Whereas UAW 2865 witnesses firsthand how the 1% (in the form of UC Regents and top UC executives) conspire to steal ever more from students and workers through repeated tuition hikes, reduced services, layoffs, increased workloads, outsourcing and other austerity measures; and

Whereas we stand for the rights of all people to living wage jobs with affordable health care, quality education, a voice on the job, fair housing and a well-funded public sector, and

WHEREAS: Unemployment is the highest it has been since the Great Depression, and people are staying unemployed longer now than in the Great Depression, 1/3 of California homes are underwater, 1/5 of the foreclosures nation-wide are in California, and San Franciscans alone have lost almost $6 billion in home value costing their city over $74 million, and

WHEREAS: Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Manhattan's Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and the Wisconsin protests earlier this year, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future, and

WHEREAS: the Occupy Wall Street has galvanized public sentiment and a broad-based movement protesting the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations, and

WHEREAS: the National AFL-CIO and Change to Win coalitions have endorsed Occupy Wall Street, a growing number of trade union activists have joined this movement, both as individual workers, and as part of an increasing number of International and Local union contingents connecting their own fights to the larger demands of the movement for economic justice and fairness, and

WHEREAS: Union and Community organizations together have been working in coalition since the crash of the economy to force Banks to pay for public services and to renegotiate predatory loans with home owners, governments, and non-profit agencies, and

WHEREAS:  public safety officers have used excessive force against peaceful protesters at Oscar Grant (Frank Ogawa) Plaza and violated their first amendment rights when more than 500 public safety officers with firearms aimed at the occupiers, tore down their tents in a predawn raid on October 25; and

WHEREAS: public safety officers on the evening of Oct. 25 again used excessive force  injuring and endangering the lives of demonstrators when they marched on the evening of October 25th to protest the violence against the occupiers that morning;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that this union will encourage its members and allies to act in support of Nov. 2 actions and honors as a "Sanctioned Union Strike Line" OccupyOakland and Occupy Wall Street, encourages union members and Local unions to participate in the movement, will actively support any unionized or non-unionized worker who refuses to break up, "raid," or confiscate the belongings of protesters, and calls on unions representing DPW workers to not participate in such activity, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that this union and its allies stand with our sisters and brothers of Occupy Wall Street, OccupyOakland, and cities and towns across the country who are fed up with an unfair economy that works for 1% of Americans while the vast majority of people struggle to pay the bills, get an education, and raise their families, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that UAW 2865 recognizes that protest movements, like strike lines and organizing campaigns, do not have curfews, are not 9-5 activities, and in doing so UAW 2865  recognizes and will work to protect the right for OccupyOakland to protest 24 hours a day, on-site and with proper protection including food, medical supplies, water, and tents, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that UAW 2865 has endorsed and will continue to endorse and turn-out members to OccupyOakland rallies and events, to provide in-kind donations like tents and food, and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that UAW 2865 joins its sister unions in the UC Berkeley Labor Coalition in forwarding this resolution for adoption to other local unions and central labor bodies.

It's official -- the administration continues to grow as faculty and workers continue to shrink. In this context, it's worth noting once again that administrators are the only ones getting substantial raises these days (the Daily Cal has the enemies list). We have to remember that austerity doesn't only mean cutbacks and layoffs -- it also corresponds to hirings and bonuses.

Here's the full report from Keep California's Promise:

In November of 2009, KeepCaliforniasPromise.org posted a report by Richard Evans titled “Soon every faculty member will have a personal senior manager” which pointed out that the number of managers at UC was growing far faster than the ranks of the faculty and that, if the trend continued, it would not be long before there were more senior managers than ladder rank faculty. Richard just sent me an e-mail pointing out that data through April of 2011 was out.

I wondered if the data would show how the “Working Smarter Initiative” and much talked about cuts of $80 million to the UC Office of the President, had combined with promises to first and foremost “preserve excellence in instruction, research and public service… which it cannot do without continuing to attract and retain top-flight faculty” (see, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/25580) to reverse that trend.

Well, it turns out faculty ranks have declined by 2.3 percent since the 2009 post, at a time when student enrollment increased by 3.6 percent. (I would hope the UC administration wouldn’t try to spin a continuing erosion of a major measure of academic quality such as the student faculty ratio as increased efficiency.)

But we all know the budget cuts have been tough. Even an administration striving to preserve the education and research missions of the University by directing as many of the cuts as possible at administrative overhead might have to make painful cuts to the employees responsible for education and research in such an environment. The cuts to senior administrators must be even steeper, right? At least as steep?

