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:

From the May Minutes:
Professor Onuttom Narayan, Physics, provided a chart showing the that (sic.) at UCSC the growth in faculty has slightly lagged behind that of students; that there has been essentially no growth in clerical staff, and rising above them all is the increase in senior management group (SMG) and management and service professionals (MSP). The difference between the growth rate of the curves is six percent. Each data set is normalized to one at its lowest point, and plotted on a log scale. After explaining the chart Professor Narayan asked the chancellor to explain this apparent increase in amount of senior management on campus, and why, at a time of furloughs, salary reductions, laying off lecturers and staff, we should ignore such a number.

Chancellor Blumenthal responded that he thinks the chart raises a good point, and one of the things he and the EVC are doing is trying to reduce the costs of the administration.

He does think that most of the growth is in MSP, and not senior management. Chancellor Blumenthal said that he is looking at ways to consolidate the positions within senior management and MSPs on this campus. A number of positions over the last year have remained unfilled at the senior level. If you look at current numbers it will be less.

Professor Narayan said the information came from UCOP data, which is available on the UCOP web site, and the two divisions (senior management and MSP) are listed together. Professor Narayan has no idea how to disentangle them, but would agree that probably the most growth has been in MSP.

EVC Kliger said the data should be looked at in more detail. He does not know whether this means a lot of clerical people were reclassified because of change in job duties, and the clerical and MSP people may need to be added together to make sense of the chart. The EVC also said there has been a huge increase in the reporting that the campus has to do; that brings up compliance issues, and that takes many people to get it done. The EVC added that if people look at the budget reductions web site, they will see that the biggest reduction in any unit on campus over the last two years has been in the EVC’s office, and that has resulted in major changes in the way the campus does business. The EVC thinks it is important to note that the administration is leading from the top, and not just assuming that all the cuts need to be made at the lowest level.

The response to evidence that UCSC is not reducing its administration at the same rate as instruction and staff is similar to the earlier case of the security guard.  Administrative officials promise to look into it, but I’m guessing it’s not high on their priority list.  It looks like the administration uses the same tactics when dealing with the Academic Senate as were used with the treesit and GSC occupation: wait it out, hope that memories fade, and completely ignore concerns.  I think the physics professor had a different graph, but the one below shows the same problem (from here:http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=469):

The trend above shows that very soon, for every professor in the UC system there will be 1 manager of the UC.  The quote from the head of the Academic Senate below is quite revealing (found here:http://senate.ucsc.edu/meetings/09Oct19/ChairLetter.pdf):

the ill-considered implementation of furloughs, joins two extraordinary challenges to UC’s historic strength – the unacceptable decline in public financial support and the deterioration of a strong faculty voice in governance. Both must be restored.

That statement shows that the Academic Senate, which is supposed to have a “dual-track system of authority and responsibility”, is really subordinate to the administration.  The board of regents of the UC are appointed to 12 year terms and these appointees in turn appoint others (the president, the general counsel, treasurer, chief compliance and audit officer and secretary).  All of this is depressing so I will move on to the positive.  The superhuman blogger that I am, I will now SOLVE THE UC BUDGET CRISIS OF 2010/11.

Most of the solutions to this year’s budget problems at the UC were solved with 1 year band aids.  What that means is many of the “solutions” to the budget are setting things up for more cuts and fee hikes next year.  I have the solution!  Unfortunately solving the future budget crisis requires one to actually look at the UC budgets, which can be found here:

http://budget.ucop.edu/pubs.html

On pages 104 to 106 of the 10/11 UC system’s budget is the section on Institutional Support, which is where the administration is paid.  You cannot read this section without running into the greatly publicized cost savings of $62.2 million realized by firing about 631 people at the office of the president (UCOP).  That means that every person fired was costing the UC system roughly $100,000 a year.  This might sound bad, but the UCOP still has a budget of $293.3 million with 1,439 employees with an average cost of $203,822 per year per employee.  So it looks like the UCOP was actually cutting employees from the bottom.  One would expect that with a $62.2 million dollar reduction in the UCOP from academic years 07/08 to 09/10, the costs for institutional support, which funds the total administration, should have gone down.  Here is what happened in each of those years budgets (numbers are in millions of dollars and are found on some of the last pages of the budget):

Academic Year      IS Expenditures    next years projected Expenditures
07/08               $651.421                     $666.303
08/09               $725.329                     $744.846
09/10               $721.806                     $775.904

As is evident, in the 3 years when this great leap of savings occurred, Institutional Support increased its budget by 10.8%.  The budget also plans for administrative spending to increase next year.   I don’t care if individual departments within the Institutional support mechanism are able to reduce their budget, when the whole block as a whole grows, and Institutional Support is not involved in instruction or research you have to ask questions.  The UCOP will have a reduced budget, if those employees are moved to a different department under Instructional Support.  I’m not saying that is what happened, but where the hell are the budget reductions?  If they weren’t rehired under Administrative Support then while the UCOP reduced their spending by $62 million, Instructional Support ballooned in size by  $132.585 million.

