Impact Statement from Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau and Mrs. Birgeneau

The Chancellor prepares for battle.

On the evening of December 11, 2009, just after 11:00 p.m. a mob of some 40 to 100 rioters, masked and carrying torches, carried out a violent assault on University House, which is the official residence of the Chancellor and his wife. The mob of masked rioters had rampaged through the streets of Berkeley, where they picked up prefabricated, accelerant-laced torches, lit them and proceeded to attack our home. Mary Catherine and I were on the second floor of the building when we heard a cacophony that was reminiscent of the noise in a full scale battle as portrayed in many war movies. Trapped on the second floor, we felt in severe physical danger as the mob, having smashed exterior light fixtures, attempted to break into our home by smashing through windows and attempting to set fire to the house.

The mob pulled down a Christmas wreath from the front door and attempted to light it on fire and lodged torches into the trees and shrubbery surrounding our home. They attempted to break into the house by ramming the front door with a garbage can and smashing through the front windows with their feet and other objects, possibly including large terra cotta planter pots which they broke. There was an extremely flammable Christmas tree just inside the front door. The windows were assaulted with such force that part of one interior wooden window frame was dislodged and glass from one of the windows sprayed five feet into the house. Mary Catherine and I felt terrorized.

We feared that this violent attack would continue to escalate as the rioters attacked the police vehicle that arrived on the scene after our call for help. Rioters attacked the officers, throwing lighted torches at their vehicle, and volatile embers entered through the open windows.

The attack received national and international media coverage and created immense anxiety for our safety and for our immediate families, including our four children and Mary Catherines two brothers and her 100 year old mother in Canada.

Following the attack, at least two persons, one seemingly deranged, came to University House in, the next days, urged on in their minds by the rioters’ actions.

The University has suffered damage, not only in the cost of many thousands of dollars of destruction to University property, and the additional security now required for University House, but sadly, to Berkeley’s reputation. The negative publicity associated with this violent assault has far outweighed any good which has derived from the peaceful student protests on campus.

Mary Catherine and I are still shaken by the fact that these acts were committed intentionally, with malice and reckless disregard for possible consequences to our safety and well-being.

Those who were at the scene, even if they were not explicitly involved in the assault, provided moral support to these violent actions and by wearing masks and carrying torches encouraged and ratified the mob’s violent and destructive conduct.

Yours sincerely,

Robert J. Birgeneau

The Berkeley Law Campus Rights Project just released a statement detailing the final resolution of Angela Miller’s student conduct case. The charges are resolved, Angela will not be suspended. This outcome is remarkable as the University originally sought a full 1 year suspension. In the meantime, rumors are circulating that Dean Poullard stepped down from Student Conduct oversight.

CRP.Miller.Press-Release.2010-05-05

Finally, a rally against student conduct under the leadership of Dean Jonathan Poullard was held on Sproul Plaza today.

UCMeP Speech.

It has become abundantly clear in the last weeks that these proceedings are not only seriously flawed, but that no just outcome can emerge from these procedures in their current form. The problems as we see them pertain to two separate but interlocking issues: the version of the code of student conduct that is currently used and the specific applications of that code in these specific cases. These flawed applications arise from inadequacies in the code itself and from flagrant instances of bad judgment on the part of those conducting the inquiries. These egregious applications of the code have raised serious questions whether those charged with directing a fair disciplinary review have overreached their mandate and contravened both legal and educational standards to which we, as a community, are bound. The rights to political protest, guaranteed by the University’s commitment to free speech and rights of assembly are paramount in this context and must provide the framework within which charges against any of these students are assessed. We note with grave concern the lack of a sufficient effort to balance these concerns with the alleged offenses as well as the failure to develop and apply appropriate measures for assessing these charges.

Read the full petition.
Download the pdf.

See related post here.

AbolitionCSC.pdf

Introduction

In Fall 2009, direct-action resistance to the UC Regents’ project of privatizing the University of California (“UC”) erupted systemwide. In response, the UC Administration is now punishing students on a mass scale for violating various provisions of the Code of Student Conduct.

