In response to the Regents' November fee increase, a swelling student movement at University of California and California State University campuses occupied campus buildings named for former regents, presidents, and chancellors – a collection of dead white men who have loomed over these universities in years past. Occupiers of UCLA's Campbell Hall, named after the UC's 10th President, rechristened it “Carter-Huggins Hall,” after the pair of Black Panthers slain in an FBI COINTELPRO operation there on January 17, 1969. In the last few months, the occupation movement has spread up and down the state, stirring students at even the most traditionally subdued campuses. UC Irvine, CSU Fullerton, and CSU Fresno students have joined the historically rowdier UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz campuses in taking over buildings, dropping banners, distributing incendiary pamphlets and handbills, and standing firm against police intimidation.
“WE make the crisis,” goes one popular slogan of the occupiers.
The newly insurgent mood on campuses is spreading quickly. Through its refusal to be co-opted and managed by the same university leaders and politicians who have colluded in structurally adjusting California's educational system, the rebellion of California's students -- joined by many university workers and faculty members -- is in the process of forcing a shift in state politics.
A New Student Insurgency
The militant phase of the new student movement kicked off in September. Over the summer, the UC's 26-member Board of Regents had bestowed unprecedented “emergency powers” on UC President Yudof, who responded by proposing the 32 per cent fee increase, laying off hundreds of employees, and imposing mandatory “furloughs” on university faculty and staff. Administrators responded by cutting numerous popular campus-level programs. It was the single most violent episode of structural adjustment imposed by the Regents thus far.
On the opening days of fall instruction, students and workers at multiple UC campuses responded by holding rallies and protests. A group of roughly 20 UC Santa Cruz students occupied the campus' Graduate Student Commons, unfurling multiple banners including one bearing the slogan “Raise Hell, Not Costs,” and another calling for an end to capitalism. The UCSC contingent voluntarily withdrew the occupation a week later, but the movement was fermenting rapidly, not only in Santa Cruz but elsewhere ....
This movement reflects a growing understanding among students, workers, and faculty members that the fee increases, lay-offs, and programmatic cuts are only the beginning stages of a permanent and more far-reaching plan pursued by the university's power structure, whose members serve as proxies for American capitalism at large, and specifically as representatives of the financial elites who have gained unprecedented power over the state and economy. According to one incisive pamphlet, the November fee increase represented a “moment where the truth of the UC [became] undeniable, where its ostensible difference from the violence of the larger society vanishe[d].”
This political violence was matched by the physical terror wrought by the various police departments who have responded to the occupations, particularly on November 20th in Berkeley. “It was the most horrifying things I've ever seen in my life,” one young woman told a KTVU news reporter in between sobs of shock, when describing the beatings she witnessed. Yet, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau commended the police for "peacefully" handling the situation.
Against such blatant contradictions between official pronouncement and the experiences of most students, deep-seated liberal assumptions about the essentially benign nature of authority and the university itself have begun to vanish. The reality of the brutal political economy of global capitalism is being laid bare for a new generation of mostly middle class students to see. In this particular case, that global system has turned hundreds of thousands out of their homes, embroiled millions in mortgage, credit card, and student loan debts, and eliminated state support for everything from education to health care for children of poverty-stricken families, yet criminalized and often brutalized those who meaningfully resist what those in power have in store for them: much more of the same.
Of course, these protests did not spring fully formed from the void. Students at Berkeley and Santa Cruz have engaged in numerous direct action protests against the university power structure since 2005, ranging from tree sits that significantly slowed campus development projects, to protests against the university's nuclear weapons development contracts. The UC's major workforce union, AFSCME, has mobilized for several years now alongside student supporters to defend worker pay and benefits, which sag below the levels paid by peer institutions and even state and community colleges.
Black, Latino, and American Indian students have been struggling since before Proposition 209 in 1996 to overcome the state's institutionalized racism and class bias that have shut out working class students from the UC. Part of this effort to increase access to higher education has involved educational outreach programs into Los Angeles and Bay Area urban school districts where, because of the hyper-resegregation of the educational system since the 1970s, some high schools are upwards of 95 per cent non-white. These same schools tend to be the most impoverished, lacking even the most rudimentary pedagogical resources and extracurricular opportunities that facilitate a transition to college and beyond. These programs to open up the university to traditionally excluded students have been some of the first cut by the Regents' austerity measures.
The most damaging effects of these taxes and cuts have been visited upon departments like Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies, and against educational outreach missions to students of color. This fundamentally racist assault on working class students has gotten so bad that roughly only four per cent of the UC study body is African American, as compared with roughly nine per cent of the overall state population, and a disproportionately high number of those black students who do attend the UC attend the system's least prestigious campuses such as Merced and Riverside. Last year, only 124 black students enrolled as freshmen at UC Berkeley. Only 19 American Indian students were part of this same entering class ...
And previously:
* "March 4th Day of Action, Internal Divisions: 'The White Student Movement'."
* "March 4th Strike and Day of Action: 'Why We're Protesting - A Letter to Parents'."
* "National March 4th Calls for Action and (Communist) Endorsements."
* "Education Protests Add to School Problems."
* "No Cuts to Education! Collectivize!"
* "Unions, Radicals to Protest Education Cuts Across U.S."
* "Shut it Down! March 4th Mobilization - Protest, Strike, Solidarity!."
* "California March 4th Protests: 'Berkeley Pre-Game Communiqué'."
* "Teachers Unions, Anarcho-Communists Launch 'Day of Action' to 'Occupy California!"
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