**Join us on MONDAY MARCH 12th at NOON at CALIFORNIA HALL to demand that Chancellor Birgeneau publicly ask Alameda County DA Nancy O’Malley to drop charges against November 9th protesters**

The picket will continue every day at noon until Chancellor Birgeneau makes a public statement in support of protesters and against the charges.

**If you can’t be there, send an email of support for protesters**
robertjb@berkeley.edu
nancy@nancyomalleyforda.org

At least eight individuals have been charged for their alleged participation in protests on November 9th. These charges come despite Chancellor Birgeneau’s email shortly after the event granting “amnesty” to participants from student conduct charges. We are demanding that the Chancellor publicly ask Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley to drop these charges in the interest of protecting free speech on campus.

Not only are the charges a persecution of individuals who exercised their free speech rights in the face of well-documented police brutality, but they are apparently designed to undermine the movement for public education and threaten free speech on the UC Berkeley campus generally.

Charges were filed against students who were NOT arrested on the 9th – meaning that the Alameda County DA and UCPD have made clear that any participants in protests on campus risk facing charges months after the event regardless of whether or not they were arrested that day.

Moreover, because some of the individuals charged were not arrested, it is likely that video evidence or testimony by individuals seeking to make public and denounce police brutality on the 9th is now being used to prosecute them. This creates a chilling effect on all students who wish to speak out regarding UCPD behavior on our campus.

Finally, because several of those facing charges have been leaders within the public education movement — but were not arrested on the 9th — such charges raise the specter of politically targeted prosecutions, meant to silence those who are vocal about university policies.

Representatives of the University, including Judge Charles Robinson and Dean Edley have publicly stated that the purpose of a specialized university police force is to protect university values in a way that an outside police force could not. The decision of the UCPD to cooperate – or even pursue – charges against student protesters for the violation of campus rules completely undermines such a claim. If these charges are allowed to stand, we as students will be doubly vulnerable – subject to special rules and surveillance by the campus police who do not hesitate to use criminal charges to suppress protests in support of public education.

Via daily cal

Three pepper-sprayed south of UC Berkeley campus following protest

By Sarah Burns

Last Updated 13 hours Ago

Student groups disagree over Palestine resolution to form state

Three people were pepper sprayed south of the UC Berkeley campus Saturday afternoon after a pro-Palestine protest staged in an intersection drew pro-Israel supporters, according to police.

According to Berkeley Police Department Lt. Dave Frankel, a group of about 10 pro-Palestine demonstrators protesting Israeli occupation momentarily took over the intersection of Telegraph and Durant avenues so that they could chant and wave pro-Palestine signs Saturday afternoon.

Two Israel supporters apparently had foreknowledge of the event and showed up at the intersection with pepper spray and began videotaping the protests and shouting counter chants, according to Frankel. One of the pro-Israel supporters also had a stun gun, Frankel said.

Then, three people not involved with either side of the protest tried to mediate the situation, at which point the pro-Israel protesters brandished the pepper spray and stun gun at the non-involved individuals, according to Frankel.

In response, one of the three who had originally tried to de-escalate the situation allegedly brandished a large stick at the pro-Israel supporters.

The two pro-Israel supporters then pepper sprayed the three non-involved individuals, according to Frankel.

According to Frankel, officers responded to the scene after the department received several reports at around 2:24 p.m. of someone being pepper sprayed there.

When the police arrived, the protesters had scattered but the pepper-sprayed victims identified the two who allegedly sprayed them and signed citizen’s arrest forms, Frankel said. The pepper spray and stun gun were confiscated, and the two individuals accused of spraying were cited and released at the scene, according to Frankel.

According to Frankel, Berkeley Fire Department paramedics showed up at the scene and decontaminated the three who had been sprayed but did not transport them to the hospital.

Because neither the pro-Israel nor pro-Palestine supporters were pepper sprayed, the police department is not considering the incident a hate crime, Frankel said.

via Three pepper-sprayed south of UC Berkeley campus following protest | The Daily Californian.

Friday, February 17, 2012

18 Occupy Cal protesters detained Friday morning

By Shannon Najmabadi

via daily cal

At about 5:30 a.m. Friday, UCPD officers detained 18 Occupy Cal protesters at their encampment outside of Doe Library, campus officials said.

The protesters have not yet decided upon a future course of action in the aftermath of the detainments. Seven student and 11 non-student protesters were told that “camping and lodging on campus is against university policy and state law” and left peacefully after being detained and identified by the police, according to UCPD Lt. Marc DeCoulode. None were cited or arrested, he said.

Eleven of the protesters were given a stay-away order for seven days, and 10 of the encampment’s 13 tents are currently in police custody, according to Claire Holmes, campus associate vice chancellor for public affairs.

According to DeCoulode, campus administrators ordered the police action after Occupy protesters did not respond to UCPD’s daily warnings that they would be cited if they did not leave. The protesters originally began the encampment Feb. 9 on the steps outside of Sproul Hall and subsequently moved to the steps outside of Doe Library Tuesday.

“The reason we protest in the form of an encampment is because it provides a safe space where dialogue and the marriage of ideas can occur,” said UC Berkeley senior Navid Shaghagi.

Occupy Cal protesters met on the steps outside of Sproul Hall at 2 p.m. Friday to regroup and discuss their course of action moving forward. While continued encampment was discussed, a decision was not reached, said UC Berkeley senior Frank Luna.

According to Holmes, while the campus administration’s approach to responding to campus protests has evolved, there is no policy in place that explicitly dictates how to manage them. Since the Nov. 9 protest events, two encampments at UC Berkeley — the encampment that dispersed Friday morning and one which took place inside the Anthropology Library — have not involved arrests.

“No two protests are alike, so we are always looking to respond to context specific protests or demonstrations and work to respond in a way that is appropriate to the seriousness of the disruption,” Holmes said in an email.

She added that administrators led by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer and Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance John Wilton have been brought together to form a protest management group, which has met on an ad hoc basis since early January.

Staff writer Christopher Yee contributed to this report.

via 18 Occupy Cal protesters detained Friday morning | The Daily Californian.

(2/7/2012) “The Provost (UCI) announced UCOP would be setting 2012-13 tuition “Perhaps … in the middle of the summer,” requesting a 4-8% increase. Book your travel plans accordingly.”

via reclaimuc (the text below was posted 6/27/2011)

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?

via reclaim uc