[Update 2, Friday 2/10]: Closing statements were made this morning; as of about 5:30pm the jury has returned a verdict: not guilty. There will be no accountability through the courts.

[Update 1, Tuesday 2/7]: Today the UCB grad student whose hand was smashed by UCPD Officer Brendan Tinney on November 20, 2009 gave her testimony and was cross-examined by the university's lawyer.

The trial continues tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8:30am, same time same place as before [scroll down]. Tomorrow's testimony will be worth checking out: first, Officer Tinney himself, who makes over $97,000 to assault Berkeley students, will take the stand. He will be followed at about noon by star Berkeley Law student Thomas Frampton, who we last saw successfully defending two students from UCB's incompetently nefarious Office of Student Conduct. Finally, the prosecution will call police expert Roger Clark.

Thursday won't be that important for folks to attend (the defense will call their medical expert and their own police expert). But Friday will be the most important day of the trial. That's when both lawyers, John Burris for the prosecution and Claudia Leed for the university's police-impunity machine, will make their closing statements and the jury will start making their decision. Pack the courtroom on Friday morning in solidarity! 8:30am, same time same place.

On November 20, 2009, outside of Wheeler Hall, UCPD officer Brendan Tinney used his baton to smash the hand of a UC Berkeley graduate student who was standing behind a metal barricade. Her hand was smashed to pieces, and she had to be rushed to the hospital for reconstructive surgery -- even so, the attack left her disabled for life. (The above picture was taken just before the brutal attack.) UCPD's internal investigation, not surprisingly, completely exonerated Officer Tinney from any wrongdoing, finding that his actions were "proper, lawful, and appropriate":

The Board’s goal was to look at the actions of the officer and determine if they fit within the parameter of reasonableness. The officer clearly communicated several warnings to you with instructions for you to keep your hands off the barricades. In fact, you initially complied with those warnings and temporarily removed your hands from the barricade. It was only after your failure to heed the repeated warnings that the officer increased his level of force from a verbal admonishment to a strike against the rungs of the barricade. When you again returned your hand to the barricade, the officer applied the next level of force by striking you. The Board determined that the officer used a continuum of force that was within reason and within his authority during these circumstances. The Board’s finding of your allegation is exonerated.

Today, over two years later, a trial against Tinney is finally set to begin. Jury selection will start at 8:30 am in Courtroom 15 (15th floor) of US District Court, Northern District of California, located in the Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave, San Francisco (near Civic Center Bart). We will be bringing you updates from the trial as frequently as we can and posting them here.

[from the November/December 2011 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas; download the PDF version here]


(photo by Andrew Stern)

By Zachary Levenson

On November 18, University of California (UC), Davis police attempted to raid a student occupation on the campus. When a line of UC Davis students refused to move out of the way, Lieutenant John Pike covered their faces with military-grade pepper spray. He returned for a second round, making sure to coat everyone’s eyes and throats.

“When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood,” described Assistant Professor of English at UC Davis Nathan Brown.[1]

Within 24 hours, a video of the incident had gone viral on YouTube, and the media feigned outrage. UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi apologized for the incident, and UC president Mark Yudof announced a task force to address the police violence. UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau was also forced to apologize after campus police clubbed UC Berkeley students and faculty while they also nonviolently defended an encampment on their campus two weeks before.

This is hardly the first time that California students have faced brutal police repression in recent years. This sort of authorized police violence has been a constant feature of campus administrations’ response to students as they have continuously mobilized against the privatization of their public universities over the past two years.


***


Early in the morning of November 20, 2009, 43 students from the UC Berkeley occupied Wheeler Hall, the building with the most classrooms on campus. When police arrived a couple of hours before classes began for the day, they found the doors barricaded and a small contingent of supporters gathered outside. Within a few hours campus unions were picketing, and students and workers had surrounded the building, chanting in solidarity. By midday, the number of supporters outside Wheeler Hall had grown to over 2,000, now actively defending the occupation in an impassioned standoff with hundreds of riot cops sent in to enforce order. Hanging from a second floor window was a spray-painted banner reading, “32% HIKE, 1900 LAYOFFS,” and the word “CLASS,” circled with a line through it. Purportedly in response to state funding retrenchment, the UC Regents had approved a 32% tuition hike for UC students across the state the day before. Students were livid.

In fall 2009, across the state, students launched dozens of occupations, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and blockades against the tuition hike and austerity measures. The police responded with repression, using batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and even Tasers. During the Wheeler Hall occupation demonstrations, one student was shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet at point-blank range, another ended up in the hospital after her fingers were nearly amputated by a police baton, and dozens reported being beaten.

“Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops,” read a graduate student nearly two weeks later, standing atop a chair, at a forum organized by the UC student government in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Police Department (UCPD). “The privatization of the UC system and the impoverishment of student life, the UC administration’s conscious choice to shift its burden of debt onto the backs of its students—these can be maintained only by way of police batons, Tasers, barricades and pepper spray. These are two faces of the same thing.”[2]

When he finished reading the statement, the students rose to their feet and followed him out of the room.

Occupying Everything Since 2009.

