A Series of Tubes

Last week the UC board of Regents increased student fees by 32%. At UCSC there was an initial protest on Wednesday, and an Occupation of the Kresge town hall building which moved to Kerr hall (an administrative building)  on Friday. The Occupation at Kerr hall was broken up on Sunday. The reason that there are protests is in part due to the lack of change through “proper” channels.  I’d like to take the time to highlight the authority structure of the UC system.  After this, I will solve the future 2010/11 budget crisis.  First, the about page of the Academic Senate:

The UCSC Academic Senate operates as a legislative body and as a system of committees run by and for the faculty. The University of California has a dual-track system of authority and responsibility which presumes that faculty are best qualified to chart the University’s educational course, while the administrators are most competent to direct its finances and organization. In practice, these domains overlap and are interdependent. To function successfully, faculty and administrators depend on a high level of consultation, trust, mutual respect and a tradition of collegial collaboration.

So right from the get go there is a problem.  If you want to get something done through proper and official channels, which of this dual-track authority and responsibility tree do you navigate to get to a solution.  Do you attempt to take up your cause and petition the Academic Senate, or do you go to the Administration?  Obviously the Senate is the preferred authority track for a student.  It contains professors who see the effects of budget cuts in their day to day work and are more connected to the decisions being made.  However the description above suggest that if your problem is budget related, those decisions fall mostly under “finances” and would thus be an administrative decision.  To look at how this system works in practice, and not in theory, it is helpful to look at the minutes from the Academic Senate.

From time to time, budget decisions come up in Academic senate meetings (these meetings are held in Kerr hall which is the building that was occupied).  Below is a quote from the minutes between a member of the Senate and the EVC, EVC stands for Executive Vice Chancellor and is a member of the Administrative arm of the dual track authority system:

From the February Minutes:
Professor Kevin Karplus, Biomolecular Engineering, asked why, given the budget situation, is the campus paying for a security guard in an inactive parking lot. The EVC responded that he assumed Professor Karplus is talking about the future site of the biomedical building and the former site of the tree sit and the EVC does not want the fence torn down or any more destruction at the site. Professor Karplus asked if replacing a fence would cost less than security guards. The EVC said he will take that into consideration.

This request, made in February, seems reasonable.  Why pay for a more expensive guard if repairing a fence is cheaper.  Karplus, seeing wasted funds, tells those in charge of finances to quit wasting money.  I’ve seen the guard in question (actually I’ve seen 2 guards, possibly during a change in shift). I know that there was a private security guard at the construction site last month (I’ll check again next time I go by the site).  At a minimum there have been private security guards, protecting a fenced in parking lot from February till at least last month, if not to this day.  What the EVC meant when he said he would take Kevin Karplus’ comments into consideration is that he hoped that nobody would look into it when he promptly ignored this concern.  This is a minor budget issue.  More serious budget concerns were brought up in May.  Please note that Chancellors fall under the administrative arm: Read more

So I had written up about 90% of a post about the rumblings happening on various blogs about another potential occupation.  The main evidence for this is the posting of a new manifesto entitled “this is our emergency“.  I had to scrap a majority of my original post because the rumblings of a new occupation are no longer rumblings, they are a reality.  Recently the UC regents approved a massive student fee increase.  There were large protests blocking traffic to the University yesterday.  After a day of protests, a portion of the protesters decided to occupy the Kresge town hall.

The main entrance to campus (with this and the west entrance blocked, no traffic can enter or leave campus)

A meeting at the Kresge town hall after the initial protests

Before addressing the new manifesto and the New occupation, I would like to point out briefly some other recent events.  At UCSC there was a semi occupation of the Science Library that started on Friday the 13th.  I’m not 100% sure when it ended, but I didn’t see much if any of it still there on Monday.  I call it a semi occupation because there are apparently library staff participating and University officials retained control of the doors.  Postings regarding this action can be found here:

http://thenewuc.wordpress.com/

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/14/18628646.php

Being unsure of the specifics of the Science library occupation I cannot comment with any detail beyond what is posted by others.  I do, however, want to pour over the latest manifesto by the occupiers entitled “occupation: a do-it-yourself guide“.  This is a blueprint as well as a philosophical justification for occupying buildings Read more

Today I read “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, and felt the need to share.  The essay acts as a guide for writers to be more effective and avoid poor style, with the political consequences half inferred.  Hopefully it will help my writing, but one of the examples that Orwell uses caught my eye:  It is an excerpt from a communist pamphlet:

All the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

After giving the example, Orwell explains the failings of such writing in terms of the English language, and from this failing in language its failings politically.  Those of you who read my blog regularly will probably already have anticipated where this is going.  The Occupiers at UCSC publish pamphlets, manifestos, communique, blog posts and other writings.  The above example from Orwell could easily be an excerpt from something they wrote.  Because of this, Orwell’s essay should be required reading for them. You can download the essay by Orwell for free online (here) or just search around if you prefer different formatting.  Examples of some of the poor writing for it’s robotic collection of empty phrases:

http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/ (This one is particularly egregious)

http://likelostchildren.blogspot.com/2009/10/gilles-dauve-is-our-mothafuckin-homeboy.html

http://revcom.us/Manifesto/Manifesto.html

I have another post related to the last link.  I will update the site soon.  Also if you hadn’t guessed already, Orwell’s essay lays the foundation for newspeak in his later novel 1984.