Somehow the ranks of managers have continued to grow right through this difficult period – up 4.2% between April, 2009 and April, 2011. In fact, the dismal prediction of our 2009 post has now come to pass: UC now has more senior managers (8,822 FTE) than ladder rank faculty (8,669 FTE).

Summer means no students -- for the UC administration, that means the absence of one of the largest obstacles to their privatizing designs. There's a similar logic in the UC regents' decision to hold their meetings at UCSF Mission Bay. It is a highly strategic space: not only is it extremely out of the way and difficult to get to from Berkeley, but it's also located in what is essentially a post-industrial wasteland, with little else around to provide cover. After thousands protested the meeting at UCLA in November 2009 to approve the original 32 percent tuition hike, it seems the regents decided to retire to less accessible locations.

Summer vacation is the temporal version of UCSF Mission Bay. It's not surprising that it was in July 2009 that the regents voted to give UC president Mark Yudof "emergency powers" due to the "state of financial emergency," which gave the administration unilateral authority to impose austerity measures. Especially as "shared governance" becomes less and less of a reality, we should expect more and more executive decisions to be made and policies to be approved at this time of the year.

The title of this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel is right on: "During Serenity of Summer, UCSC Implements 'Painful' Cuts."

SANTA CRUZ -- UC Santa Cruz's wooded campus is relatively serene in the early days of the more quiet summer session.

Beneath the tranquility though, the campus is set to execute another round of cuts including laying off roughly 50 non-academic employees in what has become an annual occurrence since 2008.

The layoffs go into effect on Friday, July 1, the start of the new fiscal year. In addition to layoffs, workers are seeing their hours (and pay) cut back. As expected, these cuts will primarily affect non-academic workers. (While there are no layoffs on the academic side of things, 40 more faculty positions that are currently empty, and 120 teaching assistantships for graduate students, will be permanently eliminated.) While UC spokespeople talk about how much much their work is valued, they acknowledge that the student-as-consumer is the primary target.

"After years of reductions in state support, we've gotten to the point where every corner of the campus has been impacted by these cuts," UCSC spokesman Jim Burns said. "It's also true that units farther from the classroom have been particularly hard hit -- not because the campus doesn't value those areas and the people working in them. But because we have tried to the extent possible to reduce cuts to the academic areas in an effort to protect student access to the courses they need."

Much like the tuition increases, however, these poverty wages are not a function of the so-called financial crisis. Rather, it's a function of a class war that's been occurring for decades:

During her two decades at UCSC, [custodian Rosario] Cortez has held several second jobs, including other custodial positions and a job at a bread factory. Currently she works five days a week at UCSC, eight hours a day, where she earns about $2,200 a month after taxes, then makes and sells tamales on the weekends for extra income.

Cortez's sentiments were echoed by Ernesto Encinas, a cook at UCSC who cares for his 86-year-old mother and 14-year-old son.

"Everyone I know has a second job," Encinas said. "There is no rest with the wages we make here. You can't make ends meet with just the one job with the way cost of living keeps rising. Any little change in our income can be devastating."

With these cuts comes not a decrease in the amount of work expected but precisely the opposite: speedup. Custodians, for example, are required to clean more areas during a single shift. Administrators get around this in a curious way -- by telling workers, apparently, to "clean less," that is, to do a worse job at cleaning more areas. It's a recipe for disaster -- especially in the context of ongoing layoffs, this amounts to an incredibly difficult balancing act for the workers. On this note, check out what an asshole Jim Dunne, the director of UCSC's physical plants department, is:

"I have heard [the complaints]," Dunne said. "We often only have a few months to implement changes and rework how we do things. We are making a lot of effort to communicate to custodians what that redesign is, but adjustment takes time. It is a difficult situation for both sides. Custodians take a lot of pride in their work. When you tell them to clean something less, that's hard for them."

Yeah, that's the only thing that's hard for them.

If they ever doubted it before, UC administrators now understand that the best time to implement austerity are the summer months. Summer evacuates much of the potential resistance -- with students and faculty mostly away, the only thing standing in the way are the workers, precisely those hardest hit by the cutbacks. It also functions usefully as a time barrier -- one of the administration's most effective tactics is simply to wait protesters out. (Look at what's happened with the last two hunger strikes at UC Berkeley.) Finally, summer marks the point at which many veteran student protesters graduate and move on. For anti-austerity protesters, it will become increasingly important to incorporate the summer into strategic thinking. This does not necessarily imply a need for stable organizing structures, which contribute their own problems, but it does indicate the need to directly address and even intervene in some way during these months. After all, the success of the walkout on September 24, 2009 depended on the work that was done by students, faculty, and workers before the school year had even begun. This does not necessarily have to take place on campus. It could also mean looking to other organizing bodies outside the spaces of the university that are attempting to build capacity for resistance against austerity.

