“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…
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Outstanding doc from inside Wheeler Hall by Brandon Jourdan and David Martinez:
And an update on last night’s UC Davis action:
Video of an early negotiation with a typical faux-sympathetic administrative snake at Mrak Hall, UC Davis:
The second Davis Occupation ended last night when administrators agreed on 5 student demands, including recommending charges dropped against the students arrested in the last week’s occupation, and not pursuing academic sanctions against those students.
Last time the administration decided to arrest all occupying students, this time the students left around 11 pm without a single arrest!
The administrators are running scared, UC! Keep up the momentum! Occupy again! Again and again!
Here’s administrator Janet Gong reading the agreement:
If she doesn’t seem too happy, it might be because she refused to meet these demands the day after the occupation in front of a ballroom of pissed students who attempted to reoccupy Mrak that night, but after this succesful action she was forced to give in!
Here’s a video of Janet Gong earlier in the night arguing the pigs she just called aren’t riot cops, they’re just armed with “tactical equipment” like tazers, batons, and shields!
More from the Davis Students’ blog: http://ouruniversity.wordpress.com/
In other news, there was another large student demo at UC Irvine this afternoon, and Université de Lausanne in Switzerland was occupied today!
The New School Reoccupied 