Live Week 2009

Schedule for Kroeber Hall takeover makeover week.

Kroeber takeover Makeover Week Schedule

The next Live Week doesn’t kick off for another three months, but even in this first week of spring semester reclamations have begun. The a group from the anthropology department launched their own flavor of campus a takeover makeover at Kroeber Hall tonight.

There’s a picnic potluck every day at noon and more events scheduled throughout the week from 5 p.m. to about 8 p.m. (though I don’t think we are required to leave the building until 10 p.m.) Come for the free food, stay for the good company, and join in the fight for public education.

Two UC Berkeley students get in trouble for flyering

Two UC Berkeley students get in trouble for flyering from Josh Wolf on Vimeo.

Three days after the night-time protest that led to vandalism outside the home of UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s home, a couple students set out to combat the administration’s rhetoric. But as the student’s posted flyers outside the Free Speech Movement Cafe, they were interrupted by police.

Letter from Student Advocate’s Office on Friday morning arrests

Note: This is a leaked draft-form of a letter that SAO plans to release soon. The final version could potentially be quite different from this draft. As such the language in this document does not represent the views of the SAO

The Student Advocate’s Office (SAO), a non-partisan and executive office of the ASUC, is deeply concerned with the circumstances surrounding the university arrests of 66 individuals, including approximately 40 students, from Wheeler Hall on December 11, 2009.

While we do not condone conduct that threatens the safety of the campus community and recognize that the planned unauthorized concert lacked the necessary safety precautions, we believe the administration did not adhere to procedures that were in the best interest of students. The following is a statement that addresses our concerns:

Following the arrests of students involved in the week-long “Open University” protests, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof stated in a university press release that “there had been an understanding of access to certain areas and [the protestors] began to violate those understandings.” He continued by stating that the arrests were made “once the group refused to reconsider plans to hold an unauthorized all-night concert in an academic building.” However, when members of the SAO met with Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard out of concern for the arrested students, he provided reasons for the arrest that were not in line with the university’s public statements. Dean Poullard acknowledged that the university’s call for police intervention was not initially linked to the concert, but rather had been discussed earlier that week before the concert had even been planned. His statements indicated that the arrests were intended for the last day of the “Open University” protest to prevent students from mobilizing and moving their activities to a different building on campus, which would further increase costs to the university. Considering that the arrests were premeditated and not solely for the purpose of preventing a disruptive and illegal concert as the university has alleged, the SAO firmly believes that the method and mode of police intervention were misleading and misguided.

The premeditation of police intervention calls into question the validity of the administration’s attempts to communicate with student organizers.

Throughout the duration of the “Open University” protests, spokespeople from the administration met with student organizers. At the same time, university officials were engaged in dialogue to plan the arrests of the protestors. Dean Poullard stated that the arrests in Wheeler would have taken place the first night of the protests had police action been strategically and economically feasible. The intentions of the administration must be called into question. The efforts to negotiate with the protestors were conducted in bad faith, leading students to believe that there was room for collaboration and two-way communication when the administration had intended to move forward with pre-planned unilateral actions from the beginning.

The lack of an immediate dispersal warning was unfair and could have seriously jeopardized particularly vulnerable groups of students.

The university had warned individuals in Wheeler Hall of legal and student code of conduct violations for four nights without taking any measures to enforce those warnings until the arrests that Friday. The routine nature of those warnings gave many students the false impression that their actions were an acceptable form of protest that was tolerated by the administration. This tacit agreement led many students to participate in the events who would otherwise have avoided Wheeler Hall had they anticipated the risk of severe punishment. The routine warning was administered at roughly 10 p.m. Thursday with a 6-7 hour gap before the arrests were made at 4:30 A.M. the following morning.

This large span of time between the last warning and the arrests ignores the possibility that some of the students present at 4:30 a.m. had not heard the warning. While the university states that its primary concern was preventing any disruption that could have been caused by the concert, it is unreasonable to insist that students present in Wheeler Hall at 4:30 A.M. would be the same attendees at the concert that was scheduled for 8 P.M. or involved in its planning.