If fall is the moment of attack, and after the fall the moment of reflection, then before the fall is clearly the moment of preparation. But maybe it's time to rethink this calendar?

We wanted to note a few important news items that were brought to our attention today, all of which pertain in some way or another to general questions of university governance. First and foremost, as we noted several days ago, today was what the California Professor called "the Ides of May" in that Governor Jerry Brown revealed the revisions to his original budget proposal. There really was no question about whether or not Brown would change his approach and drop the austerity model that has characterized his politics since the 1970s. For Brown, it's all austerity, all the time.

Now, current revenues are unexpectedly high, coming in at $2.8 billion above what was predicted. But Brown, despite some minor changes, is basically sticking to his guns:

I only have a few minutes today to look at the Governor's May budget revision, and here's what I see. Current-year revenues are up $2.8 billion over forecasts, and $6.6 billion over two years. Governor Brown, true to his turnscrew austerity vision of a Hooverite unstimulus for all Californians, increases allocations to no one except K-12 and the community colleges "pursuant to Proposition 98," and, unbelievably, prisons, with a drop for mental health (page 4).

The Regents' strategy of saying that state funding is never coming back has paid off big-time: UC and CSU get exactly zero -- not even a $10 million or $50 million booby prize for not fighting the $500 million cuts. The crappy squeezing of health services is intact (page 3), as is the closing of 70 state parks to save a whopping $11 million this year. There is no wavering of Gov Brown's vision in which the government's one and only priority is reducing the deficit.

Even worse, as Michael Meranze observes, the budget revision still assumes that almost all of the tax extensions proposed by Brown in the original budget will be approved. "In other words, it is still possible that he will end up with an 'all-cuts' budget with even more fierce slashing of the budget for education, health, etc."

Second, as you will no doubt remember, over the last month we've been watching an internal election build up and take place in the UAW local 2865, which represents graduate students in the UC system. Inspired by the generalized protests against budget cuts and the current leadership's absolute failure to provide any sort of resistance to the university administration, the AWDU caucus emerged to challenge the incumbents (calling themselves USEJ, but also known as the Administration Caucus) in the triennial election which took place at the end of April. An attempt at fraud on the part of the incumbents led to a sit-in/occupation of the UAW office in downtown Berkeley; eventually all the votes were counted and AWDU emerged the winners, taking control of every single seat on the Executive Board and almost 60 percent of the positions on the Joint Council. This is a major victory.

USEJ, as you might imagine, is not happy with the results. And now they're trying to challenge them by leveling allegations of fraud against AWDU and demanding what is essentially a do-over! As thosewhouseit points out:

So if you can’t actually win an election with the popular vote, declare it invalid and hope you win the next time around? Look at how ridiculous some of these allegations are.

This is why it is a very serious violation of the Election Committee protocol that one slate’s supporters (AWDU) was left alone with the ballot boxes for 4-5 days, after the elections committee felt compelled to suspend counting on April 30.

The Admin Caucus dominated elections committee suspended the election unilaterally and without quorum. AWDU supporters locked the ballots in a room at UCLA and set up a webcam monitoring the ballots for the duration of the time they were left unattended. There were no AWDU members in there with the ballot boxes. Another crazy allegation:

[A] poll worker at the Sather Gate voting location at UC Berkeley was reaching into a wide-open ballot box during polling hours on April 27

We can’t believe they have the audacity to try to get this photo clearly taken before the polls opened to qualify as an impropriety. Preposterous. The poll worker is setting up the ballot box before the polls opened for the day. As we’ve explained before, this is pretty obvious if you look at the sunlight coming from the east in the picture. There’s no basis for counting this out of context photograph as evidence of anything, tampering or otherwise. If AC/USEJ can point to any more specific evidence of fraud on display in the photograph that we’re just too dense to comprehend, we’d be happy to hear it. We’re waiting.

We can't hope to cover this issue with the same attention to detail as our compañeros at thosewhouseit, so for the continuing struggle in the union we recommend you check out their blog.