Almost invariably, an alleged violation of the criminal law–which, of course, exists independently of the Code of Student Conductunderlies the student conduct charges resulting from the demonstrations and actions in Fall 2009; almost invariably, the UC Administration commenced its student conduct charges against students after receiving a UC Police Department (UCPD) report detailing the student’s alleged violation of a particular law. Thus, students who engage in civil disobedience face significant repercussions from two independent State entities.

First, and most obviously, students confront the State and the possibility of State repression. It suffices to briefly mention that civil disobedience often results in suffering physical harm at the hands of law enforcement (i.e., police brutality), arrest, stints in jail, and citations for violations of the criminal law. The District Attorney can press charges against the students; the prospect of punitive fines and/or prison is real. Second, and less obviously, the University may sanction students for the same activity that the criminal law governs; that is, the University may impose additional punishments on students for their acts of civil disobedience.

A small group of law students working with National Lawyers Guild attorneys have closely monitored and defended students in these University disciplinary proceedings. Such scrutiny from a legal perspective has revealed administrators’ improper application of the University’s disciplinary process in addition to systemic abuses of students’ due process rights guaranteed under both the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and students’ contracts with the UC.

The purpose of this piece, however, is not to detail the UC Administration’s various and numerous violations of students’ legal rights. Instead, this piece generally seeks to contribute another opinion to the ongoing discussion of the student disciplinary process at the University. In addition, this article broadly aspires (with attendant modesty) to lay the groundwork for an anti-authoritarian critique of the student disciplinary process. This critique suggests an ultimate solution to the problems posed by the University’s use of its disciplinary process to sanction students for acts of civil disobedience: abolition of the student disciplinary process.

This solution may appear impractical, perhaps utopian, and too long term of a project to have any immediate relevance to the defense of students facing disciplinary charges. Undoubtedly, students facing disciplinary charges need immediate relief, and such long-term plans offer those already subjected to the student disciplinary process little assistance. This piece assumes that the most important objective for any defense-related project is to get the OSC off charged students’ backs. But it is our hope that this critique of the OSC will inform concerned parties as they move forward and formulate strategies to resist the Administration’s draconian effort to neutralize the most active elements in the Student Movement.

As a pragmatic first step, this piece argues for the abolition of the University’s authority to sanction students for conduct that the criminal law governs. Abolition of the University’s authority to sanction students for conduct that the criminal law governs is necessary, at the very least, to ensure that students can operate politically with as least restraint possible within the University context. Otherwise, the University can wield its power to deprive students of their education in order to coerce students to eschew direct-action resistance. Thus, there is an urgency to the abolition of the University’s power to sanction students for activity governed by the criminal law.

The University’s Unjustifiable Right to Discipline Students; The Office of Student Conduct

California law assumes that the University has an implied right—but not a duty—to establish conduct standards for members of the University community that are necessary for the furtherance of the University’s mission—the production, dissemination, and instillation of knowledge. The University of California has long exercised this court-recognized right to regulate its students’ conduct. Today, such regulation is memorialized in a campus’ Code of Student Conduct (“Code”) and supplementary University policies.

A Code of Student Conduct is a collection of proscriptions and regulations establishing ‘community standards’ for students at the University. But the Code does not merely outline the model behavior of a responsible member of the campus community—conformity to the terms of the Code is mandatory, and such conformity is compelled by State power.

The agent of compulsion is the Office of Student Conduct (“OSC”). The OSC, an office of the UC, enforces the Code. To this end of enforcement, the Code grants the OSC penal power and supplies the OSC with an arsenal of punitive sanctions, ranging from a warning letter to expulsion from the University, and includes sanctions taken directly from the penal codes such as restitution and fines. The OSC investigates complaints alleging a violation of the Code, and also charges and prosecutes students for alleged violations of the Code’s terms. The OSC thus serves an investigatory and prosecutorial function.

As a bureaucratic institution motivated by self-preservation, OSC also has a perverse incentive to justify its existence by sanctioning students. For it is by subjecting students to the disciplinary process that manufactures the illusion that OSC is a necessary agency in a public institution of higher education.