And not just Birgeneau. A class action lawsuit has been filed in federal court against a number of UC Berkeley officials by members of the Wheeler 66, who were arrested without warning in the middle of the night during the Live Week occupation in December 2009. The Daily Cal reports:

Six individuals, including former and current UC Berkeley students, have filed a federal class action lawsuit alleging that four campus officials violated their constitutional rights by punitively arresting and jailing 66 people participating in a December 2009 demonstration.

According to the complaint — filed Oct. 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California — the plaintiffs seek damages for violations they alleged to have occurred during the “Open University” demonstration in Wheeler Hall, which occurred from Dec. 7 to Dec. 11, 2009.

The four campus officials — Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande, UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya and UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode — were served with the complaint Monday afternoon, said Kevin Brunner, an attorney with Siegel and Yee, the law firm representing the individuals filing the lawsuit.

The complaint seeks to stop the officials from continuing what it alleges is a policy of sending nonviolent detainees taken into custody during campus protests to the Alameda County Jail rather than citing and releasing them.

“The policy of jailing non-violent protestors is punitive and a violation of the protestors’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly,” the complaint states.

According to campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore, the lawsuit is still being reviewed by campus counsel.

“We can’t comment on the details of the lawsuit at this time because it is still being reviewed by counsel,” she said. “Nevertheless, we are confident that the university’s actions were legally justified.”

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:

There's an op-ed in the Daily Cal today from Josh Wolf, a graduate student of journalism whose recent conduct hearing gave rise to what we have labeled "the new censorship" -- the attempt by UC officials to prohibit students from using Twitter at inopportune moments. In the article, Wolf deals with a different form of censorship, one that mediates the relationship between the UC and journalism. (It is worth noting that Wolf previously served 226 days in federal prison for protecting a source -- longer than any other US journalist.)

On Nov. 20, 2009, a group of students occupied Wheeler Hall in protest of the impending fee hike and the way the UC spends what money it has. It was my first semester at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, and although we aren't exactly encouraged to focus our reporting on the campus, I knew this was a story I wouldn't want to miss.

(...)

For more than a year now, the Center for Student Conduct has acknowledged that my role was that of a journalist and not a participant. But the campus still insists that I face sanctions for simply being inside the building.

Their position is that I'm a student first and a journalist second. When those responsibilities conflict, student conduct insists my role as a student takes precedence. In other words, when the police ordered the protesters to take down their barricade, it became my responsibility to overpower the protesters and open the door.

In fact, during the first part of my hearing, UCPD Lieutenant DeColoude said that it would've been acceptable for me to physically interfere with the students in order to help the police, provided I used "reasonable force."

I'm not sure how he defines "reasonable force," but in the two years I've spent studying journalism at UC Berkeley, I haven't heard any of my professors talk about when it's appropriate to beat up your subjects.

While I've never believed in objectivity, I do believe that it is my job to remain independent and avoid interfering as much as possible. After all, if journalists are forced to work as agents of the police, then their sources won't trust them and the entire campus community will suffer.

Similarly, if student journalists fear conduct charges for aggressively covering contentious issues on campus, they will become much more cautious, and our community will again suffer. The Supreme Court has ruled that government has a duty to inoculate against such a chilling effect.

That quote from Lt. Decoloude is priceless.

The conduct hearing for a student protester arrested early in the morning on November 20, 2009 during the occupation of Wheeler Hall, which began in early March, will continue tomorrow. (Originally it was scheduled to continue on April 1, but they must have realized that doing so would be the only possible way to make the conduct procedures even more of a joke.) This hearing is public -- which presumably means no censorship of Twitter -- and it will feature what is likely to be yet another masterful performance from UC Berkeley law student (and adviser to the defendant) Thomas Frampton, last seen kicking the shit out of the charges alleged against another Wheeler occupier. In the other corner, representing the Office of Student Conduct, is Jeff Woods -- the only one left, after his former colleague quit her job soon after getting destroyed by Frampton.

This will be quite a show. Come one, come all! The hearing will take place at the usual location, Clark Kerr campus, building 14, and will begin Monday, April 18 at 2:30 pm. Hopefully there will be some tweeting happening for those who can't make it -- we'll update here or on twitter as we get more info.

And we wanted to leave you with a quote from the Associate Dean of Students, Christina Gonzalez, who has herself been implicated in some of the most significant procedural violations of the Code of Conduct on the part of the UC Berkeley administration (namely the illicit extension of the timeline). Here's what she told the Daily Cal recently about the Code:

She added that sometimes issues arise because of a panel chair's interpretation of the idea of a closed hearing as well as the "poorly written" nature of the campus code.

"Honestly, part of the issue is that panel chairs also don't always know what is acceptable and what's not," she said. "That doesn't mean that it's OK, but it's probably a good reason why we're doing a revision of the code."

[Update Monday 12:06 pm]: If you're interested in following the hearing, @reclaimuc and @sgnfr will be live-tweeting it.