Finally, we wanted to bring your attention to one final update: student-regent Jesse Cheng, who was found "responsible" (i.e. guilty) for sexual battery by the Office of Student Conduct at UC Irvine back in March, has officially resigned from the Board of Regents. (Here is the statement he released.) Note that, as far as we can tell, Cheng was not forced out, but rather resigned of his own accord. Now, we have long argued on this blog that the student conduct process is a disciplinary process that, together with UCPD, constitutes the repressive apparatus of the university. We have seen OSC operate in violation of its own rules and protocols, and furthermore have come to realize that even when it acts according to these rules, its actions are governed by what one critic has called "the rule of the arbitrary." But we have also noted OSC's striking lack of follow-through regarding cases of violence against women, rape, and sexual assault. To us, this confirms our suspicion that the student conduct process operates primarily as a machine for suppressing political dissent, and only secondarily (if at all) to uphold some vague standard of student safety. (Indeed, their standard is not safety at all, but the bureaucratic construct of "health-and-safety.") It is in this sense that the official conduct process for Cheng ended, effectively, without sanction. It is only by extra-official means -- that is, by protest action -- that he was pushed out.

[Update Tuesday 9:49am]: Further thoughts on Jesse Cheng's resignation from Angus Johnston, who compares the leniency in his case with the exorbitant sanctions meted out against the "Irvine 11," who were arrested and punished for speaking out during a public lecture given by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren:

That Cheng received probation, and was allowed to keep his seat on the UC Regents until he himself chose to give it up, while the Irvine 11 saw the student organization to which they belong suspended and now each face the possibility of six months in jail? That’s not right. That’s not proportionate. That’s not legitimate.

And that disproportion, that illegitimacy, casts the whole University of California judicial system, as well as the UC’s relationship with law enforcement, into question.

From AWDU:

We have just learned that the elections committee of our local convened today at 12:30pm and agreed to restart the counting at 9am on Thursday (5/5) -- this is a huge victory for rank-and-file members who joined or supported the sit-in at the statewide offices in Berkeley and LA!! By drawing on the proud tradition of rank-and-file activism and direct action in the US labor movement, the tradition which built the UAW in the first place, members made clear that they would not stand by and allow themselves to be disenfranchised.

AWDU candidates and supporters look forward to the resumption of the count and will be present to help ensure it proceeds without unnecessary delays or suspensions. It has been our position all along that win or lose, AWDU is committed to an elections process that is free and fair, and that allows ordinary members to decide how their union should be run, and by whom. Given the extraordinary and outrageous circumstances in which the count was suspended, we plan to continue the sit-in until the voting process is fully complete and a certified result has been issued.

There are currently about 15 union members in the UAW statewide office, located at 2070 Allston way, suite 205 in Berkeley. A rally is scheduled for 11:30 on Sproul Plaza, and will turn into a march over to the union office to support and/or join the occupation. We will continue to provide updates as the day goes on.

Here's an email from Mandy Cohen, current head steward for UAW 2865 and running for recording secretary on the AWDU slate, announcing and explaining the action:

This weekend I witnessed one of the craziest things I've ever seen in my life. On Friday the counting of votes in our union leadership election began in LA. I drove down with other Berkeley and Santa Cruz AWDU members when we heard that all of Berkeley's votes had been challenged (meaning they might be invalidated). We arrived in the early hours Saturday morning and were able to help count the votes for Santa Cruz, Davis, Irvine, San Diego, Riverside and Santa Barbara. by 5pm all of those campuses were almost complete--and AWDU actually seemed to be breaking even.

The elections committee called an hour recess--and three hours later came back to say that the count was suspended, the results so far calculated were certified, and the rest of the count (including all 1500+ votes from LA and Berkeley) and all of the challenges were passed on to the Joint Council--which doesn't meet until July! The elections committee then immediately fled the building and abandoned the ballots.

All the members at LA sat down in the union office to make sure the votes were secured and to start lodging our protests with media, union officials, etc.

Late last night we drove back to Berkeley, had a meeting, and are now sitting down (in good UAW fashion) in the statewide union office until the elections committee agrees to resume the vote count. We have one demand: COUNT OUR VOTES.

We cannot let our votes be thrown out! This is exactly why we were forced to form the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union more than a year ago, though these actions are almost incomprehensible in their disregard for union democracy and members rights. Please join us at the office as soon as possible (2070 Allston Way, Suite 205) or come to the rally at Sather Gate at 11:30 and march to the office.

A call is planned at 1pm today between incumbent leadership, AWDU members, the elections committee chair and our international representative from UAW. We need to show that our members will not allow their votes to be thrown out, that the count must be finished and new leadership instated.

For more info, including our responses to the attacks that have been emailed by Daraka Larimore-Hall, see: http://www.awdu.org/ and http://berkeleyuaw.wordpress.com/

[Update Monday 1:49pm]: Occupiers just voted unanimously to remain in the office indefinitely until their demand -- that all the votes be counted -- is met.

