Last night, what may have been the last conduct hearing regarding the fall 2009 occupations at UC Berkeley took place. Josh Wolf, a graduate student in journalism as well as a press pass-carrying journalist, was in Wheeler Hall during the occupation to report on the action from the inside. The extended hearing involved the university's attempt to prohibit the use of Twitter and, more importantly, turned on the administration's inability to understand what journalism means. Jeff Woods, the prosecutor from the Office of Student Conduct (OSC), argued that Wolf should have physically intervened, attacking and overpowering the other students involved in the occupation instead of observing, taking notes, and filming. (How's that for health and safety?)

During this hearing, unlike the last two, Wolf was denied the right to have his adviser represent him, which many believe (including the ACLU of Northern California) constitutes a fundamental violation of the constitutional right to due process. In the last two hearings, in which advisers were allowed to speak for their clients, the defendants were found not guilty of any of the charges. Wolf, on the other hand, did pretty damn well for having to defend himself -- not guilty on the charges of endangering health and safety and unlawful assembly, but guilty on the charges of failure to comply, trespassing, and obstructing teaching. Fortunately, his performance was good enough to make the hearing panel recommend a sanction of... nothing! Not even a warning, which is the lowest possible sanction. (Maybe it had to do with the fact that he played this video during the hearing.) If you're interested in checking out line by line coverage, use this Twitter list (thanks to @callie_hoo).

It looks like Jeff Woods, perhaps the most incompetent bureaucrat to ever work for UC Berkeley, has lost another one.

Even if this round of conduct charges has concluded at UC Berkeley, that doesn't mean we can let our guard down. Student conduct -- as well as criminal charges -- are still being leveraged against student protesters at other campuses. Today, the Sacramento State administration is coming down hard against the protesters who launched the sit-in that would last four days before being evicted in the middle of the night by riot cops. Here's their call for support:

The Sac State 4 are four students who are being singled out by administration, and facing disciplinary action for their supposed involvement in the April 13th day of action and sit in.

They have a meeting today (4/28) with the administration to discuss what will be done. There will be a silent protest outside of Lassen Hall in support of these sudents. What the administration is doing to these students is unacceptable. Please show your support!!

Solidarity with the Sac State 4! Drop the charges! Abolish the Code of Conduct!

[Updated Thursday 7:22pm]: This just came over the Twitter:

The sit-in at the administration building of CSU Fullerton, which began on Monday evening, continues and is currently in its fourth day. Protesters are demanding that CSUF President Milton Gordon sign a "Declaration to Defend Public Education." Gordon's response: "I won't be able to sign this agreement." According to the CSUF paper, the Daily Titan, CSUF administrators justified their stubborn refusal with reference to the language in the statement relating to fair contracts and union negotiations:

Questions arose over the California Faculty Association’s involvement in the meeting and in the drafting of the declaration. Both President Gordon and acting Vice President for Student Affairs Silas Abrego suggested that the meeting itself was a CFA function.

“The declaration makes reference to the CFA,” said Abrego. “There are ongoing negotiations going on right now. There is representatives for the CFA and the CSU in negotiations, we can’t have anyone else intervene in those negotiations.”

Abrego added that the document was a way to generate support for the CFA and attendees were commingling two issues ­-- for a better contract and better education.

After the issue was discussed, two CFA members who were present removed themselves from the room.

Gordon continued to stress that he would not sign the statement or any agreement at all despite the pleas of students and faculty.

The union issue is clearly an important one. At the UC we've seen administrators literally slam the door in the face of union members. But Gordon's continued rejection to sign anything at all -- he refused to "sign the statement or any agreement at all" -- even after the CFA members had left voluntarily suggests that there's something more at stake in the standoff.

It's the word "public."

First take a look at the Declaration, written by students, faculty and staff from CSUF, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles, Compton College, Fullerton College, and Mt. San Antonio College. The first part of the statement is a sort of general preamble:

“Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.” John Dewey

We, the students, staff, and educators of California’s public schools,colleges, and universities, call upon the people of the state to recommit to and reinvest in public education as the principal foundation of a democratic society.