Our compañeros over at thosewhouseit mentioned this interview the other day, but we hadn't seen the video. For some reason, the whole interview didn't make it into the transcript. Anyway, we've been meaning to write something about it for awhile, but today there's an op-ed by English postdoc Brendan Prawdzik in the Daily Cal that beat us to it. The piece does a good job of taking down the language used both by Newsom and by Chancellor Bobby Birgeneau on the day of the protest, which, if you'll remember, was coded in typical administrative bureaucracy-speak. Anyway, here's a chunk of the piece:

When on the afternoon of March 3 student protesters took to the roof of Wheeler Hall to challenge repeated cuts to their education coupled with repeated "fee" increases (in "Truespeak," don't we really mean "tuition"?) Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who, in my experience, has never appeared afraid of email prolixity, issued to students and faculty the following two-sentence pronouncement: "The campus is dealing with a health and safety issue in Wheeler Hall and the building is closed. All classes and events scheduled in Wheeler Hall for this afternoon/evening are cancelled until further notice."

The email is both deceptive and insulting. It is a clear sign of the disconnect between the university's privileged administrators, answerable to no democratic process, and the university's students, upon whose backs our bloody budgets continue to be carved.

The email is inaccurate because administrators and police, and not students, made the choice to close down Wheeler Hall. When there was a real threat to public safety, this came from the police themselves, who (we all know) have upon several recent occasions beaten students taking action against the administration. We are all familiar with their barricades and batons: ironic symbols of "free speech" at Berkeley these days. (I say nothing about the UCPD officer who pointed a loaded gun at protesters in November.) I must assume that Birgeneau is an intelligent man with a strong command of the English language. As such, I must also assume that he was intent on deceiving the Berkeley community by sparsely referring to a "health and safety issue." For those unaware of the protests, the email works against awareness. For those aware, it implies that the protesters were solely responsible for the "health and safety" issue, for classes being cancelled and office hours cut short (as were mine, by a bevy of officers).

Regent Gavin Newsom certainly comprehends the situation this way, as evidenced by an interview published March 31, in The Daily Californian. Therein, Newsom declares that he "completely understand(s)" student frustration but that "when people start locking themselves in and denying other people access that are innocent in terms of the debate and when people start to incite behavior that can actually start tipping and losing support, that's when I just want to pause and say, 'Hey guys, you don't need to go this far.'"

Thanks for the fatherly advice, Regent Newsom. But you see, it was the police who locked everybody out, not the protesters. It was the police who "den(ied) other ('innocent') people access." Moreover, it was certainly the police who "start(ed) to incite behavior ... tipping" students not against the protesters but rather against the police and the administration. From widespread local and national news reports, it was clear to me that the administration embarrassed itself that day: the protesters held the high ground at night, and were celebrated by their fellow students. The victory proudly adorned the front page of the next morning's Daily Californian. With such extensive coverage, I expected more words from our Chancellor. I guess that he was content with his two-line, absurdly euphemistic dismissal.

Read the rest here. As for the "health and safety issue," we'd like to once again recommend our piece "Health and Safety on the Wheeler Ledge."

Oh the irony. The UC Berkeley administration has long demonstrated a tendency toward censorship, despite its supposed "free speech" credentials. From "Time, Place, and Manner" regulations which attempt to restrict political activity to Sproul Plaza, to UCPD cops breaking into department libraries to steal students' materials, to the criminalization of chalking and distributing fliers, the so-called "home of the free speech movement" has become a complete joke.

Now they're trying to keep students from using Twitter.

This past Monday, during journalism student Josh Wolf's student conduct hearing for his presence at the Wheeler Hall occupation, the hearing panel all of a sudden discovered that @callie_hoo was live-tweeting the proceedings. Threatening the defendant, they demanded that the tweeting immediately stop. It is the height of irony that they would do this to a journalism student who was in Wheeler to document the action.

Now, we've just learned that the UC Berkeley administration is unilaterally threatening to cancel the negotiations about Operational Excellence planned for Friday afternoon. Chancellor Birgeneau agreed to meet with students as part of the concessions won during the occupation of the Wheeler ledge. The administration has thrown around the idea of canceling the meeting because they're scared that a rally might take place at the same time. Pobrecitos. In any case, we wanted to quote a line from the email sent to the negotiating team by Felicia Lee, Birgeneau's bureaucratic lackey. If the "dialogue" takes place, she writes,

As a matter of respect for all attendees, no tweets, texts, or recordings during the meeting are permitted. I trust you and the others will honor this request.

Home of the Free Speech Movement, indeed. Remember, these are some of the same folks who wanted to call a administrative unit specifically designed to monitor and infiltrate student protest actions the "Freedom of Expression Support Team." These people are sick.

As reported by thosewhouseit:

Earlier this afternoon, the 9 students who occupied the rooftop ledge of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley on March 3 were charged with one count of misdemeanor “trespass with intent to interfere.”  We are posting a copy of the charge letter received by 7 of the 9 below; the DA did not charge the other two, as they had never previously been arrested for campus political activity.

If you recall, the terms of the negotiations during the occupation included the provision that no conduct charges would be filed against the students involved, and UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya told a law student on the negotiating team that he would urge the DA not to file charges. Of course this is far from what Celaya conveyed to the Daily Cal a few days later:

UCPD Chief of Police Mitch Celaya said police will encourage the district attorney to bring charges against the ledge-sitters. However, as of Friday, police had not yet brought the cases to the office for review, according to Deputy district attorney Teresa Drenick.

