length and breadth of the state were no longer willing to accept privatization disguised as crisis-imposed budget cuts. As Meister explained in no uncertain terms, the proposed (and now passed) tuition increase has nothing whatsoever to do with budget cuts, but the cuts merely provided the pretext for a long-planned drive (and Reaganite wet dream) to privatize public education in California once and for all.

Video: NYC March in Solidarity with UC Occupations!

Students and friends take the streets, dropping banners off of statues and buildings, crashing New School art parties and decorating the city in solidarity with all the UC occupations!!!

UCLA Occupation Communique

Along with UC Santa Cruz, UCLA is occupied (as of 8am Thursday): Here is their communique:

COMMUNIQUE FROM THE UCLA OCCUPATION

On 19 November at approximately 12:30 students occupied Campbell Hall at UCLA. The time has come for us to make a statement and issue our demands. In response to this injunction we say: we will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, we will occupy. We have to learn not to tip toe through a space which ought by right to belong to everyone.We are under no illusions. The UC Regents will vote the budget cuts and raise student fees. The profoundly undemocratic nature of their decision making process, and their indifference to the plight of those who struggle to afford an education or keep their jobs, can come as no surprise.We know the crisis is systemic – and that it reaches beyond the Regents, beyond the criminal budget cuts in Sacramento, beyond the economic crisis, to the very foundations of our society. But we also know that the enormity of the problem is just as often an excuse for doing nothing.We choose to fight back, to resist, where we find ourselves, the place where we live and work, our university.

We therefore ask that those who share in our struggle lend us not only their sympathy but their active support. For those students who work two or three jobs while going to school, to those parents for whom the violation of the UC charter means the prospect of affordable education remains out of reach, to laid off teachers, lecturers, to students turned away, to workers who’ve seen the value of their diplomas evaporate in an economy that ‘grows’ without producing jobs – to all these people and more besides, we say that our struggle is your struggle, that an alternative is possible if you have the courage to seize it.

We are determined that the struggle should spread. That is the condition in which the realization of our demands becomes possible.

To our peaceful demonstration, to our occupation of our own university, we know the University will respond with the full force of the police at its command. We hear the helicopters circle above us. We intend to learn and to teach through our occupation, humbly but with determination. We are not afraid. We are not going anywhere.

California OCCUPIED

California is Occupied

November 18, 2009

The Regents of the University of California are voting, at UCLA, on 32% fee increases for students from November 17 – 19. (The CSU trustees are also meeting on these dates). Students through out the state of California are in an uproar.

UC Santa Cruz: over 500 students are occupying the Kresge Town Hall as of 3:45pm, Wednesday.

the details: hundreds of students rallied at the two entrances to campus shutting it down for several hours. Another group of 300 students entered into the Kresge Town Hall to create an organizing space around the budget cuts. Later in the evening, students at the entrances joined the others in the Kresge Town Hall. Currently, the space is being used to plan further actions.

UC Berkeley attempted occupation. Students have been organizing massive actions through out these three days as well.

UCLA, 14 students arrested earlier. UPDATE (8am Thurs): UCLA IS OCCUPIED

the details: students at UCLA held a “crisis fest” on Wednesday night. At 12am, students go and occupy the campbell hall and rename it the Carter-Huggins Hall, after two black panthers that were murdered in the building. As of this morning the building is still occupied.

-see website

-info from LA Times, LA Indymedia

SFSU held a sit-in, that has now ended. See Indybay.

City College of San Francisco, 500 students walked out in solidarity