Today marks two full weeks since the hunger strike at UC Berkeley officially began. Yesterday, the Daily Cal published an article on the protest action, but for some reason claimed that the strikers were only in their tenth day without food. What, weekends don't count? The least they can do is get the numbers right! [Update: Our bad -- we got confused because the article was published on Monday with the headline that said the strike was in its tenth day, but in fact it was referring to the rally last Friday. Sorry about that.]

As we've reported here, the strikers' demands revolve around the UC administration's decision to consolidate three departments -- Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and African American Studies -- under the umbrella of their austerity program "Operational Excellence." In this case, "consolidation" means cuts, including staff layoffs and what looks like it could turn into something like speed-up for faculty. While the administration has struck all the right rhetorical tones (equality, inclusion, diversity, etc), they refuse to do anything material to respond to the demands. And this when the university is selling billions of dollars worth of construction bonds to engage in massive and secretive building projects that, in at least some cases, have gone millions of dollars over budget.

The above video was filmed on May 6, the actual tenth day of the hunger strike. In addition to giving an update on the (almost) current state of the strike, some of the speakers provide some really helpful context about the history of ethnic studies. This is useful for those folks who don't know much about the Third World Liberation Front and the story of student strikes and protests (and, of course, police repression) at SF State and Berkeley that led to the establishment of Ethnic Studies as a department. Here's a pretty detailed timeline of the protests of 1968-69 at SF State.

On Wednesday hunger strike in defense of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley has concluded its eighth day -- Thursday will be the ninth day without food for the six remaining strikers. Yesterday, after basically ignoring the strikers for a full week, the administration finally agreed to meet with them. The strikers met with two members of the UC Berkeley administration, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and Dean of Social Science Carla Hesse, and once again presented their demands. Of the four demands, two are more symbolic (basically involving the university making a statement) and two are more material (rehiring several laid-off staff members and ending UC Berkeley's austerity program called "Operational Excellence"). Guess which ones the administrators agreed to? Yes, the purely symbolic ones!

After the meeting, the university issued the following statement:


As usual, the administrators' deploy a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand, hiding behind patently false displays of affect. "We are moved by and are supportive of the concern that students have shown for the consequences of the current budget crisis." They make clear that they "respect" the students and go on to "reassure" them that everything will be alright. They note that talking with the students has helped them to "better appreciate" the negative effects of these budget cuts.

Don't worry about those staff members we just fired, Basri and Hesse declare. We'll take great care of them. Don't even think about them. See, we're working really hard to get them new jobs -- though they might be temporary or part time, that is, without benefits. But don't you worry about it, because did we mention that we really appreciate your concerns? Also, to replace those staff positions we've eliminated, we'll simply create two new faculty advising positions! See, it's easy -- we just shift that work onto the plates of the faculty members! We're sure they won't mind -- what else do they have going on anyway? And of course, in conclusion, we'll be happy to issue a statement about whatever you want, just as long as they don't have to actually do anything about it.

If these administrators actually cared about the protesters, their well-being, and their concerns, why would it take them a week to agree to sit down to discuss their demands? If they were actually moved, they wouldn't have had the sprinkler system system in front of California Hall turned on for the past two nights in order to force the hunger strikers to abandon their position.

The strikers understand that. Today, they participated in a protest in support of AFSCME workers at the International House, where workers earn $22,000 a year, are facing speed-up, and experience intimidation by management. During the protest, they were able to hand deliver the following letter directly to Chancellor Birgeneau himself, who has yet to make a single appearance at the hunger strike.

Dear Chancellor Birgeneau,

It is with steadfast commitment and fearless determination that we write again. We have sacrificed our own bodily nourishment for 193+ hours and counting to move you to reconsider the current cuts made in Gender & Women's, African American, and Ethnic Studies. The pain we continue to endure as marginalized students and students of Color, fighting for our histories to be taught in an institution which claims to foster diversity, is a pain as constant and gnawing as hunger itself. It has been 7 days since the first meeting with Administrators, and the University has yet to show they are concerned about the physical health of the strikers who have put their lives on the line to defend a department historically attacked, marginalized, and discredited. In order for you to reconsider these cuts we would like to restate and clarify our demands.