Back in fall 2009, especially after building occupations at UC Santa Cruz, folks at UC Berkeley spent a lot of time debating about whether it was better to make demands to the administration as part of an action, or not. A chant echoed across campus: "Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything!" There was something maybe too idealist, probably too abstract about these ideas. In practice, anyway, demands were often made. During the first occupation of Wheeler Hall, for example, the demands were tactical -- they responded to the situation on the ground, attempting to mobilize support and, for better or worse, define a "movement."

With demands come negotiations. There's a similar dynamic here, and it's got a slogan too: "No negotiation, occupation!" We know that a new round of "negotiations" is about to go down on Friday (though we have little faith in the administration's willingness to negotiate for real). The ledge action was somewhat successful, to the extent that the protesters were able to leave without being arrested and some conduct charges were reduced. It was also very successful in the sense that it re-energized a campus where political action had basically come to a halt. And it brought the administration to the negotiating table. But in light of the trespassing charges being filed against the ledge-sitters -- and UCPD Chief Mitch Celaya's blatant hypocrisy, though we should never be surprised about cops lying -- it's worth revisiting the old debate about demands/negotiations to reflect on what they've accomplished and where they've fallen short. We know it was kind of an annoying debate, but it seems like an increasingly important one to remember.

So on that note, some thoughts to remind and provoke:

In a sense, the byline of the movement -- occupy everything, demand nothing -- is prospective; it imagines itself as occurring in an insurrectionary moment which has not yet materialized. This is its strength; its ability to make an actual, material intervention in the present that fast-forwards us to an insurrectionary future. Beyond such a conflagration, there is really no escaping one’s reinscription within a series of reforms and demands, regardless of the stance one takes. Only by passing into a moment of open insurrection can demands be truly and finally escaped.

The prospective dimension of the earlier positions is confirmed by the fact that both the Nov. 20th Berkeley occupation and the Santa Cruz Kerr Hall occupation, the successor occupations, did have a list of demands -- demands which had a certain tactical logic in developing solidarity, and expanding the action, but that also suffered from the problems of scale, coherence and “achievability” that plague the demand as form. Nonetheless, what happened in both those instances was a massive radicalization of the student body, a massive escalation, one that was hardly at all countered by its superscription inside this or that call for reform. At Kerr Hall, the fact that the occupiers asked the administration for this or that concession was superseded, in material practice, by the fact that they had, for the moment, displaced their partners in negotiation: while they negotiated, they were at the same time in the Chancellor’s office, eating his food, and watching videos on his television. They did in fact get what they could take, and when the moment came, they didn’t hesitate to convert the sacrosanct property -- the copy machines and refrigerators -- into barricades.

The new issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly includes a section called "Against the Day," in which a number of UC students reflect on the struggle over public education in California. Most of the essays focus in some way or another on the protests that took place in and around the UC during 2009-2010. From the introduction, by Christopher Newfield and Colleen Lye:

The essays collected here are all written by University of California students who were active in the California student movements of 2009–2010. These movements were the largest and most widespread campus-based actions in the United States since the 1960s. They were also remarkable for their intellectual diversity, their successful efforts to link generally disconnected issues, their systematic attempts to rethink student movement strategies, their reflections on their own internal divisions, and their escalating confrontations with local administrations and the police.

The movements became visible to the public in November 2009, when the UC Board of Regents voted for a 32 percent tuition increase -- on top of the doubling of tuition that it had already implemented over the course of the decade. But many of the group participants had been operating for years, and the conditions that reached a crisis in 2009 had been reshaping UC and its companion system, the California State University, for two decades.

Links to free downloads of the essays (via) are below the fold.

Today the Daily Cal published an op-ed by the author of the blog post we linked to here, which builds on and develops a number of the ideas in the original. For us, the key question here is the nature of "students' rights." Check it out:

On Thursday March 4, I went to Wheeler Hall to teach section for Legal Studies 140 "Property and Liberty" -- a subject about which we learned a lot more than we expected that day!

Students were protesting in front of and on the balcony of the building, and police were standing around, but nobody stopped me from going inside. Students in my section showed up and we started the discussion.

Twenty minutes later, two police officers came and told us "the chancellor is closing the building."

But by what right does the chancellor get to close Wheeler Hall?

This campus exists because the land was donated by the state legislature to the university in exchange for its providing education to the citizens of California.

So who owns the university? If the labor of teachers is part of the educational mission, at what point do teachers get to decide what happens on school property? If you believe, as I do, that student labor is also part of education -- helping to create what is learned by all in the classroom, what right do students have to make use of the spaces whose existence is justified by an educational mission? If there is disagreement or diversity of opinion, who or what should arbitrate these rights?

I later got an e-mail from the chancellor saying that a "health and safety issue" in Wheeler Hall required its closing.

Immediately afterwards, a friend who was outside Wheeler Hall told me about police pepper-spraying and beating protesters with batons while attempting to remove them from the area. Was that the health and safety issue?

In November 2009, a police officer smashed the hand of and nearly took off the finger of a student participating in the protests, while at the November 2010 Regents' meeting, police pepper-sprayed nonviolent students in the face. On March 4, police prevented people from bringing water to those protesters who were thirsty and had requested it. Police presence appears to be a leading cause of these "health and safety issues," and yet they are still allowed on campus.

Another issue raised during previous protests was concern over damage to the building. But is damaging human bodies preferable to damaging buildings? Also, has anyone seen the bathrooms in Wheeler Hall? If police were to start beating people over building damage, 20 percent of students there on a regular day would need ambulances. Hiring back the laid-off janitorial staff would be a better response to this concern and a better expenditure of university resources than paying the wages of police who beat students.