Again. Thosewhouseit has the press release. Here's the key paragraph:

In the wake of a hotly contested election for leadership UAW local 2865, reports from inside the vote count indicate UAW officials may be trying to steal the election. The count is unfolding currently in Los Angeles, where one member has challenged every box of ballots from UC Berkeley on fabricated grounds. The ballots being challenged represent 25% of all votes cast: about 800 of approximately 3,200 total votes in this election. The challenge threatens to disenfranchise every voter on the campus with the union’s largest membership. UAW local 2865 represents over 12,000 Academic Student Employees across the UC system.

Here's another update from last night:

Des Harmon, someone who is not a graduate student, not a teaching assistant, and not a member in good standing has challenged hundreds of ballots from Berkeley on grounds that are completely fabricated. And the current UAW administration has the votes on the elections committee here to let this farce stand.

Des Harmon is the Los Angeles Recording Secretary for UAW local 2865. Where does he stand on the election, you ask?

Note: Within 10 minutes of campaigning at the polls for AWDU on the first day of the election, I met Des Harmon. He tore the AWDU leaflet in front of my face – I’m sure this gives you a sense of where he stands. – Renee Hudson

Members of AWDU Berkeley left late last night to go down to LA to try to monitor the vote count and prevent this fraud from taking place. It's hard to say with complete accuracy at this point, but the word is that AWDU folks have responded by making some of their own challenges. We'll try to keep the updates coming. Regardless, if fraud were to happen, it would be the second fraudulent vote in the union in the last six months. Last December, you remember, there was a vote about whether to approve the shitty contract that our negotiators were telling us -- falsely -- was actually pure gold. (And look where that got us.) AWDU and others organized a "NO!" campaign, which quickly generated an astonishing amount of support. It's impossible to say for sure, simply because there weren't enough safeguards in place to keep track of what's happening, but it seems likely that the count was fraudulent. And this one is starting to look the same way.

Tragedy, meet farce.

[Update Sunday 9:20am]: Once again, it's fraud:

This just in: After leaving the counting for 3 hours, Admin Caucus members Jorge Cabrera and Travis Knowles, the latter of whom is the chair of the Elections Committee, certified the results without counting ballots from UCLA or Berkeley. We’ll post developments as they come in. As things stand, they are trying to postpone the count for a full two months until the next Joint Council meeting. Why else would they do this unless they were certain they lost?

The following is an open letter that's just come through the email:

May 1, 2011

Open letter from an outraged member of UAW and AWDU supporter.

This message goes out to everyone on the USEJ slate, everyone on the Elections Committee, and everyone who voted in the election.

I am hugely appalled by the incumbent caucus’ decision to prevent the counting of votes at UCLA and UC Berkeley. I have just read the official UAW email claiming that the election has been “partially certified.” AWDU members present at the Los Angeles UAW office have informed me that “At 8 pm after a break begun at 5pm in which election committee chair Travis Knowles was absent with opposition candidate Jorge Cabrera for 3 hours, the election committee returned and certified the election without counting Berkeley or UCLA ballots.” What, I wonder, could “partial certification” mean, and according to what definition of democracy? To be clear about what’s happened: imagine a U.S. Presidential election in which, in the eleventh hour of vote counting, the incumbent party—lets make them Republicans, for the sake of argument—decided not to count the remaining votes from, say, California, New York, Ohio and Tennessee. Let’s say that the incumbent party’s spokesperson went on air with the message, “Because there were challenges from both sides, and because things have been contentious, and because we’ve been counting for so long—48 hours!—we decided to call it a day.” What would you think? Would you believe the principles of democracy were being upheld?

I am even more appalled because today is May 1st, the one day of the year devoted to working men and women, not only in American, but in all nations. This is not the day to trample on the democratic rights of workers, but that is what the power-holders in USEJ have chosen to do. This is not the day to communicate to the honest workers of our local that their votes were not even counted for fear of the results. This is not the day to pretend that the “contentiousness” of an election is grounds for the nullification of the democratic process. On any other day, this behavior would be shameful and intolerable. But today, it is a gross insult and a travesty of the values of “social and economic justice” for which the incumbent caucus claims to stand. It is an insult to all of us, on both sides of the election campaign. This is not the day to defile the honor of public-sector workers; this is a day to stand together, and to cherish one of the few rights afforded us as workers in this country: the right to participate in collective bargaining. Recent events in Michigan, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have shown that this right is under serious threat from the political Right. For too many American workers, May Day has already been tarred by political defeats and betrayals. Still, I did not expect I would be spending my May Day contemplating my own union’s betrayal of my rights as a worker.