1. To reinstate the FTE staff positions in Ethnic Studies/Gender & Women's Studies/African American Studies cut by organizational simplification under Operational Excellence (OE). [That is,] 2.5 FTE's in Ethnic Studies, .5 FTE in Gender & Women's Studies, and .1 FTE in African American Studies.

2. To end the process of Operational Excellence, specifically the "organizational simplification of OE that is threatening to cut and marginalizes the Ethnic Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and African American Studies departments.

3. To publicly support the Legislative Resolution ACR 34, co-authored by Assembly members Ricardo Lara and Luis A. Alejo in support of Ethnic Studies in California.

(...)

4. We demand that the Administration publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley, again.

We acknowledge that you considered the last two demands most feasible, however, to agree to symbolic gestures without solid actions to back up your investment in our departments is to make empty promises.

We will continue striking until we see acknowledgment that all 4 demands which are both well within reach off the UC Berkeley administration and are acted upon in good faith.

In the words of Mario Savio:

"There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Chancellor, Our bodies will continue to grind against this machine until you and your administration take action to stop it. We will not be silenced, we will not allow ourselves to get pushed aside, we will not stop until we are able to study, work and learn as equals to our peers.

We urge you to make a strong material, not just symbolic, offer to our negotiation team.

There will be a rally in front of California Hall on Friday at noon. Come out and support the strikers and their demands!

We wanted to post a couple quick thoughts and links in order to provide some context for the ongoing hunger strike at UC Berkeley right now. As we mentioned yesterday, protesters began the action in response to the administration's attempts to consolidate three departments -- Gender and Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies -- as part of an restructuring initiative called "Operational Excellence" (OE). OE, which has been the target of previous actions, is basically an austerity program developed by the UC Berkeley administration in collaboration with an outside consulting firm called Bain & Company (which was paid $7.5 million for its efforts) to cut campus costs. As the Daily Cal reported yesterday, this model has been exported to other UC campuses, complete with their own ridiculously bureaucratic variations on the OE acronym like "Operational Effectiveness" (at UC Santa Barbara) and "Organizational Excellence" (at UC Davis). UCSF couldn't come up with another OE name, so they just adopted Berkeley's.

The UC Berkeley Faculty Association has a set of documents about OE here. But we wanted to quote Chris Newfield's thoughts from last fall on Bain & Company's OE report, because he treats OE as an administrative apparatus instead of getting mired in the details:

The image is the bureaucratic version of the alien ship in Independence Day, a looming, inverted pyramid in which top dwarfs bottom and threatens to swallow it whole. Everything flows top-down, and the administrative content takes the form of goals-metrics-evaluation which are communicated to units (metrics -- assessment of performance), on down to supervisors (accountability functions) and then finally to individuals (performance metrics tied to unit goals.) Relationships are reduced to the abstract modalities of compliance embodied in assessment procedures. Management is not support for the university’s necessarily diverse creative functions but is a state of permanent evaluation. There is no respect here for the autonomy of the units -- departmental staff, student services, and technical staff for laboratories -- that are close to the “customer” (cf. “autonomous culture” as a source of inefficiency in procurement, slide 35). The tone is of control through communication, through finance, through even more of the endless audit and evaluations to which UC employees are already subject. The implicit diagnosis is that Berkeley’s employees are inefficient because they are insufficiently assessed, measured, and financially incentivized. The diagnosis is anti-humanist, at odds with current literature about both human motivation (intrinsic) and effective organizational behavior (collaboratively organized). It is also ungrounded in evidence from the Berkeley campus. The predictable effect, as I noted at the start, is that the model contained in the report is already making staff efficiency worse.

I don’t have first-hand knowledge of how the Berkeley campus process is unfolding this week or this month, but the public documents are not promising. There is the OE czar, central process managers, hand-picked committees making implementation decisions in smoke-free rooms, and roving HR bands hired from the outside. There is nothing there about collaborative implementation, protections for productive autonomy, bottom-up integration, non-intrusive coordination of the decentralization on which organizational creativity depends.

In an op-ed published last week in the Daily Cal, Robert Connell, a PhD student in Ethnic Studies, frames OE in terms of diversity and specifically the departmental consolidation that provoked the hunger strike. Like Newfield, he makes the point that instead of "wrangling over statistics" we should be paying attention to the broader context and the process through which OE has been formulated and is being implemented. But Connell also brings up another important point, one that is often left out of these discussions -- the centrality of staff for thinking about campus diversity:

What rarely gets acknowledged, however, is that staffers within these departments play a significant role in cultivating campus diversity. They mentor marginalized students from various departments, assist in recruitment efforts and generally help to build a diverse sense of community, doing much of this outside of their regular paid duties. Students from many departments, both undergraduate and graduate, can attest that the terminated staffers have been vital supports to them throughout their time at Berkeley.

