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Students Protest Nationwide
Walkouts, student strikes, and marches shook every level of California's embattled public education system yesterday. University of California students blocked access to campus entrances at Berkeley and Santa Cruz while college kids joined forces with K-12 students and teachers in Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles. In Oakland and Sacramento, hundreds of marchers confronted police after taking their protests onto the freeways. Numerous concurrent rallies numbered in the thousands.
The call for action against crippling state budget cuts coupled with tuition hikes was echoed by students and teachers in 32 states coast to coast.
These videos, all shot yesterday, offer a sense of the stakes at hand and the passions in play.
UC-Berkeley
Rally in Sacramento
UC- San Diego
Rally in Pershing Square, LA
Original Post
Reports from coast to coast are still coming in, but it's clear that the March 4 Day of Action saw a major turnout of students opposing budget cuts and tuition hikes who just may represent a rising new movement mobilizing on behalf of its own threatened interests.
Dozens of campuses have reported rallies and actions, teach-ins, and other events. California is clearly leading the way, reports the studentactivist.net, as it has since this movement began to bubble up last semester.
The biggest, best-organized, and most dramatic actions reported so far are all happening in the Golden State. In part that's a reflection of the depth of the crisis facing California higher education, but it's also a reflection of the head start that California campuses have on the rest of the country. Almost every campus reporting huge demonstrations today has seen multiple rallies and protests over the last few months.
Check out this excellent map of campus organizing today compiled by Angus Johnston of the Student Activism blog.
Johnson's blog is one of a number of excellent places to keep up with the protests and where the movement goes from here. Also see the March4 site for ways to help beyond today's protests. For anyone on Twitter you can find constant updates and links by searching for the hashtag #march4. And please check back in this space in the morning where I'll post an update on what happened today with select videos and links.
- Posted in
16 Comments so far
Show AllOh, hooray for the students! I mean, if they are politically aware and active enough to protest rising education costs, they are more likely to be aware and active re climate change, militarism, BigMed/Pharma, and all such issues. Ditto for the likelihood of protest; maybe we just needed someone to break the ice. This is a positive and hopeful thing.
It will only be positive and hopeful if students catch up on protesting all the real political issues that they have ignored for the past decade. Time is of the essence as Obama continues to sell the US working class down the river poste haste.
The degrees today's students ultimately obtain will have little value if Obama continues to pander to Wall Street and implement Obamacare, both of which will result in millions of baby boomers delaying or cancelling retirement from family wage jobs, thereby making those milions of jobs inaccessable to young Americans.
Although I very sincerely support the students in their tuition woes (I am so lucky, I just graduated in December) and think it is great they are protesting, I do also have to agree that it would be just as much in their self-interest to throw up this fight in protest of Wall Street, MIC expenditures, offshoring jobs, DEFINITELY ending the war besides the MIC expenditures, and so many other things.
I think students were really messed up by the whole Obama thing, as one of the dumbass supporters, I spent a lot of time marshalling votes for that a-hole, time I could have and should have spent studying. So that cost is besides the fact that we failed by winning. I think students have felt exhausted by that effort and devastated by the result. maybe they had a small return of the enui that preceeded the 2008 election, but luckily the education attack is one injustice they cannot ignore and hope to fulfill their goal of finishing school, many of them. So hopefully this will re-energize their fighting spirit and maybe, having been so badly fooled once, "We won't get fooled again?" I put a question mark there because some of my erstwhile fellow Probamanites still look me askance as a turncoat. It is hard to overestimate the power of an ingrained mneme, such as the "Obama is a good guy" mneme. It is like instead of looking at the world, they are wearing VR goggles showing what is inside their heads rather than outside their heads. We will see not only if student can continue and diversify their mobilization but also if they can avoid falling into another attractive carniverous plant like Obama.
Way to go Students...
I'm glad to see the student movement growing. I can not wait to see what happens when these students realize that there is no Pot of Gold waiting for them when they graduate either. A year ago they were promised HOPE AND CHANGE by the Speachmaker in Chief, but know the onion is being peeled of the shallow charade and they should see that BARRACK is contiunning the US EMPIRE mentality and only helping those of big money interests, not we the people as it should be.
Protesting tuition hikes makes you politically aware? This is one selfish bunch. They couldn't be bothered till it hit their pocketbook.
Perhaps they should have been more concerned with the abuse of the illegals by business there or maybe the poor who are suffering real hurt from this economy.
They just discovered there is a price to pay for unfettered spending.
Pathetic.
far from pathetic. You obviously have never been a student before, it takes up all of your time, if you are doing it right. Every minute these kids spend not at their studies is time inefficiently spent. Students are not SUDDENLY politically aware, things have just gotten bad enough that they have to stand the fuck up!
Admittedly the injustice they are protesting is being perpetrated on the face of it against students and teachers and in that respect is self-interested. But in the deeper analysis, the assault on education is a class war/generational/cultural assault on people who are trying to better themselves and the people trying to help them.. It is a very deep assault on democratic society and not only does it impoverish US intellectually, it is economic suicide as every dollar spent on education stimulates at least 3 dollars in future economic activity (as is well documented by many sources, if you doubt I will provide them).
"Perhaps they should have been more concerned with the abuse of the illegals by business there or maybe the poor who are suffering real hurt from this economy."
Most students are aware of victimization of illegals, many are involved in efforts to publicize and organize against these and many other injustices. As a matter of fact, I would say that student involvement in social activism at least competes with non-student involvement. As to your second sentence there, man, STUDENTS ARE THE POOR in a lot of cases, I sure as hell wasn't walking around with a fat wallet while I was in school and I worked the WHOLE FREAKIN' TIME, often 3 jobs, and fishing in Alaska in the summer. And I found time to volunteer my time for community organizations, beach clean ups, and the like. As did many of my fellow students.