Let me pose a question to the supporters of USEJ. When you cast your vote in the election, what image of democracy did you have in mind? Would you have felt comfortable voting for the incumbent caucus knowing that they would try to tilt the election in their favor by whatever means necessary? Are you aware, for instance, that the photograph touted in a recent USEJ email as evidence of voter fraud at Berkeley--it shows a man reaching into the ballot box--was taken prior to voting, while the polling station was still being set up? (Which is precisely what the photograph depicts: a volunteer, not an AWDU member, preparing the polling station for voting.) If you had known to what lengths the incumbents were willing to go to ensure victory, would you have voted for USEJ or for AWDU? As for candidates on the USEJ slate, I cannot understand what you mean by the phrase “social and economic justice.” Is it socially and economically just to shut out voters at UCLA and Berkeley? What should we call justice that exempts itself from judgment? What would you propose? Or are you as appalled as I am? If so, I strongly urge you to condemn your caucus’ leadership for making a mockery of the election, a mockery of union democracy, and a mockery of justice. Moreover, I urge you to join AWDU. The stakes of our caucus are real: union democracy urgently needs defenders. We want to fight with you, not against you, to build a stronger union for all of us.

Make no mistake: infamy is at work in the union. It has draped itself in the costume of “partial certification” and the legitimacy of the Joint Council of the Union, but it is infamy nonetheless. We have all been stained by this insult, and we ought all to fight it—today, tomorrow, and every day until our union is again worthy of that title. Otherwise there will be no union, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar and a fraud.

If you share this opinion, send a message or email djmarcus@berkeley.edu to have your name added to the list of signatories.

Daniel Marcus
UC Berkeley

About 20 students at Rutgers University have taken over the administration building to protest tuition hikes and the anti-democratic decision-making of the Board of Governors (like the UC Regents). They've released the following demands:

1. We want President McCormick to FREEZE tuition so Rutgers students do not have to take out excessive loans to pay for a PUBLIC education.

2. We want SCHOLARSHIPS for underprivileged / first generation college students.

3. We want Rutgers to provide FREE transcripts for its undergraduate students.

4. We want support for the rights of ALL University affiliated workers.

5. We want the Rutgers University population to have a voice in decisions made by the Board of Governors—INCLUDING TUITION COST! THREE voting Student Members, ONE voting Staff Member, ONE voting Faculty Member—all elected by their respective constituencies: NO APPOINTEES!

Police are in the building and are apparently preventing friends and supporters from sending food and water into the building, but protesters say that at least nobody will be arrested tonight. Follow their Twitter feed here and send solidarity messages to their email address: keepRUpublic@gmail.com.

[Update Wednesday 9:56 pm]: Protesters are still in the building. The New York Times has an article up. Here's the key quote:

Last year, a cap limited the increase in tuition to 4 percent, but this year, public colleges are likely to have the ability to set their own rates, meaning the rise could be higher. At a recent legislative budget hearing, [Rutgers President Richard L.] McCormick predicted that tuition increases at the state’s public colleges would be less than 10 percent.

The Rutgers University Board of Governors typically sets tuition and fee rates in July, after the State Legislature has determined the state budget and financial support for higher education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Again, thosewhouseit has the goods:

The following email was written by Felicia Lee, Chief of Staff for Vice Chancellor Harry LeGrande. She has been the administration’s pointperson for interfacing with the Wheeler ledge occupiers regarding the “dialogue” to be had this Friday. We write “dialogue” because -- and we can’t say we’re surprised -- the administration is not interested in negotiations with students and workers about campus privatization; they are only “interested in having a serious exchange of ideas through thoughtful dialogue and not a negotiation.” Moreover, Lee explicitly threatens to cancel the meeting if a rally takes place.

In addition, she rejects all but one of the student negotiators who have been preparing for this meeting. Only those who were actually on the ledge are invited. The worker is rejected as well, as apparently AFT doesn’t count as a real union to these people. In short, with 2 days’ notice, everything is up in the air.

These people disgust us. They “welcome a serious exchange of ideas regarding OE and to support that goal, it would be great if the attendees could take a few moments to review the OE website prior to the meeting.” We are welcome to discuss these cuts, but they are a given. Negotiations are off the table. Here’s what the head of OE Andrew Szeri had to say:

This is meant to be a civil, open discussion to see why these students are so adamant about ending [Operational Excellence]. We will not be ending Operational Excellence, it is that simple. But we do want to hear what they have to say.