There is also strong evidence that the OSC is exercising its power to enforce the Code in an unprecedented, aggressive manner. Indeed, the OSC’s own statistics show a dramatic rise in the number of students subjected to the student disciplinary process for non-academic violations of the Code. For example, in the 1999-2000 academic year, 239 students were referred to the Office of Student Conduct; in the 2006-2007 academic year, the number was 657.1 We can attribute OSC’s intensified enforcement of the Code both to the bureaucratic impulse for survival and expansion and Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard’s entry in May 2006 followed closely by Director of Student Conduct Susan Trageser’s hire in January 2007.

But there is also a political agenda behind the OSC’s enforcement of the Code. The OSC describes the student disciplinary process as ‘educational’ and ‘developmental.’ In the OSC’s worldview, students make ‘mistakes,’ whether they be fratboys with alcohol problems or students who lock themselves in a building for political purposes. Student conduct officers (bureaucrats at the OSC) help students identify their ‘mistakes’. The OSC, therefore, presumes that any violation of the Code lacks any political or ideological meaning; indeed, the OSC presumes the opposite, for framing the violation of the Code as a ‘mistake’ implies that a student recognizes the legitimacy of the Code and desires to conform to its standards and obey its proscriptions.

The language of ‘education’ also belies the OSC’s ideological, political purpose: delineating acceptable forms of protest, and penalizing those students whose tactics stray beyond the borders of the Administration’s definition of legitimate protest in order both to ‘educate’ students who employ so-called ‘illegitimate’ tactics in ‘proper’ forms of civic protest and to send a strong signal of deterrence to those in the campus community considering acts of civil disobedience. In this sense, the OSC, functions as an institution of political and ideological education and re-education. The OSC does not attempt to conceal this; in fact, the Office of Student Conduct proudly advertises its coercive, totalitarian objective in their motto: “Campus Life & Leadership guides the learning journey of students as they explore leadership and social change in their communities.”2

Perversely, the ‘educational’ process applied by the OSC is blatantly discordant with the general mythology surrounding the U.S. system of higher education. Today, society tells youth that economic success and thus social membership is regulated through the University. To enter society and contribute as an equal, we are told, our thoughts, ideas, and skills have to be rubber stamped with a college diploma. UC Berkeley subscribes to this vapid story of merit and social worth. Yet here, the educational process practiced by OSC is being used to exclude students from the University, supposedly an essential element of their social worth.

In short, there is nothing ‘educational’ about the Code of Student Conduct’s disciplinary process, unless we understand ‘education’ in a totalitarian tradition. On the one hand, the UC’s disciplinary process serves to strangle students’ development as individuals committed to pursuing social change. There is nothing ‘educational’ about ca UC office enforcing conformity to the Administration’s notion of permissible dissentthis is base coercion. The Administration also fails to admit the rank hypocrisy inherent in the ‘educational’ disciplinary process: the OSC’s ‘educational’ sanctions of suspension or expulsion from the University (or the threat thereof) deprives the student of an education.

The Current Debate: Reform or Abolition

The UC Administration’s subjection of politically-active students to the University’s disciplinary process and the revelation of the significant and troubling defects in the Administration’s application of the University’s disciplinary process is generating debate about student discipline at the University among the diverse and numerous groups interested in some level of leftward change at the UC. The debate essentially reduces to a question of reform or abolition of the University’s student disciplinary process: can we impose some sort of reform in order to make the student conduct process fairer to politically-active students; or, must we abolish the University’s power3 to discipline students for political activity?4

Our position is straightforward: the University has no legitimate basis on which to regulate student .political activity or action. There is an immediate and practical solution to the problems posed by the OSC’s persecution of politically-active students: obviate the University’s power to repress student political activity. In order to do so immediately, we therefore demand the abolition of the Office of Student Conduct’s jurisdiction over students’ conduct that is governed by the criminal law.