A significant number of students came to Wheeler Hall primarily to study and most were asleep at the time of the arrests. The drastic shift from treating students as peaceful protestors for four days to hostile occupiers on the fifth was unnecessary and showed callous disregard for student well-being. Beyond creating a criminal record for these students, the university’s actions will also result in the creation of conduct records that will have negative implications on the students’ academic careers.

Further, by not giving an immediate dispersal warning, the university failed to assess the extreme safety hazard that their actions posed to any AB540 or international students on site. Legal charges against any student under either category could have put the students at serious risk of deportation. Administrators did not take into account these potentially dire consequences.

The response to the “Open University” protests demonstrates the administration’s adversarial attitude towards student protestors.

The jarring discrepancy between university press releases and actual administrative plans to end the protest shows great irresponsibility on the administration’s part. This failure to correct inaccurate information released to the public has misrepresented the indicted students’ behavior. It avoids any formal recognition that there was a distinct level of premeditation and an egregious lack of sincere communication between student protestors and the administration leading up to the arrests. The SAO believes that the administration must uphold responsible procedure to address student conduct and take clear steps towards creating safe and respectful spaces for dialogue with the student body.

Eight protest bystanders charged with multiple felonies after UC demo

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION

Contact:
UC Berkeley student, Marika Iyer — marikaiyer@gmail.com
Other student Organizers of Live Week:
Laura Zelko, student organizer with Live Week: laura_z@berkeley.edu
Callie Maidhof, student organizer with Live Week: callie.maidhof@gmail.com

UC Police arrested 8 more people – many whom eyewitnesses say had not been engaging in any illegal activity – on the final night of a 5-day, 24-hour-a day “Live Week” open university, held by Cal students and faculty to protest and provide an alternative to the “dead week” at the end of the semester resulting from recent furloughs and budget cuts. The final event of the week, a free performance featuring Boots Riley, a hip hop artist from The Coup, had to be moved at the last minute after a morning police raid on Wheeler Hall, the primary site for “Live Week” activities.

Some 200 students gathered for the concert at the UC Berkeley campus from UC Davis, SF State, UC Santa Cruz, and UCLA as well as Berkeley. Following the concert, which had been interrupted by police cars constantly circling the area, some of the attendees joined a night march that left campus for the residence of UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. Some of the protesters carried torches to light up the path, they said. Some dragged newspaper boxes into the street.

“Regardless of what one thinks about the events of last night, the minor vandalism that occurred cannot be viewed outside the context of the physical violence inflicted by police on student activists and the broader assault on public education,” said Callie Maidhof, a student organizer with Live Week.

Many of the marchers were upset about the arrests that had been made earlier that day, when police stormed into a building where students had been holding Live Week events since Monday. Sixty-five people who had been sleeping or studying were loaded onto Alameda County Sheriff’s buses during the cold pre-dawn hours, some of them barefoot and wearing only their underwear. Most of the students were given misdemeanor trespassing charges and released by the afternoon, but some say they’re fearful of additional charges that either the District Attorney or the UC administration could add on in the coming year.

Police swooped down on the activists in front of University House around 11:30 p.m. on Friday, resulting in pandemonium as the students and other activists dispersed in all directions.

“When everyone is running, you don’t think that clearly. My friends and I were trying to leave because things were getting out of hand,” said Jobert Poblete, a Cal alumni who participated in the march.

Poblete was split up from his friends, who ran into the woods near Strawberry Creek. Police then swept up Carwil James, 34, a visiting Ph.D student from City University in New York.

“Carwil hadn’t been doing anything at the time. Now he’s in jail on his birthday, and they just raised his bail from $50,000 to $132,000. There’s no way we can raise that much money. This is a travesty,” said Poblete.

David Morse, 41, an independent journalist, was filming the demonstration and police response when he was arrested, said witnesses.

“They were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said a student who observed the chaos when police arrived at the chancellor’s house and declined to give their name. “Not all of the protesters were students at Cal – but the issue here is larger than tuition hikes anyway. It’s about the state of public education and neoliberalism in the US and abroad.”

Eleven people arrested at student demonstrations during the past week remain in custody at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.