We can’t say we’re surprised. These are the people who consistently call in riot cops on students with no history of violence, turn a blind eye as they are blasted with pepper spray, and disseminate Mogulof lies to the media. We will not stand idly by as the administration attempts to use this meeting as a shroud of legitimacy for its austerity measures. We are not interested in “exchanging ideas.” This budget-cut fatalism masks the substantive issue on the table: austerity is a done deal for these people. A line is drawn in the sand. We will not decide how and where we would like to be cut; we decide not to be cut.

Dear ✖✖✖,

I recognize that it is difficult to keep having these conversations over email and appreciate the professional nature of our exchange.

As outlined in ✖✖✖’s email on March 4th, the Chancellor agreed to a meeting with “students participating in the ledge sit-in on Wheeler Hall on March 3, 2011” to discuss Operational Excellence. As I have stated before, the Chancellor has asked that the numbers be kept to four students and one worker in order to facilitate a thoughtful conversation. Upon review of your submitted participant list, there is only one student (✖✖✖) from the list who was on the ledge. Please send me the names of four currently enrolled UC Berkeley students from the original list of nine individuals who would attend Friday’s meeting:

[names redacted]

Furthermore, please send me the name of one worker from your submitted list:

[names redacted]

I omitted ✖✖✖ from your original list due to his status as lecturer and not as a staff worker.

I do not want to presume that you are aware of the notices circulating that Friday’s meeting with the Chancellor is a negotiation and additional protests outside California Hall are being planned during the time of the meeting. The Chancellor is interested in having a serious exchange of ideas through thoughtful dialogue and not a negotiation. Presenting demands will not be a fruitful use of time or aligned with the original spirit of this meeting. Furthermore, the Chancellor is concerned this meeting is being utilized as a catalyst for a public rally. He is prepared to postpone the meeting should it escalate as such and/or create disturbances for academic classes, students studying in nearby buildings, or staff working nearby.

We welcome a serious exchange of ideas regarding OE and to support that goal, it would be great if the attendees could take a few moments to review the OE website prior to the meeting (http://oe.berkeley.edu/). We are open to receiving any questions or thoughts you may have that you would like to share in advance of the meeting in order to maximize our meeting time in addressing your concerns.

We cannot agree to your request to record the meeting. Note-taking responsibilities, as with other meetings with students, have been a collaborative process. Typically, an administrator and a student representative take notes and these notes are compared and agreed upon with the entire group before distribution when necessary. 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.

The meeting will begin promptly at 3:30pm so please arrive at Cal Hall by 3:15pm and I will escort the group to the meeting room. As a reminder, the meeting will also conclude promptly at 5:30pm in order for the Chancellor to attend a separate event welcoming parents and students shortly thereafter.

Please remind the attendees to bring a photo ID. I would appreciate receiving the attendee names no later than 5:00pm on Thursday April 7, 2011. I look forward to seeing everyone on Friday.

Sincerely,

Felicia J. Lee, Ph.D.
Chief of Staff
Division of Student Affairs
University of California, Berkeley
130 California Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
510.642-6757 (office)

In light of this bullshit, we recommend our post on "No negotiation, occupation!"

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.

Last year, a woman in my department became a celebrity for a month or two. Folks who had never met her had heard about her and asked me about her research and her advisors. The source of her short-lived fame? She -- a political theorist with an emphasis on postmodern feminist thought -- got a job. And not just a job, the golden ticket of jobs: A tenure-track position at a reasonably good university. She was a source of both awe and reassurance -- it does happen, see. Really! But also: What did she do? How did she do it? What did she do that I can do, too?

Her professional success came at the same moment that journalists at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times alike were running a series of stories about the “crisis” of tenure and the absence of tenure-track jobs in the humanities. These statistics-based doomsday pieces were accompanied by angry opinion pieces from professors who had started to resent and regret the con they believed they were perpetuating on incoming graduate students in these fields. Rumors of indefinite hiring freezes in the wake of the financial crisis were racing through campuses just as applications to graduate school -- where, unlike credit card debt, the student loan bills wouldn’t come due for a few years -- were skyrocketing in the absence of sufficiently intellectually stimulating post-college jobs. My fellow political theory graduate students and I were in a state of high anxiety, and justifiably so.

The reality of our situation as graduate students in the year 2011 is this: Most of the scientists will be OK, occupying post-docs until either breaking into a research university or “settling” for a well-paying industry job. The professional schools are a mixed bag; newly minted lawyers are increasingly relying on “bridge” grants from Boalt while they fruitlessly search for jobs, while optometrists probably face pretty decent prospects. But for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, the future looks bleak -- at least if we cling to the dream of growing up to be just like our advisor. We’ll probably end up working 2-3 teaching positions, possibly at different universities within the same metropolitan area, sans benefits, maybe still sending out tenure-track job applications, maybe eventually giving up and attempting to figure out what else one can do with a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (for example), or more likely -- competing for jobs on the basis of a bachelors’ degree we’ve long thought irrelevant.