Of course there are other fun parts of the UC budget.  I will highlight my favorite: Provisions for Allocation.  Now what the hell is that?  According to the 2010/11 budget on page 145:

“Provisions for allocation serve as a temporary repository for certain funds until final allocation decisions are made.  For instance, funds allocated for fixed cost increases, such as salary adjustments, employee benefit increases, and price increases, are held in provision accounts pending final allocation.”

Awesome!  It’s a fund where temporary salary increase and bonuses can sit without being part of Institutional Support.  Bonuses benefiting those who messed up are all the rage on wall street, now they can come to a public university near you!  The explanation of how the funds were spent in this section is non-existent.  There is no breakdown whatsoever of how this pile of money is spent.  If there was any place where shady and corrupt spending is happening in the UC budget, this is the place.  And by year (again with the dollar in millions):

Academic year    Provisions for allocation      projected Next year
08/09                     99.940                      95.418
09/10                     90.993                     101.192
10/11                    120.301                     592.142

Yes you read that right, next year the administration is increasing its fund for salary adjustments, and employee benefits by over $400 million.  You just have to look at the minutes from a random UC regents meeting (see the September minutes here) on compensation to know that the UC isn’t hiring janitors with that money.  The administration also uses the private HR firm, Mercer, to tell them what a reasonable salary is, instead of peer reviewed research (a problem looked into in this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/14/MNGEKIRLKU1.DTL).  I can’t find a single person in the Regent’s meeting minutes with a salary under $100,000.

This all leads to a presentation made to the Regents on the 18th where a projected budget gap of $607.5 million will occur next year.  What this will mean is that using the budget crisis as an excuse, students and faculty should expect another round of cuts and fee increases next year.  A combination of reducing the Provisions for allocation to 08/09 levels and Institutional support to 08/09 levels will result in savings of $616.685 million.  Future budget crisis solved with over $10 million to spare.

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

The Manifest gets going under the heading Why Occupy? First it tells the reader what other actions have been attempted, and how they have failed to achieve their goals.  Specifically:

-The strike on September the 24th had a picket line that did not block traffic.  Although not stated in the manifesto, the strike failed to achieve a rollback of budget cuts or a decrease in student fees.

-Berkeley protests saw their supporters dwindle after each successive meeting

- Activists interrupted a regent’s board meeting, were removed by the police, and nothing changed as a result of this action

These three actions failed to net any positive change, and are identified as failures in the manifesto.  This self criticism and analysis is a bit of a departure from the original manifesto which was essentially a rehashing of old communist pamphlets.  The part I was most impressed with was the following:

“No decision making body has the power to give us what we want…The deans and chancellors making the cuts are subordinate to the UC president.  The UC president is subordinate to the Board of Regents.  The Board of Regents gets its funding from the legislature.  And the hands of the legislature are tied by the California constitution, which require a two-thirds majority to raise taxes.”

This is the ugly truth of the situation.  Of course they left out the fact that everyone in the chain from the Regents down is an appointee, with the governor appointing the Regents to 12 year terms (that’s some serious job security).  The people in decision making positions are so removed from any sort of oversight or democratic process that it is far more common for those in charge of the UC to make self enriching decisions instead of decisions that are in the best interest of the UC.  This naturally breeds a lack of confidence in the leadership of the UC system.

So considering that I have been disappointed with the previous manifesto for its vague nature and a thinly veiled attempt to spur some sort of communist revolution, this well thought out argument and description of the problems facing the UC took me by surprise.  Of course it didn’t take very long for the manifesto to loose my support.

Since the manifesto begins with a rejection of other forms of protest due to their inability to net any sort of positive result, I assumed that the manifesto would lay out some sort of plan with which an occupation, unlike other strategies, would net a positive result.  Unfortunately there is no plan.  In the manifesto the author writes “It is simply because we are at the University, we have occupied a building and we begin with what we know.”  After this quote is a list of successful occupations in Mexico, Latin America, France, Chicago, and South Korea.  How an occupation will overcome the difficulty in obtaining a positive outcome, as described in the beginning of the manifesto, is not addressed.  If a rally or a negotiator will not accomplish anything, how will an occupation be any different?  This is the unanswered question that lies at the heart of the problem the UC system faces.  The line from an occupation to a reversal of fee increases is actually made less clear after reading the manifesto since the beginning lays out problems that the middle fails to address.  The end of the manifesto talks about how to block doors and doesn’t touch on the philosophical underpinnings of the occupation.