The reformist camp believes certain remedial measureswhether they be an oversight board, a deletion of the more odious provisions of the Code, or the creation of judicial bodies composed of students (peer courts)can cure the rampant abuses of the University’s administration of the student disciplinary process. Before we critique particular reforms, however, it is necessary to critique the assumption on which any reform rests. The assumption underlying all the reformist camp’s measures is that the University has legitimate authority to discipline students for political activity; that the University may legitimately set parameters for students’ conduct; that the University has the power to sanction students who fail to conform to the campus’ Code of Student Conduct. Thus, reformists necessarily accept the legitimacy of the University using its power to deprive students of their education in order to compel students to conform to certain norms established by the Administration. The very existence of that power is illegitimate; the University’s exercise of that power is even more repulsive.

Since the University’s exercise of this power is itself an abuse, even the most fairly administered Code of Student Conduct will operate to oppress politically-active students. So long as the University wields this power, there will be coercion. Our call, therefore, is not for a more rational, more equitable use of the Office of Student Conduct’s power over the political student body; our call is for the abolition of that very power. It is not a legitimate function of the University to establish a model of ‘permissible’, ‘legitimate’ student expression. Instead, the form the Student Movement assumes, the strategies it develops, and the tactics it employs, should be the autonomous and unfettered decision of students and their comrades. We are not arguing that students should be immune from the consequences of their political actions; rather, we merely contend that the price of engaging in political activity and civil disobedience should not be the deprivation of one’s education.

Administrators who have heard this critique respond that students must accept ‘responsibility’ for their acts of civil disobedience. This is, however, a red herring. The students who engaged in civil disobedience do not contend that they should be immune from the consequences of their acts of resistance by virtue of being politically active. Instead, the question for which the Administration has no convincing answer is why the University should have the power to sanction students for conduct that the criminal law proscribes. We provide a simple answer: students should not face sanctions from two organs of the state simultaneously, the ‘People’ on the one hand in a criminal court and the University Administration in a quasi-judicial kangaroo court on the other.

Conclusion: “Let our watchword be ‘abolition,’ not ‘reform’”

The very existence of the student disciplinary processso long as students are subject to it because of their political activityis a tool with which the Administration will attempt to repress student voice and agency. Reform of the student disciplinary process, therefore, is not a tenable solution.

We demand a University in which the Administration has neither the power nor the right to regulate students’ political activity; a University in which the Administration does not hold students’ right to an education hostage in order to compel students to excise civil disobedience from the Student Movement’s repertoire of tactics.

Therefore: Let our watchword be ‘abolition,’ not ‘reform.’

* Subject to ongoing revision. Please leave suggestions in your comments.

1 Student Conduct Case Statistics 1998-2008, available at http://students.berkeley.edu/osl/sja.asp?id=4435.

2 http://students.berkeley.edu/osl/osl.asp?id=2721 (emphasis added).

3 There are at least two non-mutually exclusive approaches to accomplish the goal of the abolition of the University’s power to discipline students for political activity. One would target the courts; the other would target the University (the most effective strategy may be to employ both). We can eliminate the University’s right to discipline students by destroying the court-recognized right of Universities to establish and enforce standards of conduct for the University community. Or, we can pressure the University to relinquish voluntarily its authority to sanction students for political activity. How exactly either of these approaches will take concrete form is beyond the scope of this paper.

4 Of course, at some point we must address whether abolition of the student disciplinary process in its entirety is appropriate. This question is not technically outside the scope of this piece; indeed, this question is perhaps the most fundamental issue in the debate: should the University have the power to regulate any student conduct? This piece contends that resolving this fundamental issue is unnecessary in order to score relatively immediate positive gains for politically-active students. In order to abolish the OSC’s jurisdiction over activity governed by the criminal law, we do not need to concurrently abolish the OSC’s jurisdiction over academic-related violations of the Code of Student Conduct.

12/11 Was an Inside Job

I was a woman of color. On the night I chose not to die, I fought with anger and determination, and finally fell asleep with a satisfied smile born not from my own sheltered existence, but from the momentary dissolving of the reality of privilege. That night I watched the hordes of college students exiting the bars and dispersing, walking past those of us confronting police in the streets as if it was simply none of their business. That is the privilege you describe, which has no place in this movement.

