Tent University had many goals, but it originally wanted to democratize education. It rapidly ballooned to include many many other goals and was violently broken up by campus police. You can’t say that Tent University achieved its goals when it had a ton of things it wanted to do and none of them were to highlight police brutality. Advancing the original agenda of tent state was a failure. Just read the wikipedia page on tent state university and asses how well it pushed and achieved the changes it proposed at UCSC.

The tree sit also had many goals. Yes, one of the goals was a greater public scrutiny of University developments. That goal could be achieved by handing out fliers in downtown Santa Cruz or writing letters to the editor. Hell, handing out fliers underneath the treesit would have helped achieved that goal better, since it is hard to get people to scrutinize the University when they don’t know the goal of the treestters. Usually a treesit will attempt to get concessions from the people attempting to cut the trees down. In that respect, the treesit was a horrible failure. The University just waited for the treesit to lose focus, get off message, and lose the support of the majority of the students.

I don’t really see the current set of protesters having a greater amount of success achieving goals than tent University or the tree sit. Protesting the UC in order to force disinvestment in South Africa is a great example of a successful protest with a clearly defined goal. I’d support the current protests if they had that kind of focus. Perhaps they could protest the UCSC campus to take a specific action

The comparison of a small, multi-issue protest to the multi-campus (even multi-university) protests lasting weeks and including students, faculty, staff and members of the public at large that eventually lead to UC divestment from South Africa does not seem like a fair comparison. The South Africa divestment movement had specific goals and was well-organized. I don’t think Mark is criticizing protest as a way to motivate change, as the poster above me implies. The critique is far more specific: What is your goal, and what is the path to achieving that goal?

Specific answers to these questions should be defined, available to anyone interested in participating, and clear to anyone who sees the action.

I would argue that frenetic, disorganized action actually does more harm than would be achieved by doing nothing; If you wish to bring public scrutiny to something, make sure that when they look they can clearly see a message. Otherwise, the public becomes desensitized to action in general.