Public education is a sacred trust and needs to be protected from those who would see the state divest even further from its constitutional obligations.

Public education is a public good and needs to be protected from the for profit interests of the private sector.

We call upon the people of California to recognize that, though an educated workforce is essential to our prosperity, education itself has a social value that cannot be reduced to monetary considerations alone.

Public education brings together diverse communities of educators, staff and students in ways that prepare learners for a productive yet socially responsible life.

Public education creates spaces that promote the intellectual and emotional development of tolerant, critically-engaged citizens.

Public education is by definition open to all Californians, regardless of geographic location or socio-economic status, and is thus the very cornerstone of a vibrant, principled, and fundamentally compassionate democracy.

This is not, whatever these administrators might mistakenly think, a particularly radical statement. Even apart from the fact that a statement is all it is -- it's not legislation or a policy decision, it doesn't lock Gordon into doing anything at all -- it amounts to a simple acknowledgment of the value of public education. And its public character is heavily emphasized: every paragraph but one (notably, the one that talks about economics and "monetary considerations") includes the word.

Now compare the Declaration to the statement that President Gordon made in a follow-up letter to the editor that was published yesterday in the Daily Titan:

I commend students for their active engagement in critical issues facing our university and the CSU during these challenging fiscal times. I agree with and support many of the points of the Declaration to Defend Public Education and encourage all students to ensure that their voices are heard.

Your amplified demands for quality education are timely and provide a significant opportunity to maximize the importance of this message to the people and government leaders in the state of California. In your recent call for action through peaceful demonstration April 13 and during our meeting that day, students exemplified the values we embrace at Cal State Fullerton -- civic engagement, positive interaction and dialogue with faculty, staff and administration, as well as civility and respect for those whose opinions differ from your own.

The state budget crisis is at the heart of the fiscal challenges we face. Lessening its effect on the CSU continues to be the highest priority of the CSU chancellor, the CSU presidents and other leaders of our system. Despite this year’s increase in tuition fees, the cost of a CSU education remains the lowest of comparable institutions around the nation. At the same time, one-third of these tuition fees are set aside for the neediest of students, which serves to preserve access to higher education for those who can least afford it.

I am committed to continuing to work toward access to a high quality university education and to keeping the lines of communication open as we work through these difficult times together. Please continue to take an active role in support of providing quality public education for all deserving students.

Dr. Milton A. Gordon
President
California State University, Fullerton

The word "public" appears once, aside from the place where he mentions the name of the document that he's refusing to sign. Just once. And take a careful look at that sentence: "Please continue to take an active role in support of providing quality public education for all deserving students." It is only students who must "continue" to support public education -- he's most definitely not saying anything about himself or his administration. This is an incredibly revealing statement.

In place of "public," Gordon seems very comfortable with the word "quality." Not a public education, but a "quality education" is what he wants his CSU to provide. What comes to our mind is the recent statement by UC President Mark Yudof regarding 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."

What Gordon, Yudof, and other administrators are talking about with their vague, bureaucratic language is privatization. Yudof says it outright, marginalizing and putting up for negotiation the categories of access and affordability. Gordon, on the other hand, continues to speak of "access," but does so in the context of a sort of generalized resignation, a complete acceptance of the talking point that this sort of thing is "inevitable." Budget cuts at the state level cannot and will not be fought. He says it outright: the job of the CSU administration is not to combat these cuts but rather to "lessen their effects." University administration has become a task of restructuring, of imposing austerity, of privatizing, of moving the financial burden onto the backs of students and workers. It has become a corporation, with corporate salaries and perks from foundations.



Why doesn't Gordon want to sign the Declaration? Not because of the CFA, or ongoing negotiations. It's because he doesn't want to use the word "public." At best, he believes it's outdated or obsolete; at worst, he thinks it doesn't work, that is, that education shouldn't be public. Regardless, we can now say that it's become official: CSUF President Gordon does not support public education, period. It's that simple.