Whose rights are being protected by the beatings, the pepper-sprayings, the denial of water to protesters?

Let's consider students' rights to pursue an education without disruption. We were carrying on our section without a problem until closure of Wheeler Hall happened, it was the police who kicked us out.

What of the rights of the students who have dropped out because of fee hikes (many of whom are locked into crushing debt), or the janitors and other staff members who will no longer be on campus because of the policies like fee hikes and the layoffs like those dictated by Operational Excellence? Did they have any rights to pursue an education? The founders of the UC system would have said that they did.

How do we measure these rights alongside those of students, protesting or not, currently attending UC Berkeley? Non-protesting students' rights to pursue an education have already been affected: Despite massive fee increases, the resulting funds have not gone towards actual education: Class sizes are increasing, labs are cut, libraries are closed or have shorter hours, teaching resources are cut, class sessions are cut -- my own course has four fewer classes than usual because of the cuts! Meanwhile, endless construction projects disrupt the campus more than any protest has, to date.

We all learned a tremendous amount about the power and meaning of property rights on March 4. We saw how the campus put property rights in objects over people's property rights in their own bodies.

Students' rights to bodily integrity, to pursue an education and to have a voice in University of California policy were less important than the chancellor's right to absolute control over the goings-on inside Wheeler Hall. But what, besides force of arms, supports the chancellor's right? What about the UC's mission as an educational institution?

Today's conduct hearing, for one of the Wheeler Hall occupiers from 2009, was live-tweeted by @reclaimuc, @callie_hoo, and @sgnfr. All of these twitter feeds are conveniently available on a twitter list we've put together, appropriately titled "kangaroo court." The cast of characters includes Thomas Frampton, star counsel for the defense coming off a huge victory in his last case; Jeff Woods, prosecutor for the Office of Student Conduct (OSC) and widely seen as one of the stupidest and most incompetent people in UC Berkeley's administrative bureaucracy; Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and the faculty chair of the hearing panel; and, in a minor role, Stacy Holguin, who interprets the Code of Conduct as OSC's "procedural adviser" and monitors protest actions as administrative spy. The hearing ended for the day around 5 pm, and will be taken up once again on -- and this is entirely appropriate -- April Fool's Day.

In the middle of the hearing, we received the following update from thosewhouseit:

What a joke this whole conduct process is. We just learned that Student Regent Jesse Cheng was found guilty of sexual battery by UC Irvine’s OSC. The sentence? Disciplinary probation. To put this in perspective, this fucking rapist gets off with probation, while one of this blog’s own contributors was given a stayed suspension and 20 hours of community service . . . for his participation in the 2009 occupation of Wheeler Hall. Even more egregiously, Cheng will not be removed from his position on the Board of Regents, in effect condoning sexual battery. Again: non-violent civil disobedience gets stayed suspension and community service; rape -- let’s dispense with the technocratic minimization as “unwanted touching” and call a spade a spade -- gets disciplinary probation, a markedly lighter sentence. What the fuck is wrong with these people?!

This is not a new or accidental phenomenon, nor is it only a question of Cheng's position as student regent. Rather, it speaks to the nature of the university's quasi-legal student conduct apparatus itself. The system operates according to assumptions of difference, inferiority, and hierarchy -- whether they are based on politics, age, race, or -- as is the case here -- gender. Again, this speaks to not some sort of idle speculation but a striking pattern of impunity. Take the following examples, just published in the last couple weeks. First, an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer discusses the case of a female UC Berkeley student who was raped four years ago by a "persistent upperclassman." Pay close attention to what OSC does and does not do in the context of these rape allegations:

Marika Iyer and Alex Barnett, two of the nine protesters on the Wheeler ledge, take to the Daily Cal:

On March 2, a national day of action to defend public education, 17 people were arrested for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall. Less than 24 hours later, nine students locked themselves to a ledge atop the building, four stories above ground, with four demands:

1. Stop the $1.4 billion in cuts to California public education.
2. Allow democratic decision making in the budgetary process.
3. An end to student repression through a politically motivated student conduct process.
4. An immediate end to Operational Excellence (OE), the campus's budget cut program.

UC Berkeley sophomore Jessica Astillero recounts her experience: "I was sitting in one of the doorways studying, when all of a sudden riot police rushed up the steps and told us to move. As we did, they started shoving us and the next thing I know, I get hit with a baton in the face and then another officer maced me right in the eyes ... it was a ridiculously excessive use of force for such a peaceful demonstration."

Several questions have been raised about last Thursday's action:

What was accomplished? What does this demonstrate? This action witnessed the first concrete victories since protests began in fall 2009; specifically: one, a decisive end to past and present conduct charges which the campus has used to intimidate students from engaging in political action, and two, a meeting between Chancellor Birgeneau, the chair of Operational Excellence, and the students and workers on campus who are directly affected by its proposed implementation. The events of March 3 also clearly demonstrated the value and necessity of direct action. The administration has proven that they will not respond to anything but the most spectacular expressions of student dissent. Once again, this has exposed the administration's complete disregard for the collective will and well-being of students and workers and has brought to attention the authoritarian logic governing the campus.