One might think that the recent occupations at UCSC are an isolated incident.  The method of students occupying buildings on campus is being tried in Vienna.  I must say that the protest in Vienna is putting the UCSC protests to shame.  I’ll talk more about that later.

To begin, I need to first talk about Bologna.  Bologna is two things.  First it is a delicious sausage that originated in a city with the same name in northern Italy.  Second, and more applicable, Bologna is the city that holds the oldest University in the western world and is the location where sweeping EU wide University reforms have recently been proposed.  The reforms, called the Bologna process, are a framework to standardize the educational system in the EU, making degrees and courses from differing Universities comparable, so a physics class in one University will teach the same thing as a similarly named class at another.  It would also standardize degrees from various Universities as well, so different universities would give out similar degree types, like the bachelor/masters degrees given out in the US.  For science and engineering courses, this would help people to transfer to other Universities since credit from one course would easily transfer to a new institution.  For art institutions, this is a double edged sword.  Creativity is not something that can be standardized, however requiring students to have a broad set of courses in order to get a degree could be beneficial.

Now that I’ve talked about both sausage and University reforms in the EU, it’s time to get to the protests.  There are two protests/actions that happened in Vienna.  Since most of the writing about it is in German, many of the bloggers and interpreters in the US conflate the two.  The first one was at the Academy of fine arts, Vienna in Austria.  If you click on the link for their homepage, you will notice the ]a[ logo that the University uses.  This matches the photos from the demonstration that happened on Tuesday the 20th:

I can understand why an Art Academy would resist a program of standardization.  It also makes sense why the website that describes the protests is called “paint by numbers” (malen nach zahlen), as a witty way of pointing out the difficulties inherent in standardizing art.  The Academy of fine arts Vienna has a student body of about 900, according to wikipedia, making it about 1/16th the size of UCSC.  Looking at the picture I would say that they had a phenomenal turnout.  Unfortunately the second action has more images and press and I can’t tell what is still happening with the original Academy of fine Art occupation anymore.

Not wanting to be outdone by the Art Academy, students at the University of Vienna decided to stage their own protest on the 22nd.  This protest started in ways that reminded me of the UCSC Occupation.  Just a little bit of info about the University of Vienna: The student population at the University of Vienna is about 74,000, making it more than 82 times bigger than the Academy of fine Arts Vienna and more than 4 times bigger than UCSC.  The reason I say it reminded me of the UCSC occupation is because of the series of events surrounding the Occupation of the University of Vienna.  First there were marches and rallies which ended with the Occupation of a lecture hall.  Various participants were encouraged to speak at the podium.  After the speakers, participants broke up into groups so that a document could be formed outlining what exactly they were protesting.  Since the Bologna process is less of a rallying cry for a University with a prestigious science program that has generated many Nobel laureates, the demands made were very general and overarching.  The result of this process was the following list of demands: Read more

Executive Vice Chancellor Kliger sent out a comment on the new occupation.  You can see his comment along with two photos of a building tagged and a door being barricaded here.  His post is titled Vandalism at Humanities building.

In response to this, one of the occupiers wrote a blog post.  It is a must read:

http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/letter-to/

There are two things about the post that I want to highlight.  First is the assertion that the intent of the protest was peaceful: “Most American school children with even a cursory knowledge of the history of nonviolent protests from Gandhi to Dr. King, would not fail to recognize the true nature of last night’s events.”

This is an awesome and comically false assertion.  Take a look at the photos on Kliger’s post.  There is a picture of the building tagged with the words “RIOT: coming soon.”

Also read the words of previous posts in order to gain support for the occupation here:

“We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.”

fires of insurrection sure sounds peaceful to me.

“Peaceful marches, rallies and symbolic protests, attracting spectacular media attention, will never increase our ranks because this very process of mediation reduces us to passive observers of what is supposed to be our own activity. Organization for action has become an end in itself cut off from the reality of capitalism in decline.”

I mean seriously occupy CA, do you even read your own posts?  This quote is hands down a rejection of peaceful protests.

The second point that occupyca makes that I want to comment on is this:

“as to EVC Kliger’s assertion that students were provoking police officers, this is simply untrue. He was not there, and has relied upon the accounts of the police officers who were. Perhaps he would be interested in hearing what others saw, but I doubt it. There are dozens of eyewitnesses who saw, as well as video footage showing, what actually happened”

Watch the video and see if you hear the words “fuck the police”.  There is yelling and obvious provocation.  If occupyCA is reading this, please watch and listen to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNxCaXi28OQ&feature=player_embedded

Update: I have a picture, below, and a video, at the end.

Photo from indybay.