So get off the short bus, dude, these protests benefit you and your future progeny as much as it benefits these particular students. Besides the fact that what they protest is also at its basis the issue of privatization of socially important services, which should be fought tooth and nail by every self-concerned individual and community. And you give them shit for getting off their asses, when it is exactly what each one of us should be doing? I sat around and worked on marketing materials yesterday, man was I ashamed about that when I realized how selfish I had been not to go to my local college and support our students. Maybe go look in a mirror and rethink pathetic.
Step right this way ladies and gentlemen, see the great freak, Veritas, suffering vicariously for abused illegals everywhere. See how it bleeds. Yes, it bleeds from its asshole. This is due to its great capacity for spewing excrement from the very orifice responsible for its survival. There is no cure for poor Veritas. As long as there is a perceived audience, Veritas will go on and on and on. So please, step right this way.
What disgusting wording. Identifying someone's level is always helpful though. Thanks.
Oh, it gets so much better. The help, I mean. Look further below monster.
I saw students talking about the rights of campus workers. I heard students chanting "bail out students, not banks". Many of the students in UC and CUNY are far from wealthy themselves. They are fighting back against a political system that is stealing all our wealth for the rich and their agendas.
Mean to them. Why are you so mean to them?
Joe
Not mean. Just realistic. Where were they Joe before the tuition hikes? We must quit assigining wishes to something and look at the realities. Nothing will ever be accomplished otherwise.
People are always first concerned with their own lives and problems. They try to handle them on an individual level. It has always been like that.
It is a brilliant day when they realize the problems are not their own fault, cannot be fixed by changing personal habits and strategies alone, and that the solutions require joining with others and acting. It is even better when they relate their problems to larger issues like workers' rights, the destructiveness of war and the greed of bankers.
Joe
To some of the apparently unaware commenters here, these movements are about MUCH more than what you are attempting to reduce them to and dismiss them as.
i.e. "Perhaps they should have been more concerned with the abuse of the illegals by business there or maybe the poor who are suffering real hurt from this economy. Pathetic."
Oh, please! These movements are directly related to all of the "other" problems you mention, and particularly the complicit role of the "corporatization" of higher education in creating and perpetuating them!
Enlighten yourselves with more exclusive coverage of these movements:
Learning to Remember:
After March 4
by Marc Bousquet
It began with a handful of direct actions and refusals–bold occupations, sit-ins, a one-day strike and walkout, and a manifesto that fired the imaginations of students planetwide.
Today it is a mass movement, with marches and pickets across the country scheduled for Thursday’s National Day of Action. The hope and the stories will keep coming all weekend. If you jump a bus for Sacramento, you might get a seat next to Etienne Balibar. If you try to enter the UC Santa Cruz campus–the epicenter of the movement–thousands of students and workers will be picketing every gate. Over a hundred major actions are scheduled.
But Tuesday morning, March 8 will begin the next news cycle. Where will the movement be then?
It might look a little bit like this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h_9O7P-QXg
Give it ten seconds. I’m pretty sure you’ll watch it to the end.
"While there seems to be endless conversation about the violence of smashing windows and the damage to the movement done by spontaneous action, there is a notable absence of discussion about the violence of class division in American society and its relationship with higher education.
Is the movement so fragile that a smashed window destroys it–yet broken bodies don’t bring it to boiling point? We are told that the streets must be policed in order to be safe–that no one will join us–that people who would have supported the cause are now frightened to participate. Yet what we see is laughter, dancing and a freedom that is not possible to describe in the language of everyday capitalism. How, we must ask, is a movement that collapses under the weight of overturned trash cans going to withstand the presence of millions of people challenging their relationship to the economy?"...
continued at
http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/245
Marc Bousquet is the author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation (NYU Press, 2008)
"The single most important recent advance in our understanding of the structure of higher education." - Cary Nelson
"Bousquet is about to emerge as the Al Gore of higher education." - Thomas Hart Benton, The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 30, 2007
"How the University Works does for academe what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for breakfast sausage." - Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Education, January 9, 2008
"The best study of academic labor conditions in the U.S. since the 1970s." - Vincent B. Leitch, general editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
See more in-depth reviews at http://marcbousquet.net/reviews.html
How the University Works has spawned a blog of the same name http://howtheuniversityworks.com that has very quickly emerged as a prime venue for muckraking, agitation, and YouTube interviews with known troublemakers. In other words, it’s really good to see, and I urge you to take a look. - Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Education, January 9, 2008
I really appreciate this kind attempt to enlighten folks by plugging my work so thoroughly. But I also want folks to know I didn't do it myself! (And if you read the comments that follow me on the Chronicle of Higher Education, I certainly don't have the power to dispel magical thinking about higher education's role in the economy.)
Nice piece, Peter. One thing East Coast folks might not realize is that March 4 was probably just Act 2 out here. Spring quarter doesn't begin for another three weeks or so... solidarity, m
And where was this great "movement" before their tuition and fee's went up? I must have missed it.
There is no connection between this "movement" and the poor or the abuse illegals suffer there among other things. If they found out that denying educational monuies to illegals children would bring their tuition down below where it started, those kids would be out of luck tomorrow.
I don't indulge in fantasy and thats what giving this any credence is. Sorry.
So, this Veritas, it's something of a monster then. It spews rancid venom from its anal orifice at young people for engaging in organized protest against a system that disenfrachises them, but bleeds for illegal immigrants who protest for engaging in organized protest. Strange freak of nature. Strange logic. It looks like it'll have to find somewhere else to feed though because there's no audience here for its strange behavior. Or maybe it'll just crawl off somewhere and die.