Why is there so much scrutiny on UC Berkeley administrative decision-making, when all energy could be directed towards the cuts coming out of Sacramento? The concrete situation we are experiencing on our campus and systemwide has as much to do with the administration's prioritization of funds as it does with cuts at the state level. Operational Excellence - our university's internal restructuring program - comes out of last year's $3 million contract with consulting firm Bain & Company. Not only is it irresponsible for our administration to pay out that much in contracting costs in these conditions but also the move emphasizes their utter inability to "administer" the campus (the job they claim requires a six-figure salary) as well as their exclusion of those most affected by the restructuring from important decision-making processes.

Additionally, OE is branded as eliminating excessive bureaucratic and managerial layers, yet staff have already buckled under the added strain resulting from last year's layoffs. Rather than eliminating unneeded positions, OE is eliminating vital positions and reallocating that work to the remaining staff members; this is nothing short of exploitation. Top administrative ranks, however, remain untouched. We also shouldn't be quick to forget the university administration's use of promised fee increases as construction collateral as well as their opting for riskier investments which cost the university $23 billion in the 2008 recession. The administration does not have its hands tied as it would like us all to think - it very much has control over the allocation of what funds are at its disposal.

What's next? Chancellor Birgeneau should be meeting regularly with concerned students, not least the departments and programs that are being affected by such unilateral decision-making. He must be accessible. He cannot hide in an office or a house - we must have these conversations, and they must be public. The administration's attitude echoes that of President of the University of California Mark Yudof - "being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: There are many people under you, but no one is listening ... "

We are here to tell the administration: We are not corpses. The chancellor, provost, vice chancellor, dean of students and any other unilateral decision-maker on our campus must realize: This action was a response to their consistent refusal to make themselves accountable to those who work and study on campus. As students, we will not tolerate this any longer.

For more information, check out reclaimuc.blogspot.com and thosewhouseit.wordpress.com.

Yesterday we mentioned the need to keep a careful eye on the UC administration and especially on UCPD and its chief Mitch Celaya to make them follow through with the concessions made to the protesters on the Wheeler ledge. Now we find:

Misdemeanor Charges Are Filed Against 14 UC Berkeley Protesters

BERKELEY, Calif. -- A total of 14 people were charged Monday with misdemeanor offenses for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall during a protest at the University of California at Berkeley last Wednesday, according to prosecutors.

However, Alameda County District Attorney spokeswoman Teresa Drenick said no charges have been filed so far against another group of nine protesters who chained themselves to the ledge on the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall in a second day of protests on Thursday.

Drenick said UC Berkeley police are still finishing their report on that incident and have not turned it in to prosecutors for possible charges.

Fuck you and your "recommendations" Mitch. You better start making phone calls to the DA.

[Update Wednesday, 9:48am]: Mitchell is apparently very upset that people think he didn't follow through on his end of the deal. He insists he's made two calls to the DA, and that he recommended that the DA not bring misdemeanor charges. And, apparently, the DA doesn't give a shit. So, to be clear: yes, Mitchell, you made your calls. But based on the DA's actions, we are left wondering whether your recommendations were persuasive enough. So we repeat our earlier recommendation to you: push harder.

Yesterday was a Day of Action for Public Education in which you and many others made your voices heard in support of public higher education. Like all of you, I am dismayed at the staggering size of a $1.4 billion cut to all sectors of public higher education. I am fully sympathetic with your concerns about the State’s disinvestment in public higher education and have been working hard in Sacramento to address this issue.

However, you have chosen a method of protest that I cannot support. I am very concerned about your health and safety and urge you to end this unsafe action. In the interest of your safety and that of others, we have closed Wheeler Hall. Please consider your fellow-students’ right to attend classes.

These are some very strange things to say. What jumps out first are the usual propaganda strategies deployed by the UC administration: shift the target of criticism to dodge the blame. "Like all of you," Birgeneau writes in a desperate attempt to conjure up a feeling of solidarity -- the demands of the protesters on the ledge included rolling back the $1.4 billion budget cuts but Sacramento was far from the only target. The key target, which Birgeneau clearly understands, is the UC administration. As we wrote here last fall,

California's economic devastation has little to do with the UC administration's decision to impose austerity on the university. One of the most important goals of the protests on UC campuses [in 2009] was precisely to combat this rhetorical maneuver, to focus attention back on the administration. It's hard work -- politics is synonymous with government, and so it seems that the natural outlet for political protest is Sacramento. But Sacramento is everywhere. The regents, the administration, the built environment of the university itself. Not that it was necessarily our goal, but the protests last year caught Sacramento's attention -- they were the "tipping point" in the state government's decision to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars more to the UC in this year's budget. But as we've been saying all along, more money from the state is irrelevant without regime change in the administration. And, effectively, we've been proven right: this year [i.e. 2010] the regents came together to raise our tuition once again.

UC administrators were the ones responsible for turning to risky Wall Street investments, which cost us $23 billion when the economic crisis hit; UC administrators were the ones who committed themselves to using student tuition -- and the promise of future tuition increases -- as collateral for construction bonds to feed an insatiable appetite for capital projects. For their part, the UC regents are appointed by the governor -- they are extensions of the political center of the state, nodes in a plutocratic constellation of corporate interests and exploitation that hides behind the aura of the country's most "liberal" university. Sacramento, it bears repeating, is everywhere.