[Update Thursday 1:34 pm]: This op-ed by Peter Cornett in the Daily Titan is pretty on point and seems to be the source of the data in the above tweets.

[Update Friday 11 am]: The sit-in has finally ended, after President Gordon gave in and agreed to sign a statement. Note that he did not sign the original "Declaration to Defend Public Education" that we looked at above but rather a revised "Statement in Defense of Public Education." At first glance, the changes seem fairly minor. But that doesn't mean they're not significant. Check out, for example, the one part where the text refers to administrators. Here's the original Declaration:

A commitment from administrators, school boards, teachers unions, staff unions, student organizations, parent groups, professional associations, community-based organizations, and postsecondary institutions to work together with the State to provide quality education for all people regardless of gender, economic, social, ethnic, or racial status.

And the revised Statement:

A commitment from administrators, school boards, teachers unions, staff unions, student organizations, parent groups, professional associations, community-based organizations, postsecondary institutions and state leadership to provide quality education for all people regardless of gender, economic, social, ethnic, or racial status.

What strikes us here is the way the revisions enable a shift of responsibility away from administrators et al. While the original Declaration makes it clear that administrators must commit to working "with the State" (e.g. lobbying), in the revised Statement the state is incorporated into those actors that directly "provide quality education" (there's that word again). Administrators are, to some extent, off the hook. The revised statement thus fits with our earlier analysis of Gordon's letter to the editor (which, it should be noted, remains the clearest example of his own position on "public" [read "quality"] education), inasmuch as the responsibility can now be laid at the feet of the "state leadership" and budget cuts remain out of reach, inevitable.

The LA Weekly reports:

​A group of 50-odd CSU Fullerton students and staff become the latest media darlings of California's public-education crisis this partly cloudy Tuesday morning, having just spent one valiant night staked out in the chilly corridors of Langsdorf Hall.

The sit-in was in reaction to a major snub by CSUF President Milton Gordon, who -- to add insult to rising student fees and dwindling course offerings -- currently makes $300,000 per year. When asked to add his signature to a feel-good "Declaration to Defend Public Education" last night, Gordon refused, and instead offered his own declaration, according to City News Service.

The video above documents the meeting between President Gordon and the students who asked him to sign their declaration. Two takeaways: first, even the student government guy recognizes that the president was uncomfortable because "he wanted to be in a position where he could be more in control of the situation"; and second, the narrator from the Daily Titan notes that Gordon refused to sign because of the involvement of the California Faculty association and called the declaration "radical." (Here's the declaration, which was written collaboratively by students, faculty and staff from CSU Fullerton, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles, Compton College, Fullerton College, and Mt. San Antonio College.)

In the early hours of the morning, police from both the CSU and SFPD, dressed in full riot gear entered the administration at Sacramento State -- which was going into the fourth day of occupation by student protesters -- advanced on sleeping students in attack formation and from multiple directions, and ordered them to leave. Occupiers left voluntarily, with no arrests. Here's part of their statement of the eviction:

This morning on the fourth day, April 16 at 3:24 A.M. we were met with the administration’s opposition expressed through a riot taskforce.

Earlier that morning at approximately 12:30 A.M CSUS police entered the building for the first time accompanied with San Francisco State police. We were told that the new forces were needed, and that our own police were showing them the layout of our building. At this time we asked to be updated about the situation and we were refused that request.

Our police liaison Yeimi Lopez, again approached CSUS police with questions and she was told that they could no longer release information, and that they were following the orders given to them.

At 3:24 AM there was a police officer at the front doors unlocking the entrance, when asked what was happening and why, we were told that he could not answer that question. At the same time police were assembling in a militant formation with full riot gear, batons, and a large amount of zip ties. They were approaching sleeping students from multiple directions within the building. They threatened with force that if we did not leave we would face arrest. Our police liaison met with Lieutenant Christine Lofthouse that if we did not leave the peaceful demonstration that we would face arrest.