Who was left? Who made it their business? If you were there, if you dared approach the dancefloor and “battlefield” of the streets, you’d know what we “looked” like.

And yet according to your fairytale of homogeneity and privilege, on the morning after “I chose not to die,” according to you, I woke up a white man. Let me tell you… NO I DIDN’T!

It’s as though all the work I’ve done, the lifetime of daily struggle, of people acting as if I was naturally inferior and practically invisible, is a waste of my time. Because the people I also struggle for, among others, could flippantly assert that now, because I fight alongside my white brothers and sisters, I have no identity, no history, and no color of my own.

~~~

To the author of the “Open Letter to a White Student Movement,” we respond:

Read the entire statement at Occupy California.

Read More at Campus Progress.

The student-worker Movement should heed the lesson of November 20th: disruption of ‘business as usual’ at the University through direct action is instrumental to the Movement’s successful resistance to the Regents’ project of privatization of the University of California. For the experiences of Fall semester 2009 demonstrate that it is primarily through direct action—as opposed to delegating our authority to spineless, impotent politicians, whether in the Democratic Party or self-styled student leaders—that the Movement realizes its collective power. And it is only through the local exercise of this collective power—unfettered by the stifling bureaucracy of a political party or the institutions of the University—that the Movement can effectively press for and implement the fundamental change it demands at the University and even its host society.

A brief review of the November demonstrations and actions underscores the potency of direct action.

On November 18-19, students, staff, and faculty spent long days on the picket lines, chanting and marching in circles … while hordes of scabs walked right by the strikers. The Movement’s act of defiance—the workers in striking, and the students in walking out and supporting the striking workers—quickly turned into an alienating experience. Ironically, students and workers were disempowered by an action that should have been empowering. Those on the picket lines chanted, over and over again, that the University of California is ‘Our University!’ But those words rang hollow; indeed, it was as if the striking students and workers were foreigners in a hostile land—the disconnect between Us and Them could not have been stronger. ‘Whose University?’ The chant was not rhetorical—the University certainly did not belong to students or workers.

Instead of impressing upon the strikers the power of the Movement, the strikers’ actions underscored the Movement’s weaknesses. Instead of mobilizing the sympathizers of the Movement, the picket lines only seemed to identify the scabs. Seemingly notwithstanding the test of reality, the Movement’s faith that students were interested in fundamental change at the University dissipated and morphed into defeatism. Sensing defeat, those on the picket lines could only shame those who so callously ignored the struggle of students and workers. While it is undeniable that many students refused to cross the picket lines on principle and in order to show solidarity with their fellow students and the University’s workers, it is also undeniable that the picket lines failed to generate the leverage the Movement needed to prevent the Regents from approving the proposed fee increases and to accede to workers’ demands.

The failure of the picket lines to effect a sufficiently major disruption of the University’s operations notwithstanding, it is beyond question that it is a worthy display of solidarity for students to stand beside campus workers in their struggle for a decent existence, and in so doing to communicate to the University and the community at large that students and workers have an identity of interest; to reject the capitalist logic that the furtherance of students’ interests must come at the expense of workers’ interests, and vice versa; to proclaim that any economic system that creates such an antagonism between students and workers is perverse and unworthy of perpetuation. Indeed, such demonstrations of student-worker solidarity in themselves are acts of resistance to the Administration, because they are a visible rejection of the Administration’s vision of the University in which students and workers are competitors for finite resources, a myth that expediently neglects to recognize that there is a third party that preys upon both workers and students—the Administration itself.

But conventional picket lines will only advance the Movement so far. In the employment context, picket lines may be sufficiently effective to compel the employer to accede to employees’ demands, for when there are no workers, there are no profits. But it is clear that the victory of the movement for fully-funded public education will require more. The theory runs as follows. Not only must the University’s workers withhold their labor, but the students—consumers—must also simultaneously withhold what they possess—their own selves; that is, the students must mentally disconnect themselves from the institution that does not serve their interests, must regard the managers of the knowledge factory as an illegitimate authority. Yet the negative act of withdrawal alone is insufficient; there must be a complementary positive act of application, a translation of abstract principles into concrete acts—a transformation of the dead space of the University into living, communal space governed by those who study, work, and teach at the University. This principle was clearly elucidated at Wheeler Hall on November 20th.