But there's a lot more here than just dodging the blame. For starters, look at the language: lots of "I" sentences. "I am dismayed," "I am sympathetic," "I cannot support." We don't care how you feel -- we just care what you do. "I am very concerned," Birgeneau writes, "about your health and safety." Health and safety. What is that most bureaucratic formulation? Not health, not safety, but health-and-safety. What is this compound noun, and what does it mean?

From thosewhouseit:

We have just learned that Tuesday’s issue of the Daily Cal will feature an explanation and analysis of last Thursday’s occupation by its protagonists, including a first stab at next steps. Once again we commend our comrades for their excellent work and look forward to seeing what they have in store for us. We are confident that these students are conscious of the limits of their achievements, but by the same token we scoff at accusations of reformism. To those who would reject this action on the grounds that negotiations with administrators is a source of legitimation; that we must immediately transform social relations and not ask for partial concessions; that Thursday’s victory is no more substantial than liberal calls to “defend public education,” we wish you good luck in revolutionizing the relations of production by yourselves, purity tests and all.

We are under no illusion that the content of the administration’s concessions is in itself meaningful. The latest Wheeler occupation was a step forward for two primary reasons. First and most apparently, we haven’t had anything representable as a concrete victory for direct action at Berkeley since the October 2009 occupation of the anthropology library. Some might argue that the original Wheeler occupation led Schwarzenegger to restore previously cut funding to the UC, but there’s no definitive evidence to suggest this is the case, save for a lone quote from his chief of staff that appeared in the New York Times. In any case, with a moribund student-worker movement on March 2 revitalized by the following day’s victory, there’s something to be said for the necessity of re-moralization if we are to get anywhere in our fight against austerity.

Second, as we’ve suggested before, militant confrontation with the cops should never be considered as an end in itself, but it is certainly desirable as a means of radicalizing students and workers whose consciousness remains to be developed in the process of struggle. The violent confrontation with the state’s first line of defense allows the dispossessed to experience firsthand just how far the administrative-managerial class is willing to go to protect its interests. As one student told the Daily Cal,

“The police hit us with the batons in the stomach with the tip of their stick. Absolutely full, full force,” said Khademi, a professional violinist who said he now suffers injuries to his left arm, making it difficult to play.

The number of students who were, or at least witnessed, their friends and comrades-in-struggle being pepper-sprayed and beaten with nightsticks is pretty alarming given that this was a nonviolent protest in the center of an elite establishment if there ever was one. No longer can these students deny how far the UCB administration is willing to go to suppress criticism of its austerity measures, nor will many of them likely remain dormant as before. When we build for the next action (and the one after that), we will have a community-in-struggle waiting in the wings.

We had something similar (though obviously to a much larger extent) after the first Wheeler occupation; we all remember how militant the student movement was that December. We’re not quite there yet, but we will hopefully be soon. Let’s use this recent victory -- and it must be represented as a victory -- to build a mass militant student movement. We’re not talking about some hypothetical notion of “mass” in which we have to wait around for a consecrated criterion that will never actually materialize, nor do we fetishize “militancy” as identical to spontaneous acts of violence. As we move forward, let’s be sure to remain conscious of the limitations of Thursday’s action without slipping into the morass of maximalist pessimism. It was unconditionally a victory, even if merely a means of building for the next more substantial action.

And P.S.: Fuck the Daily Cal for the most reactionary editorial we’ve seen it publish in years. This cryptic horseshit about the necessity of finding a “true leader” is laughable, especially given that one of their possible candidates was ASUC President Noah Stern. The most indicative sentence in the entire column was the following:

Protests should have a more cohesive message and be directed at legislators and other state officials who are actually making the cuts to public education.

And there we have it: typical Democratic politics masquerading as objective analysis. What a joke. We hereby challenge the Daily Cal to identify a single instance of American civil disobedience in which the targeting of legislators yielded success. If you still haven’t gotten the memo, the anti-austerity movement is not interested in asking Jerry Brown to change his mind, nor any of these technocrats. They have nothing to give us. Do you really think that a mass march with a couple dozen nonviolent arrests will convince these administrators to change their minds? We can’t ask for what’s already owed to us; we have to take it.

XOXO,

TWUI

A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. The protesters who locked themselves down on the Wheeler Ledge won the following concessions from the UC administration:

1. A meeting to discuss Operational Excellence (OE) will be held with Chancellor Birgeneau, the chair of OE, and a group of students and workers;
2. Basically no action will be taken to punish the protesters on the Wheeler ledge: they will receive only a "notification" from the Office of Student Conduct (OSC) and trespassing charges will be treated as an infraction instead of a misdemeanor;
3. Occupiers of Wheeler Hall in 2009 will receive a new offer ("administrative disposition," in bureaucratic lingo) from OSC to resolve their cases: instead of a "stayed suspension" (which basically means that if you get in trouble for literally anything you're automatically suspended) they offer will be for "disciplinary probation" (a somewhat milder version, but that entails an entirely new hearing process) until the end of the spring 2011 semester.