The current occupation at UCSC is at the Kresge town hall.  I think the Kresge town hall is sort of a community room for kresge college, which is stereotypically the hippie college.  Essentially the occupation is a gathering of like minded people in a supportive college in a  room that doesn’t hold classes.  The occupiers could possibly have even filled out some forms to use the room through the college, but then it would be a University event instead of an occupation.  Basically this is one of the least confrontational rooms to occupy since it is not an administration building or a building used by graduate students.  My expectation is that the University will ignore this new occupation in a manner similar to the treesit.  The Kresge town hall is tucked off into the corner of the University (the campus map describes its location as “The Kresge Town Hall is located in the northwest corner of the campus“).  A person would have a hard time finding the occupation if they didn’t already know the general location of it.  My guess is that eventually the number of students at the occupation will thin out and then, during an academic break, the University will clear out the occupation.

Essentially the occupation is at the raising awareness stage.  We’ll see if it gets past it.

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.

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:

-enough money for each university place
-free access to education
-all real democratization of the universities
-self-determined learning and living instead of pressure to perform
-no restrictions to master degrees
-independent teaching and research
-stop precarious working conditions
-no restricted extra curricula
-stop neoliberalism!

The first two demands are for more money and increased enrollment opportunities for future students.  It’s not very specific and on a University campus is as controversial as stating your love of puppies at the humane society.  The devil is in the details for a lot of these proposals, and it requires the support of the taxpayers or government to implement.  The end of Neoliberal economic theory is a hilarious thing to tack on at the end.  Anyone that hears these demands will not have the ability to end neoliberal economic theory.  It’s as unrealistic as the UCSC occupiers calling on an end to capital.  Now if this were a UCSC protest, the demands would get bogged down in the various Marxist/Anarchist theories of property ownership, and the message and demands would balloon and expand to unrealistic proportions.

The most recent list of demands to come out of the occupation in Vienna make a little more sense, spell out specifics, and are more practical considering who they will be negotiating with.  It is a much better statement of purpose than the UCSC occupiers produced in both clarity and practicality.  Let me highlight one statement:

-We oppose ourselves to the degrading transformation of universities and schools into training facilities oriented by the labour market.  We want education as space for thinking, not training as the mere reproduction of workforce!.

So this sentiment, if written by a Marxist, could have been phrased as a critique of how the University acts as a wing of the capitalist system.  Instead it is a statement about academic freedom.  There are possible problems with the statement for the Vienna occupiers.  Fist is that the argument is a bit esoteric.  It is difficult to stay on message, but not impossible, since a larger audience is not interested in the inner workings of the University.  The second difficulty in the statement is that counter points can be made of them.  I must give a tip of the hat to the Vienna protesters for not making me wade through various Marxist rehashings in order to figure out what the point of the Occupation is (see here for an example).

There are quite a few students who see higher education as a great place to become prepared for a better and higher paying job.  For them, a University as a form of training facility for the Job market is exactly what they want.  A compromise solution should be possible for most of the complaints since the demands are not laced with Marxist rhetoric.  Threats of escalation, riots, street barricades, and violent revolutions are not present in the statements from the occupiers.  It will be interesting to see if this occupation, with a distinct lack of threats of violent escalation, accomplishes anything on the points that it has laid out.  If it works, then the UCSC occupiers need to take notes.  If not, then it will be yet another data point against the theory that occupations achieve their goals.

After looking at pictures such as the ones below I must say that I am impressed. There are no masked participants, they all appear to be students.  The speeches are streamed on the video link below.  There is faculty support.  The second round of demands was an improvement on the first and the protesters are coalescing on to specific actions they would like to see taken.  The Occupation has been going on for days and the number of students still participating is impressively large.

I’m going to go ahead and say that the Vienna occupation puts the UCSC occupation to shame.  Even though I don’t really care about the Bologna process and its affects on EU Universities, I really want this occupation to succeed just because its methods and demands have a certain amount of practicality and rationality unseen in the UCSC protests.  I’m sure there are some translating that needs to happen before I can grasp all the specifics of the Vienna protests, and I might not agree with them 100%,  but they have the potential to alter protests at UCSC for the better, and therefore I support them.  The question is, are any radicals at UCSC paying attention?

To keep updated on the Austrian Occupations see:

Painting by numbers: http://www.malen-nach-zahlen.at/

Our University: http://unsereuni.at/

Der Standard: http://derstandard.at/r3653/UniPolitik

Video: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/unsereuni

pictures: http://unsereuni.at/?p=245

]]> http://oehlberg.com/blog/2009/10/26/as-goes-santa-cruz-so-goes-vienna/feed/ 3 http://oehlberg.com/blog/2009/10/16/but-it-was-a-peaceful-occupation/ http://oehlberg.com/blog/2009/10/16/but-it-was-a-peaceful-occupation/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:47:49 +0000 Mark http://oehlberg.com/blog/?p=785 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

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):

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.