The Occupiers have moved from occupying the Graduate Student Commons to Occupying the Dean of Social Sciences. There are two statements for the occupation that I found, one on indybay and one on occupyca. There is also a facebook group despite facebook being a company that plans to make money using the personal information of its users to sell to advertisers, but I’ll try to stay more positive since the occupiers appear to have moved up the food chain, closer to those more responsible for budget and salary decisions at UCSC.

This building is actually owned by the University and not by graduate students so there is a much greater urgency for the University to respond.  The University will also have lawyers ready to prosecute the occupiers, so there is a greater chance that the administration will send police in with orders to make arrests.  After the first occupation, the police will be on high alert, giving them a faster response time to a second occupation.  As I write and research this I found that it is already over, and the police already responded!  The second occupation didn’t last 1 day.  That is what happens when you occupy a building the university cares about.

Here is a video (poor quality probably due to it being dark outside and the camera used was probably on someone’s phone, but you can still hear the action):

Nathan Coombs over at the guardian has an interesting read about the new communist movement and how the Santa Cruz Occupation fits into that (see the link here).  I apologize to my Anarchist readers, but the article’s author, like me, identifies the Occupation of the graduate student commons as a communist revival more than an Anarchist action.

I find this fascinating since I am currently reading books on Mao and Che and I quite recently read the motorcycle diaries.  The new communists correctly identify a major problem with previous revolutions: massive human rights violations perpetrated by a totalitarian state.  The idea is to maintain a large distance from the state, this would then prevent a link between communism and totalitarian systems of government.  Instead of installing a new government, the communists would instead install a system of worker owned coops (in order to obtain the means of production of say a factory, the communists would occupy the building).  The problem with the model is that large corporations can charge slave wages and undercut the coop prices.  In order for this new communist plan to work, it needs some sort of government subsidy or massive government intervention to compete.  This is where the theory and the practice butt heads since in practice, a strong and supportive state is needed, but the theory wants to keep the State far away in order to avoid past errors (aka.  deaths).

What you end up with at the end of it is a confused Occupation movement that wants a communist coop model, but has no practical political theory to acheive this end.  I guess the question is whether or not the new communists will figure this out or if instead we will have ineffective occupation son campus with vauge goals and demands.

At least one person associated with the GSC occupation is trying to portray the occupation as a success.  The blogger repeats in different words: “We leave not to retreat but to plan further modes of escalation.”  I can image the meeting where that decision took place:

Hey guys, the occupation has been going great.  It’s going so good that it’s time to move on to phase 2.  What’s phase 2 you ask?  Well it’s the most cunning and brilliant part.  We leave the GSC, and start planning.  I know what some of you are thinking “Why is phase two of our current planned occupation to scrap the occupation and get a new plan?”  The fact of the matter is that all great revolutions really get going and escalate when they stop whatever they are doing, disband, and then have a planning pot luck.  Viva la revolution!  I’ll bring the couscous.

It’s time for a little reflection on the Occupation of the graduate Student Commons.  Who were the occupiers and what were their goals?  UC Santa Cruz has a history of activism:  There was tent University in 2005, which originally aimed to be a replacement University.  They set up tents at the entrance to the University but were loud and there were complaints from the neighbors.  Police came and forcibly removed the students using strangling tactics which resulted in bad press for the police officers.  Tent University had an expanding list of goals, from reforming the University, to removing military recruiters on campus, to solving the Israeli Palestine issue, to more student control of the UC budget.  With no one goal the University did not know how to meet their demands since there was no one demand.  The police acted in conjunction with University Administrators and the Administration was caught with mud on its face when the police used harsh tactics.  This failure was the backdrop for the treesit and eventually the Occupation of the Graduate Student Commons.

Read more

4:30 Update:  The occupiers have left!  You can read about it at the Santa cruz sentenel.  No postings yet on indymedia.  I found a post here.  Looks like the manifestation to express anger was code for “we want to steal from the bookstore”.  Turns out that you cannot order random people to commit petty theft with cops nearby.  Shocking.

The Graduate Student Association is preparing to hold its first meeting tonight. On the agenda is the occupation of the GSC and the meeting is supposed to happen at the currently occupied GSC. The agenda talks about the occupation in the past tense, meaning that the Graduate Student Association expects the occupation to be over some time before the meeting starts.  Should be interesting.

The occupiers have been keeping busy by holding another dance party last night. I have not seen pictures of said party, but I’m guessing that the attendance was less than the original.  I would expect no images of this second dance party to emerge or for pictures of the original and more widely attended original party to be recycled.  Edit: Pictures of the second dance party were posted (as pointed out by the commenter below).  I posted links to some of the pictures in my wrap up post. This afternoon the Occupiers planned “A manifestation to express our anger that… we have to pay tons of money for our books.”  Manifestation is a synonym for expression so the occupiers plan on expressing an expression and that expression will be anger.  I’m hoping that they use the apple text to speech program again for said expression.  I wasn’t around to witness this expression of expressions at noon today, but I’ll just assume that the computer spoke the wonderfully glorious words detailing our future Utopian Communist society.

Indymedia has no update on things at the GSC so I’ll assume they are still there.  I will stop by near the beginning of the meeting to see if anything has changed.