So far, the administration is following up on the deal. But what's important to remember here is that the administration would never have negotiated under normal circumstances -- they did so only because we made them, because they were forced to. Even after this agreement, then, we can't let our guard down -- the administration must always be kept in check. On that note, we're posting the following emails sent by key administrators who will be responsible for turning these negotiating points into concrete results. (Daniela Urban is a member of the Campus Rights Project and was the primary negotiator for the protesters on the ledge.)

The first email is from Associate Dean of Students Christina Gonzales, who oversees student conduct issues:

From: Christina Gonzales
Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:47 AM
Subject: RE: Follow Up on March 3 Wheeler Ledge Sit-In
To: Daniela Urban
Cc: Jonathan Poullard , Mitchell Celaya , vcsa@berkeley.edu

Dear Daniela

The Center for Student Conduct [i.e. OSC] has sent out a new administrative disposition (they went out on Thursday night) to students facing conduct charges from November 20, 2009. We received the signed copies of the new disposition by the participants of the ledge sit-in.

The notifications that were agreed upon for March 2 & 3, 2011 will go to students by the end of this week, I sent the names you shared with the Center for Student Conduct so that the letters could be drafted and sent out.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you
Christina

Christina Gonzales
Associate Dean of Students

The next email is from Mitch Celaya, the chief of UCPD. Note that he has not confirmed anything, but has merely made a "recommendation" to the DA. Criminal charges will most likely be minimal in any case, but this is definitely something to keep our eyes on -- Celaya is notoriously sketchy:

From: Mitchell Celaya
Date: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:37 AM
Subject: RE: Follow Up on March 3 Wheeler Ledge Sit-In
To: Daniela Urban, poullard@berkeley.edu, Christina Gonzales , vcsa@berkeley.edu

Daniela,

I made the recommendation to the charging DA, because we field cited out the 9 students on Thursday I don't expect to get a reply from the DA until the end of the week at the earliest. I will advise you of the DA's response as soon as I get it. Mitch

Thanks, Mitch. More from the Daily Cal here.

[Update Tuesday, 1:12am]: Either Mitch didn't follow through, or his "recommendation" isn't worth shit.

The same questions I ask about the claims over "intellectual property" have always been worth asking about physical property. By what right do people claim the right to exclude? What rights do people who labor and create have to define access and share what they have?

Those of you who tried to come on Thursday, I apologize -- the police let several of us in and we were inside the building until police came and told us the chancellor was closing the building at which point we had to leave.

A question this course should lead you to ask is: by what right does the chancellor get to close Wheeler Hall? Whose property is it?

Know that this university exists because the land was donated by the state to the university in exchange for it providing free education to the citizens of California. In terms of labor theories of value, if the labor of teachers is part of the educational mission, at what point do teachers get to decide what happens on school property? If you believe, as I do, that students' labor is also part of education -- helping create what is learned by all in the classroom, what right do students have to make use of the spaces that were given as sites of education? If there is disagreement or diversity of opinion, who or what should arbitrate these rights?

I later got an email from the chancellor saying there was a "health and safety issue" in Wheeler which necessitated closing it. This seems odd to me. I also heard from a friend who was stopping by Wheeler (a volunteer medic) that police had pepper-sprayed and beaten protesters with batons while attempting to remove them from the area. (Was that the health and safety issue? If so, I can think of a few ways short of closing the building that could have protected people.)

I encourage you to think about the primacy of property rights in what happened at Wheeler Hall. Property rights in objects were supreme over rights over people's own bodies. The rights to bodily integrity of the students were not as important as the rights of the chancellor to control what happens in Wheeler Hall. It's true there may have been a concern about damage to the building -- but during the first occupation a police officer smashed the hand (and nearly took off the finger) of a student who was participating in the protests (nonviolently and not causing property damage), and yet police are still allowed on campus. The costs and the harm of  batons and pepper spray are not as much concern to the university as the right of the university to control property.

Whose rights are being protected by this? (Note that we were carrying on our section without a problem until this happened, it was the police who were limiting access.)

Of course there is the question of [a] student's right to pursue an education without protest. As above, who should be the arbiter between those different opinions about educational priorities in situations where protesters ARE disrupting classes?

But also, what happens if you include the rights of the students and former students, and also the janitors (speaking of keeping the building in good shape) who are no longer on campus because of the policies like fee hikes and the layoffs dictated by Operational Excellence? Did they have any rights? Milton Friedman (whom we read this week) would say no. But what about the founders of the UC system and its mission?

Also, the rights of nonprotesting students to pursue an education are affected anyway, because even despite the massive fee increases the resulting funds have not gone to education: class sizes are increasing, labs are cut, teaching resources are cut, class sessions are cut (this course has four fewer classes than usual because of the cuts), libraries are closed, construction disrupts the campus as much as protests.

I hope this is food for thought and future discussion!

We're too tired to write anything right now, but we wanted to post a few links anyway. Also, check out our twitter feed for a minute-by-minute account of the day, and this twitter list from Student Activism for tweets from many of those on the scene.

Links:
- "Wheeler Locked Down Once Again" (thosewhouseit)
- "A Victory for Direct Action" (thosewhouseit)
- "Roof of Wheeler Hall Occupied" (occupyca)
- "Berkeley Students Occupy Ledge at Wheeler Hall" (student activism)
- "Wheeler Hall Occupied" (zunguzungu)