The November 20th occupation of Wheeler Hall—delivering the promised ‘escalation’ of the student-worker struggle—resuscitated the deflated hope of the Movement. By expropriating Wheeler Hall in the name of students and workers, 43 activists gave real meaning to that heretofore empty phrase—‘Our University.’ The Administration could continue ‘business as usual’ while students and workers peacefully picketed, but the gears of the knowledge factory came to a grinding halt when this small group of activists claimed Wheeler Hall. The direct action of a small group of the student-worker Movement—itself but a fraction of the campus community—threatened the Administration’s authority more than any of the mass demonstrations in the Fall. Why? Because the occupation denied the Administration’s managerial control over the campus, publicly declared that control as illegitimate, and created a space students governed themselves.

The Administration’s response to the November 20th occupation of Wheeler Hall is an indicia of the tactical efficacy of direct action. The first two days of action in November provide an illuminating counterpoint. In characteristic Ivory-Tower Liberal fashion, the Administration was dismissive of the picket lines and mass demonstrations. This should come as no surprise—the picket lines did not significantly disturb the Administration’s control over the campus; the picket lines did not challenge the Administration’s prerogatives. By and large, the picket lines took place within the bounds of acceptable protest, as delineated by the Administration. By and large, the students on the picket lines played the traditional role of the Liberal student activist, relying on the power of words in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to effect change. The Administration could deal with this familiar student tactic—weather the storm and barrage the media with the narrative that the Regents’ fiscal decisions are but the inevitable product of the State’s ‘budget crisis.’ While these contradictory narratives competed in the marketplace of ideas, the Regents approved the proposed fee hikes, ensuring that privatization is the fate of the public University.

The November 20th occupation, however, eliminated the comforting distance the Administration usually enjoys between protests and their sphere of control; the occupation didn’t just bridge that gap, the occupation created its own sphere of student control exclusive of the Administration’s. When, by claiming space, the occupation brought the student struggle to the Administration, the Administration’s usual patronizing amusement gave way to frenzy and paranoia befitting the most reactionary of dictatorships. The Administration could not co-opt the occupation; there was simply no possibility that the Administration could bring the occupation within its framework of control. Thus, the Chancellor called in an army of riot police to quell an incipient crisis with revolutionary potential.

By virtue of eliciting this response alone, the occupation was a success because it put the Administration on public display and exposed it for what it truly is: an illegitimate authority, created in the image of a private corporation, that subordinates the interests of students, workers, and even faculty to its project of privatization; a bureaucracy with entrenched interests, whose primary mission is to perpetuate its own existence and expand the scope of its power. The November 20th occupation also served a line-drawing function: the disconnect between the Administration and the Movement manifested itself in physical terms, neatly divided by metal barricades with students and workers on one side and riot police representing the Administration on the other. The riot police’s violence—sanctioned by the Administration—against demonstrators only reinforced the antagonism between the students and the Administration.

Moreover, the occupation served a valuable function in physically manifesting the struggle of values underlying the privatization of public education. The violence on the barricades only made clear that state violence undergirds privatization, thus exposing neoliberals’ vile hypocrisy: in service of the poor, the state must offer nothing; in service of property, the state provides repressive violence against the dispossessed (in this case, the state employed violence to silence those whom privatization is disinvesting of a public good—affordable education). The police violence at Wheeler Hall also shattered the illusion that UC Berkeley is encapsulated in the metaphorical ‘bubble,’ somehow isolated from the cold realities of the ‘real world.’ Even if there is a kernel of truth to the ‘bubble’ hypothesis, the violence of the riot police effectively destroyed the protective barrier insulating the campus from ‘reality’—or, at least for that segment of the student population willing to step outside the bounds of permissible discourse. Also, the Administration’s violent reaction to the occupation proves that the Administration regards the Movement as a significant threat to its authority.

