FUCK UCPD
SERVE & PROTECT DZ NUTZ
FUCK CE-"LIE"-A

Today two banners were dropped on UC Berkeley campus. One, reading "TIME UC US OCCUPY," was dropped from the Campanile (hard to see in the picture, but that's what Daily Cal reporter Damian Ortellado, who took these pictures, tweeted) while another (actually a three-banner set), reading "FUCK YOU BIRGENEAU," was dropped at Eschelman.


This unsigned letter was apparently being distributed at the site of the banner drop:

Respectfully to:

President Mark Yudof, Regents, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, UC Chancellors, High Level Administrators, and Fellow Students.

We come to you at a time when our careers and futures look bleak, and the future of the generations to come look even more inauspicious than our own. We can all agree in saying that in our own unique perceptions of this world, we see its problems and calamities, and recognize the time has come to act.

The voices of students have spoken. We know there is something inherently wrong within our method of operation, and as you have seen, no matter what the method of repression, even allowing time to pass to kill us, we will continue to speak and voice this message. We call on each and every one of you whose eyes touch this message to act in all your ability, with full vision and intensity, to work to create the real solutions to the problems we face, especially those within our university community.

Mohamed Bouazizi and the Arab Spring, massive worker strikes world wide, the riots in London and Greece, student revolution in Chile, the network of occupiers infecting every cultural sphere of the globe made up of people in every demographic and possible category one can be placed, when viewed together, demonstrate the underlying tensions that we as a species are feeling together. We are paying attention.

These matters must be attended to or the decline of our complexly interconnected species will surely come to disaster in due time. Today we focus on education. We ask to those who can, those who in their present time have power, to help mold a new way to how we operate and function in our educational system. Education is not a commodity only to be sold to those who can afford it. We hope that all will address their own personal responsibilities to their campus and local communities, to influence those in your spheres of work and school, to create and facilitate the solutions for our educational system, and the problems our nation faces that we see fit. No matter where you stand, we must act.

We, some students here at UC Berkeley, with the privilege at our backs to be attending this great university, have recognized the need for change through our studies in class and in our homes, and are watching with a close eye of the events that are transpiring. We understand education is the solution, and this is why we fight for it. This global awakening is a direct result of mass education and awareness through the resources we have been given through the gift of technology and human creativity. We are beginning to see, and time is running out.

To you whom it may concern: our networks only grow, and we will more than gladly generate the solutions for ours futures ourselves if you don't act in all your ability. We want to see things change, not the tabling of our tuition hikes for student outrage to die out.

The time is now.
Occupy your education.

Fiat Lux,
Students
Go Bears!


...tic tock

In the early morning of November 16, students blockaded California Hall, the main administrative building at UC Berkeley. Heavy police presence made it difficult to maintain the blockade, and by 9am they had opened up an entrance to the building. But we're just getting started.


(photos via occupyca and thosewhouseit)

(critical analysis here)

(mostly here and more here)

On the morning of October 7, the national day of action, UCPD officers broke into the Rhetoric Department library and confiscated banners.


The note reads:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
THE BANNERS IN THIS ROOM
WAS [sic] RECOVERED BY UCPD
AS FOUND PROPERTY IT IS
HELD AT UCPD ANY QUESTIONS
PLS CONTACT CAPT. RODRICK
LT. TEJADA

They did it again this week. This time, they stole the following materials, which had to be "re-recovered" from UCPD: a few boxes of paint, medical supplies, water, plus a couple of signs.

UC Berkeley: Home of the Free Speech Movement.

Sit-in at North Reading Room of main library.
Updates and photos at Occupy CA.

Update [Friday]: Student Activism wonders:

The sit-in broke up around seven o’clock or a little earlier. Neither the Occupy CA liveblog, the Daily Cal liveblog, nor the Daily Cal morning story say exactly why . . .

Answer:


Update [several days later]: On a related note, check out "A Call for Disassembly" from Anti-Capital Projects.

Update [even later]: See also.

Barrows Hall



Wheeler Hall


(via indybay)

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.

At SF State and UC Santa Cruz:



Get ready for March 4.

Take the strike pledge.