This is to be expected. In the end, these administrations don't care whether student action, especially direct action like occupation, is "peaceful" -- in any form it constitutes a threat to their ability to impose whatever measures they deem appropriate. At UC Berkeley, for example, we experienced something similar in December 2009 during Live Week, when riot police descended at 3 am on sleeping students and arrested 66 of them. We scare them. As our compañeros at Anti-Capital Projects wrote,

From this perspective, the bottom line is: fuck yeah Sac State! Solidarity with occupiers everywhere!

* OCCUPY * DISRUPT * RECLAIM * FIGHT BACK *

The occupation at Sacramento State continues into its second night, after 18 students slept there last night and kept the building open. Check em out on the blog and the twitter. Here's the demands, as of this morning:

1. A moratorium on managerial raises and salaries; Funding must be focused on instruction and student services.

2. Publicly support AB 1326. The oil extraction fee for higher ed bill.

3. Publicly support SB 8. The transparency bill.

Their full communiqué is after the jump:

From occupyca:

Students and faculty at around 4 California State University campuses held sit-ins today in administration buildings. Sit-ins and marches to administrative offices took place at: CSU Fresno, Monterey, Sacramento, East Bay, Long Beach, Pomona, Northridge, San Francisco State University, and San Jose State University. Rallies, marches and teach-ins were scheduled at all 23 CSU campuses today as a part of a day of action. AP estimates more than 10,000 participated.

According to AP, around 1000 students and faculty at CSU Sacramento marched from the library quad to an administrative building to deliver a set of petitions, and around 100 demonstrators staged a sit-in demanding the resignation of the CSU Chancellor. Around 800 demonstrators at CSU Long Beach marched to the student services administrative building, but the building was already shut down. These actions take place in the face of the $500 million budget cut to the CSU system (out of a total of $1.4 billion in cuts to CA higher education).

UPDATE 7:30pm: Reportedly, Sac state students inside their administrative building are staying overnight.

(map from thosewhouseit)

[Update 1:38 am Thursday morning]: Sounds like the occupation at Sacramento State is going all night. They're calling for support at 7 am:

I.

Like all regimes of law (or quasi-law), the UC Berkeley Code of Student Conduct corresponds to a particular spatial jurisdiction, within which it is considered to be in effect and therefore applicable [1]. What is the nature, and what are the contours, of this space?

To begin, however, we must take a step back and start with a different question. What is conduct? According to the Code, the university constitutes a “community of scholars” governed by “rules of conduct intended to foster behaviors that are consistent with a civil and educational setting” (1). Although this “civil and educational setting” remains undefined, what is clear is that the Code is aimed at regulating the practices of those who participate within the scope of the university community. This formulation points to an initial, reflexive reading of the term conduct: what is at stake is the way in which one “conducts oneself.” That is, the Code (like the law) presumes to produce self-regulating subjects, or rather, certain kinds of subjectivities that become embodied in everyday practices. Here, a second understanding of conduct as transitive verb, one that suggests directionality or purpose, emerges: to “conduct something” is to advance it along a determined path. The Code of Student Conduct, then, is an apparatus designed to produce (student) subjects that are simultaneously subject to and defined by the privileges and restrictions accorded to that particular subjectivity.

The Code’s target, in other words, is the student body. It is telling that the administrators of the Office of Student Conduct consistently talk about the disciplinary process as “developmental.” As a biological metaphor, development reads the student body as unfinished material, as pre-person, as person-to-be. Thus, the Code’s language of “fostering” the development of the student body must be read as part of a matrix of evolutive images and ideologies that ground the legitimacy of the Code and its Office.

But the student body is not only the target of the Code: it is also the jurisdiction of the Code.