Since the occupation represented a fundamental challenge to the Administration’s legitimacy as the managers of the University, the Chancellor’s violent reaction to the November 20th occupation of Wheeler Hall should have come of no surprise to anyone who has a basic understanding of power. What was truly unforeseeable was the spontaneous coalescence of students, workers, faculty, and community members on the outside, on the barricades. Underestimating the solidarity between the occupiers and the students on the barricades, the Chancellor’s militarization of campus actually served to foment the uprising. The crowd of supporters grew ever larger as the army of riot police swelled. This unintended effect of the massive police presence represented a complete defeat for the Administration, as students’ presence on the barricades signaled that their interests were aligned with the occupiers, the ones whom the Chancellor attempted to turn into campus pariahs. Equally potent was the proof that the students in the Movement are so dedicated to their cause that they are willing to stand in defiance of the Administration in the face of riot police, willing to risk their personal safety for the continued existence of the public good.

Lastly, we must analyze how the Movement responded to the crisis generated by the occupation of Wheeler Hall and the violent confrontation of police and the occupiers’ supporters. Instead of acceding to the Administration’s authority, students ‘on the outside’ rejected it and did so in a more direct fashion than the two previous days of demonstrations and picket lines. Students put themselves in the line of danger to support the occupiers to the extent of suffering physical harm. Students spontaneously coalesced into flying columns to barricade and defend all possible exits from Wheeler Hall. In short, students—heretofore complete strangers alienated from one another in the bureaucratic University—related to one another in ways they never had before: cooperatively for the achievement of common goals.

November 20th also serves as a strong reminder that direct action itself is a movement-building tool. It is a living demonstration of the Movement’s power; it reveals to the uninitiated or previously uninterested student that another reality is possible at the University, one in which the student actually feels alive. Magnetic-like, the collective pulse of the action draws in those who are disaffected by the bureaucracy of the decision making apparatuses of ‘democratic’ mass organizations and by the dilution of radicalism in the illusory quest for ‘consensus.’ Direct action provides an outlet for those who want to see immediate change where they study, work, or teach. It is democratic in the sense that individuals (or small groups) can contribute to the Movement without subordinating themselves to the police power of ‘leaders’ within mass organizations, who, for the purpose of party building or making the movement palatable to so-called ‘moderates,’ attempt to restrain those who desire to manifest their radicalism through direct action—the unfortunate result being a homogenized movement that is too cautious to act for fear of alienating the apathetic student body, yet whose unjustified caution itself breeds apathy and ensures the perpetuation of the status quo. Direct action is democratic for another reason—there is no script that participants must follow, there is no master narrative that so-called leaders impose on the action; instead individuals and groups can contribute in ways they determine are appropriate. November 20th provides an illustration: the initial act of resistance functions as a call for others to engage in direct actions; it allows ‘observers’ to become ‘participants’ and in this way the original action becomes something much larger and more powerful than it originally was. Direct action grows the Movement in an organic way, on principles of voluntary cooperation.

At an otherwise miserably apathetic campus that despicably finds solace in censored memories of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, November 20th witnessed a rare event at UC Berkeley: powerful displays of resistance—a vibrant exhibition of unstifled life in an environment strangled by a bureaucracy that functions to cultivate national resources—human capital—that government and private enterprise will consume. Through this collective resistance, the Movement came to life. Individuals cooperatively worked and associated, and in so doing, not only overcame the alienation born of the dreary reality of the modern University, but also created a sum—a Collective—with a power that individuals could experience directly, a power that actually transformed UC Berkeley on the 20th into an environment where a future worth living in started to look possible. The crisis generated by the occupation, and the Movement’s response thereto, forged a new consciousness in the Movement, one that is more cognizant of the gravity of the student-worker struggle.

The November 20th occupation radicalized segments of the student-worker Movement in the most profound way. On that day, the Movement took and held space. On that day, a small section of campus was actually ‘Our University.’ If the Movement intends to make March 4th and the days of action beyond a success, then the Movement must find ways to tap into and amplify the spirit of resistance that overtook UC Berkeley on November 20th.

Read more.