Protests and Shit
In response to the yes vote on a 32% fee increase for UCs, there has been an overwhelming surge of activism here. Wednesday we closed campus all day and marched and eventually took over Kresge Town Hall, which is now claimed as our permanent organizing space. About 60 people slept there, or more. Thursday we took over Kerr Hall, which is the main administrative building with the Chancellor's Office and Conference Room and a ton of other stuff. About 100 people have been sleeping there since then, and we have assemblies all day about whether to take down barricades, what press release to use, etc. Several times a day people bring us huge amounts of food, and yesterday morning there was a carton of cigarettes on the free food table. Right now I am in town hall (because they shut the internet off in Kerr Hall), and our delegates are having their first negotiations with the administration. We have a list of demands that must be met before we give them their building back. This shit is happening at UC Berkeley, Davis and LA, but the police/SWAT have shut a lot of it down by breaking into their occupations and using rubber bullets and pepper spray and hitting kids with batons. Students in Vienna who have been occupying for the last month are marching on the American embassy today to show solidarity to the students who have become the victims of police brutality. If we are still occupying the space on Monday morning there is a good chance the police will try to shut things down, in which case we are going to sit on the ground studying and link arms while they drag each of us out. It will be the first time that has happened to me, and it is basically just a waiting game unless by some miracle our demands are met and we decide to leave of our own accord. A lot of important shit is happening in our state. This is a historic moment in the history of public education, with the increasing privatization of state schools limiting access to nonwealthy students. The Master Plan for the UC system states in unequivocal terms that public education should be free, not ten thousand dollars a quarter. There is no excuse for the 32% fee increase they passed, and no excuse for the future increases they have proposed.