So here’s how it works: A dwindling class of tenured professors, the “rock stars” of their discipline, are paid very well (you can look up individual faculty salaries here) by the university to maintain our reputation and placement in the US News and World Report rankings to attract paying customers -- oops I mean undergraduates -- research grants, and yes, elite graduate students. They are recruited to places like UC Berkeley (a public institution, thus not always able to match the salaries of, say, a Columbia) in part with an implicit promise: You won’t have to do such menial tasks as grade papers or interact with undergrads. There will be “squadrons of GSIs” (Dean Edley’s exact words) eager to do such work so that they may study at your feet. If a newly hired professor does not yet have tenure, there is enormous pressure to devote every waking second to publishable research -- and not to teaching. In other words: Professors may be amazing teachers who care deeply about reaching out to undergrads (and some -- to their own detriment -- work their ass off to be so), but the university systematically incentivizes minimizing the time spent working with students. Meanwhile, an increasing proportion of teaching is done not by tenured or tenure-track faculty, but by “lecturers,” who are basically piece-workers without job security or benefits. This benefits the university (hey, the customers/undergrads still get taught, but with a smaller price tag), doesn’t always bother the tenured professors (whose teaching load is reduced but job is secure), isn’t always obvious to the undergrad (lecturers are, after all, often as good or better than a tenured professor at leading college-level classes), and isn’t the subject of nearly enough anger and/or discussion amongst graduate students.

The Social Sciences Tower at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota was occupied yesterday. Occupiers apparently stayed in the building throughout the night even though it was supposed to be closed down at 11 pm. They have a blog and their twitter feed is @umnsolidarity. As of this morning, they have released a list of demands:

Because we are residents of Minnesota, and because this is a public, land-grant university,

We demand the right to peacefully occupy space at our university,

We demand that the general public has reasonable access to university resources;

We demand that the university respect the rights of all workers to organize and to earn at least a living wage;

We demand tuition and fee reductions;

We demand that regents be democratically elected by the university community;

We demand that the university treat student groups fairly and equitably with respect to funding and space. We demand student groups on the 2nd floor of Coffman Union be able to keep their spaces.

In doing so, we stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin, and students and workers worldwide.

General Strike, or Unlimited Wild General Strike?



(burnt bookmobile, one and two)

Usually, we're in solidarity with the workers. But there are some workers we just can't get behind. UCPD, for one. But another group that's caused us a lot of headaches over the past year and a half or so is the folks at the Office of Student Conduct (OSC). They're the ones responsible for investigating and prosecuting cases against student protesters. They're the ones who have suspended students. They're the ones who consistently violate their own rules and procedures, such as pursuing cases far beyond the timeline (i.e. statute of limitations) for their being resolved. As the counterpart to UCPD, the bureaucrats at OSC constitute the quasi-legal arm of the university's repressive apparatus.

On that note, we've just received some great news: Laura Bennett -- who has served as OSC prosecutor in numerous conduct cases since fall 2009, including that of our compañera Laura Zelko as well as a farcical performance against legal powerhouse Thomas Frampton -- is officially leaving her job! We were just forwarded the following email, regarding a currently ongoing student conduct case:

I wanted to email you to let you know that I will be leaving Cal -- I accepted a position at another school. My last day in the office will be Tues March 15. As a result, I want to inform you that after I leave, Jeff [Woods] or Susan [Trageser] would likely be the best contacts for you regarding your case. If you have questions before then, or would like to talk about an informal resolution, please let me know.

Thanks-
Laura

Our inside informant adds that OSC already has hired two people on contract in order to deal with the work overload. Just another example of the administration's inefficiency and waste. Why not just abolish OSC?

From burnt bookmobile:

Senators in favor of stripping unions of their collective bargaining rights figured out a way to split this section from the rest of the budget and pass it without the presence of the runaway Democrats who were stalling the passing of this part of the bill. People in Madison are running angrily to the Capitol and storming the doors, starting shoving matches with the police holding them shut until the police gave up and retreated. Once inside thousands of people filled the building and chanted “general strike” and “occupy”, amongst other things. Strikes seem more imminent than ever. They appear as certain. Thus chanting and marching in circles appear as more than obvious to everyone as finally and obviously inadequate. News sources are describing firetrucks driving around Madison blaring their sirens as sense of a state of emergency prevails across the city. They are joined by an endless stream of cars in traffic honking their horns constantly as well.

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!