CONCERT WITH BOOTS STILL ON! 7:30PM WHEELER STEPS!

They will not stop us.

Meet 7:30pm on Wheeler steps to resist police repression and march to the concert, featuring Boots Riley from The Coup!!!

March from Wheeler Hall to California Hall at noon

We will demand that UC police release the names of everyone arrested this morning.

See you there!

Call this number and demand UCPD to release names of arrested

(510) 642-6760 phone
(510) 643-4655 fax
ucpolice@berkeley.edu

Press Release: UC BERKELEY “OPEN UNIVERSITY” RAIDED BY UC POLICE, 65 ARRESTED

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
UC BERKELEY “OPEN UNIVERSITY” RAIDED BY UC POLICE, 65 ARRESTED

Contact: Elias Martinez (559) 999-4964 and Ianna Owen (570) 977-0487

This morning, on the fifth and final day of a weeklong “Open University” held at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, University of California Police stormed into the building around 5am, arresting 65 people without provocation, witnesses said.

“People were not given a final warning – police burst in while people were sleeping and immediately started locking doors and arresting people. Many students have papers due today, and finals to take starting tomorrow,” said Elias Martinez, an undergraduate from Political Science. “There had been cops in here all week, they were acting like it was okay. We had no idea.”

The police raid at UC Berkeley came one day after students participating in an occupation at San Francisco State University, also railing against budget cuts to public education, were arrested by SFSU Police at 3am.

Douglas Virgos, an undergraduate student, spent the night in the UC Berkeley building but then left on a food run in the early morning. “I got back and saw that the police had put handcuffs on the doors. I was there all night and never heard police tell us we had to leave.”

Students and faculty supporters who gathered on the scene shortly after raid alerts went out say they saw the students, some of them without shoes and wearing only their underwear, being loaded onto Alameda County Sheriff’s buses headed to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.

“We’ll be shuttling people out there all day on caravans to do jail support and camp out there until the protesters are released,” said Melissa Barker, an undergraduate of Interdisciplinary Studies and parent. “The fact that the cops drove 65 people all the way to Dublin makes me think that the charges will be way more than misdemeanor trespassing. We’re worried, but we’ll do everything it takes to support our folks. We’ll be there all weekend if it takes.”

Students have been holding public events, including teach-ins on the UC budget, study-ins, and live music shows as part of a “Live Week” of Open University events since Monday.

The week of events was scheduled to end with a free concert in Wheeler Hall, where the Oakland-based political hip hop artist, Boots Riley, would perform tonight.

“We are going to proceed with the event today, and this show will be larger than ever. We’ll continue to organize with students from other schools and build a worldwide movement of students fighting to retain and expand public education,” said a student who withheld their name, fearing university reprisals. “The police attack only makes us angrier.”

45 Years, No Progress

Students at UC Berkeley take part in a guerilla art action to protest the lack of free speech on campus despite the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
By: Ari

“UC Protesters Return to Wheeler Hall” – The Daily Planet

From the Berkeley Daily Planet:

By: Raymond Barglow

Having barricaded themselves in Wheeler Hall on Nov. 20, on the last day of a three-day strike, UC Berkeley students who oppose cuts to public education in California returned to Wheeler Monday night, Dec. 7.

But this time they said that they were appropriating the space for educational purposes rather than “occupying” it. The avowed intention of the protesters this week is to show that the university should rightfully be governed and run by those whom it directly affects: the students who learn in it, the faculty who teach in it, and the staff who provide services and maintenance.

This campus community has “shown the world that we can shut this university down,” the protest announcement says. “Now, we show that we can run our public university the way it should be—by the public.” The current aim is to transform Wheeler Hall into a “24-hour open university” during a week on campus that has traditionally been called “dead week”—a time at the end of the school term when students prepare to take their final examinations and hand in their term papers.

This most recent action began on the steps of Wheeler at 2:30 p.m. That evening, Professor Meister from UC Santa Cruz addressed the students in Wheeler auditorium. He talked about the way that UC is representing its financial situation to the world, “The administration is telling us that the problem is so big, so determined by global factors, that nothing can be done.”
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