Therefore, OE, whatever its successes, deals a heavy blow to campus diversity, equity and inclusion because of the loss of individuals who are key to actually maintaining those realities. Nowhere does our coalition see evidence that OE planners took this into account.

This is important in terms of building solidarity between students, faculty, and workers -- something that the administration hopes to prevent at all costs. This is one reason, for example, they don't want union members to accompany students in negotiations, that they literally slam the door in their faces. It is notable that this happened during last year's hunger strike, when two members of AFSCME actually joined the student protesters in refusing to eat. Diversity, in other words, isn't just a question of how many students of color are admitted, as it is often treated. It's also a question of solidarity with those workers and students especially whose lives are made increasingly precarious through the administration's top-down imposition of austerity measures.

This afternoon, after a joint teach-in on the administration's plans to consolidate Gender and Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies, a group of nine students began a hunger strike in front of California Hall. Some of the strikers are veterans of last year's hunger strike as well. Their demands are the following:

1. Reinstate the FTE staff positions in Ethnic Studies cut by organizational simplification under Operational Excellence
2. End the current process of Operational Excellence
3. Publicly support the Legislative Resolution ACR 34, co-authored by Ricardo Lara and Luis A. Alejo in Support of Ethnic Studies in California.
4. We demand that the administration publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley.

The administration has released an official response, which is available here. As expected, it not only treats the strikers like irrational children, but furthermore completely fails to respond to their demands. Instead, it tries to make them disappear by asserting that, despite all available evidence, the administration in fact shares the same goals: "Our hope is to understand one another better, given that we have the same ultimate goals for equity and inclusion." Oh really. Flashback to Yudof's recent comments on what he called the UC's "compass points":

Yudof said the university has long operated on three "compass points" -- access, affordability and excellence.

"We are moving dangerously close to having to say: pick two of the three. That’s my view, and the excellence is nonnegotiable," he said. "We are going to have to look at access and affordability."

But we don't need to pick over the statements of UC administrators -- we have enough evidence right before our eyes. The fact is that through "Operational Excellence" UC Berkeley paid millions of dollars to the consulting firm Bain & Company to identify areas to "streamline" (that is, cut). As thosewhouseit reported earlier today from the hunger strike:

This afternoon, over 100 members of a coalition in defense of Ethnic Studies gathered at Sather Gate against the impending consolidation of their departments as part of Operational Excellence. OE, it should be noted, has now been exported to UCSB, UCSF, UC Davis, and UCLA.  We now have “Organizational Excellence,” “Operational Efficiency,” and God knows how many other variants. If Berkeley shelled out a cool $7 million to Bain, UCLA is using Huron, Davis ScottMadden Management, and Santa Barbara an “individual consultant.” Against this affront to Ethnic Studies under the guise of austerity, the 100-200 students and their faculty allies marched to California Hall after announcing the inauguration of a hunger strike. Eight students are now on hunger strike and stationed in front of California Hall.

There's one more piece of the administration's response that's worth noting. The concluding paragraph reads:

We are concerned that some students would endanger their health [or safety!!?!] by a hunger strike, and/or negatively impact their academic performance at the end of the semester. We have offered to meet with a small representative group, and this offer remains on the table. In the meantime, you are able to exercise free speech and protest, but are also bound by the campus rules on time, place, and manner (http://police.berkeley.edu/about_UCPD/news/news_101006.html). These rules preclude overnight lodging or camping.

Behind austerity measures, the threat of riot cops. But the administration's discourse is inherently paternalistic, even when it's actively engaged in threatening its students. This is reflected, to begin with, in the concern over "health [and safety]," a keyword that's been deployed frequently against student protest over the last year and a half. It also appears in the notion of "time, place, and manner" regulations, which proclaim the importance of free speech while relegating it to geographically isolated and temporally restricted areas. This is the logic of the "free speech" or "first amendment zone." Time, place, and manner -- a subject for a future post.