As of this morning, according to occupyca, between 15-18 people barricaded themselves into the Humanities building. As of 6:51 am, cops had entered the building, detained four, and were talking to the rest. Check back for updates. In the meantime, the communiqué:

Why Occupy? And Why the Humanities Building?

First and foremost, it is important for us to express our unease with the term “occupation.” The term’s historical indebtedness to militarization/colonial exploitation is difficult to disassociate. We use the term merely as a means of putting ourselves in direct solidarity with the “occupations” that have been occurring the world over from universities to factories to foreclosed homes; from Asia to Europe to Africa to central and south America and, now, here in the United States. They are happening and they are growing. The term that is perhaps more appropriate, and which still expresses the spirit of these movements, is “reclamation.”

Now to the question: why reclaim? Well, none other than CSUF’s own strategic planner Michael Parker, as well the university’s administration, has put out the call. In a document that was released as “pre-event reading” for the President’s Planning Retreat held on January 20th, 2010 Parker wrote the following:

If degrees obviously lead to jobs in fields like healthcare, public administration and pre-legal training, science and engineering, research support, communications, business, pre-medical and dental training that can be seen as crucial to society, then we make our case. More esoteric offerings such as literature, philosophy, fine arts, and so forth will only be justified in the minds of the public as they are clearly related to practical concerns. The fact that these are traditional parts of comprehensive universities is no longer a strong enough argument to the public. (p. 5)

Parker’s argument is that, given the current social mandate (i.e. the demand for high level job preparation in areas like public administration, business and communications), the Schools of Humanities and Arts, along with their subsequent disciplines, are “socially irrelevant.”

However, the term “social mandate” is duplicitous as it, in reality, refers to no social body whatsoever. Instead, it refers to various components of the global economy. As Parker writes: “…international corporations, the European economic Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other international trade groups have become an organizing principle for society and are once again reshaping the nature of universities.” (p. 10) Thus, it seems clear to us that the Schools of Humanities and Arts are not “socially” irrelevant but, instead, “economically” irrelevant and, even, politically dangerous to the established economic order that has become an “organizing principle for society.”

Throughout the Presidents Planning Retreat document, as well as another document by Parker entitled “Strategic Planning Activities 10-08 to 09-09”, students, faculty and staff are consistently referred to as “human capital”, “producers”, “consumers” as well as short- and long-term “payoffs” meant for “repurposing” and “downsizing”. It is in the Schools of Humanities and Arts that we learn both the facts and expressions of various forms of social resistance to the commodification of everything – even the commodification of our lives. And it is precisely these programs (Afro-Ethnic Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies, Modern Languages, Classical Guitar, and so many more) that show us a world beyond mere commodities and engage critically with the established order of the global economy, that Parker designates as “merely desirable” and “non-essential.” WE are not surprised because WE are dangerous.

And this is precisely why we are reclaiming the Humanities building: because we do not trust an administration that seeks to marginalize alternative narratives to the University of Phoenix business model (p. 10); because we cannot acquiesce to a university administration that called the 2007 CSUF on-campus noose-hangings merely an “offensive act” and not a hate crime; because we refuse to allow the absence of any disruption to a university system that seeks to expel Muslim students at UC Irvine for protesting a pro-Zionist speaker while a woman who hangs a noose at UC San Diego faces mere suspension; because it is absolutely impossible to offer our complicity towards the systematic downsizing of staff and adjunct faculty; and, finally, because we offer our solidarity to the Tongva Indians who, for 18 years, have been fighting developers to preserve the Puvunga, a burial ground on the western edge of campus of CSU Long Beach.

As our project may be to open the school of Humanities to the communities beyond the university context, those outside might ask: why the barricades? The school of Humanities cannot be a truly autonomous space until we have built the community to defend it, to ensure a space devoid of police, university and state violence and repression. As Michael Parker and the university administration have put the call out to reclaim spaces, we put the call out to those communities that wish to oppose systematic and conventional racism, classism and sexism.

For the full Michael Parker documents:

csuf links university and military planning

csuf planning committee deems humanities and arts esoteric