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.

The treesit was originally a protest against the LRDP or Long Range Development Plan.  This is the long term building construction and student enrollment document.  The LRDP was preceded by the strategic futures committee.  Often changes to the LRDP plan were rejected because input was only allowed during the planning stages of the strategic futures committee.  Students often felt ignored or left out of the decision making process because the strategic futures committee was not widely publicized and the ability of the LRDP to make modifications that benefited the students was almost non existent.  Public feedback to the LRDP plan was taken and mostly ignored.  The LRDP plan was thus disliked and not trusted when it was finally produced.  Construction on the first building laid out by the LRDP plan was met by a tree sit.

The treesit, like tent University, attracted many groups with many agendas.  Since the first LRDP building was on science hill, there were a lot of animal rights protesters within the treesit organization.  Environmentalists concerned about the chopping of the trees along with those concerned with the LRDP’s drafting and implementation, along with Anarchists were members of the treesit movement.  The strategy for the treesit from the University was simple.  Since the University didn’t care much about the trees and there was not an immediate need to break ground on the new construction, the University waited the treesit out.  Avoiding a big clash with the police paid off as various groups within the treesit tried to define the movement behind it.  The group left in charge of the treesit was mostly the animal rights groups and the Anarchists.  Over a year after the treesit started the University acted to remove it.  Only one person was in the trees when this occurred and that person came down without a struggle.  As a result of the treesit the LRDP plan remains unchanged and the trees have been removed.  Construction on the building has started.

The treesit provided the background for the recent Graduate Student Commons Occupation.  It should be noted that before Tent university, the strategy for an occupation/sitin has been attempted before.  Piggybacking on a strike, a group of mostly students tried to occupy Kerr Hall, the main administrative building.  This lasted less than an hour and was broken up by Police.  The occupation of the GSC started exactly the same: it was a split off group from a Union protest.  The goals of this Occupation were not limited to a single labor issue, but rather a desire for a communist transformation of the academic system with the eventual goal of a nationwide communist revolution. Unlike previous demonstrations, there was from the start an obvious group in control of the situation: Communists.  Select portions of their manifesto are quoted below with my comments.  Editors of this publication include Sebastian Touza and Jasper Bernes (as found by looking at the properties of two different versions of the document’s pdf.).  I’d google them further, but who they are is less important than what they wrote/edited. (I’m pretty sure that Jasper is a grad student at Berkeley):

Laying the groundwork for a communist Society required the Authors to first find problems with and blame the current system.  The current system is capitalism and its faults are blamed left and right in their document:

“the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society.”

The anti capitalism is combined with a form of self pity in a communist emo rant:

“Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the Internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.  Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords.  We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved.”

““Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases”

Oh woe is the life of an aspiring communist.  I’m assuming this document has a purpose:

“we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.”

Thus we have the stated goal of the Occupation.  Piggy backed onto a labor strike, the occupation wants to free society by instigating a communist system of property.  Communism here we come!  What is the strategy to achieve this wonderful and glorious goal?

“We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes.”

Oh the good old standby of violence.  Start things off with:

“Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle”

This will then escalate to:

“We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place”

So Occupation of the building would lead to widespread roadblocks.  Then what?  Well…the document kind of peters out there.  I think the writers would be happy if it actually made it to the road block stage.  With that rock solid plan the Occupiers instigated it by Occupying the Graduate Student Commons.  Before the document ends there is a warning that Unions and other student organizations should read:

“We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority.”

The organizers will use other groups but don’t want to be used.  This was the case when they used the efforts of the local Unions to organize a strike to try and drum up support for their communist revolution.

In the end the Occupiers had a dance party where an organizer yelled “this is what communism looks like” to a crowd of people that showed up to dance to their rave music.  Later on there was a second dance party with speeches made by a guy dressed like a pimp (seriously click on the links to see pictures of the pimp speaker).  Deciding to move past having raves, the Occupiers moved on to having emotions about book prices.  More specifically they had a “manifestation to express anger” about book prices.  This was code for “we want to steal stuff from the bookstore“.  When a bunch of cops were hanging around the bookstore, the occupiers scrapped their plan.  The occupiers eventually left the building after realizing that there was a backlash brewing against them from the Unions, faculty, staff, and students that the occupiers wanted to use for their barricading of the streets.

In the end Communism failed to catch on from the occupation of the GSC (maybe next time guys).  Capitalism is still occurring.  People still use money.  The GSC was left smelly and kinda trashed and the movement raised the awareness of passerbys, specifically the awareness of how ineffective such actions are.  The direct action groups at UCSC have thus far put together at least three major and public failures in the last 5 years.  Learning from past mistakes and setting realistic and accomplishable goals does not seem to be their forte, so expect to read about the next failure in the near future.

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.