http://www.thenation.com/article/165195/fighting-privatization-occupy-activists-cuny-and-uc-kick-high-gear
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
Fighting Privatization, Occupy
Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear
Josh Eidelson | December 16, 2011
Every afternoon last week, students, teachers, and neighbors gathered to
hold classes on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. Everyone was welcome. They sat on
the ground, or on what are now called the Mario Savio Steps. Topics included
the economics of debt, the poetry of persecution, and Chilean student movement.
There has also been a massage train and a gospel chorus. “There are no walls,”
said graduate student Michelle Ty, “And it’s free.” You could call it a public
university. The irony, not lost on these students or their East Coast
counterparts, is that they’re supposed to already have one.
The University of California (UC) and the City University of New York
(CUNY) are both massive public university systems, long points of pride for
their respective states. Together they claim over two million graduates. And
now, as administrators declare there’s no alternative to austerity, they’re
both occupied. Though these occupations draw tactics and momentum from the
Occupy movement, their lineage is as mixed as Zuccotti Park’s: international
anti-austerity activism, struggles for graduate student unionization and union
democratization, student occupations of decades past. As winter—and police
raids—set in, universities are becoming an increasingly important face of
occupied America. How is occupying a public university different from occupying
Wall Street? For one, few of the occupiers want their schools abolished.
UC
UC Davis graduate student Nickolas Perrone recently joined fellow activists
on a trip to the Bay Area to visit the private companies, like Bank of America,
where the regents of the UC system work. Though the regents (and leading
California Democrats) have blamed the current tuition hikes on the Great
Recession, students say the regents have been pushing privatization on their
public university for a long time.
In the decade leading up to 2007, the UC system's management positions grew
four times as quickly as its faculty. In 2004, the chancellors signed an
agreement with then-Governor Schwarzenegger to seek private donations to the
system's budget. Berkeley's chancellor paid Mitt Romney's old consulting firm,
Bain & Company, $7.5 million to help the university "achieve [greater]
efficiency." Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley has called for
Berkeley to build more virtual campuses, rather than "bricks and
mortar" ones.
(RICHARD BLUM BOUGHT HIS WAY ON TO THE
BOARD of REGENTS WITH A BRIBE TO FORMER
CA GOV GRAY DAVIS FOR $75,000. DO YOU THINK HE’S MADE HIS MONEY BACK?)
Nowhere is the close relationship between California's public universities
and private corporations more apparent than in the UC Board of Regents. UC Regent
Richard C. Blum is both the husband of Democratic California Senator Dianne
Feinstein and the Chairman of the San Francisco-based investment firm Blum
Capital Partners. Though he has served on the board since 2002, his firm is
also the largest shareholder in Career Education Corporation and ITT Education
Services Inc., two for-profit higher education companies that have both been
under federal investigation. In a 2010 expose, the Sacramento News &
Review reported that the UC investment managers invested $53 million in
public funds in both companies. Despite these connections, UC officials claim
that no conflicts of interest occurred.
“What’s at the heart of the privatization,” says Berkeley graduate student
Megan Wachpress, “is a bringing in of the market logic, and the kind of
exploitations and the inequalities associated with the market…into parts of
life and relationships that we used to see as parts of our responsibility as
co-citizens.”
The UC system’s last wave of anti-privatization activism was two years ago,
when regents announced a round of tuition hikes. Though unsuccessful in the
short term, those efforts built the groundwork for a reform slate to oust the
leadership of UAW Local 2865, the graduate student employees union. The
transformed Local 2865 has been at the forefront of the new occupation
movement.
General assemblies began at Berkeley in October, and the un-walled
classrooms (the “open university”) soon followed. Berkeley administrators
responded with a November 9 police crackdown, and a prohibition against
camping, sleeping, or over two hours a day of amplified noise. Berkeley
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau further inflamed students with his declaration that
linking arms “is not non-violent.” Faculty condemned the administration’s
actions in a near-unanimous vote November 28th. Opposition to police
violence at Berkeley helped galvanize UC Davis students for what would become
the most famous confrontation of the student movement to date.
Sophomore Shannon Giamichele checked out Occupy UC Davis for the first time
out of concern over planned tuition hikes. She took part in a November 20
general assembly, after which students complied with a university order to
remove their tents. After seeing some friends arrested for refusing to clear
their bodies from the quad as well, Giamichele joined a seated human chain
occupying the space. “At some point we just heard people in the crowd saying,
‘Cover, cover, cover! They’re gonna shoot!’” Police in riot gear sprayed
Giamichele and others with pepper spray. “It felt like a lot of fires burning.”
Because of her asthma, Giamichele’s doctor has told her she can’t go back to
the quad until her lungs have healed.
That night, hundreds of students waited hours for their chancellor to
emerge from a building, and then stared in silent judgment as she walked to her
car. The next day they held an unprecedented rally. Two weeks later was a
statewide Regents meeting. Students say such meetings are often held at Davis
because it’s been a relatively placid campus. This time the regents met by
teleconference, as students rallied throughout the UC system and Davis held a
student strike. Saturday night, activists from Berkeley, Davis, and other
campuses met and formed a proposal to occupy the California state capital in
March.
Facing police violence has been a transformative experience for students.
“They didn’t make us feel safe at all,” says Giamichele, “they hurt us.” But it
hasn’t made them give up on government. Asked whether being pepper-sprayed by
UC Davis police changed her view of the state, Giamichele responds, “It
affected my view of the police officers who did it…It honestly really made me
feel that we don’t have a need for police on our campus.” Reflecting on the
Berkeley beatings, Ty says there were “just so many absurdities…we knew we
would be beaten if we were to try to give expression to the idea that it is not
OK to privatize the university.” Perrone sees police violence less as an
indictment of government than as a sign of the private sector’s encroachment.
“For administrators who are intent [on] privatization, they want to create safe
spaces for corporate investment.”
Among the country’s occupations, Berkeley’s has produced perhaps the most
comprehensive set of demands, local (replacement of administrators through
campus-wide election), statewide (affirmative action), and national (bailout
public services and schools). Those demands passed Occupy Cal’s General
Assembly by an 83 percent vote, though there were vocal dissenters. Wachpress
says the lineage of university-focused fights helps explain Occupy Cal’s
comfort with directing demands at the government, though she credits anarchism
with inspiring some of Occupy Cal’s signature tactics, like the open
university. At a public university, says Perrone, “there’s a level of
accountability that’s not there with privatizing everything. There’s also a
sense of ownership.”
Ty sees engaging the state as more of a pragmatic necessity. But she adds
that authorities’ responses—insisting to speak to spokespeople, barring tents,
unleashing violence—have shown the limits of representative democracy alone.
CUNY
For CUNY Baruch junior Denise Romero, Occupy CUNY is the newest front in a
history of activism in defense of public services. Like many Occupy Wall Street
organizers, she had helped organize Bloombergville, a pre-OWS summer encampment
meant to dramatize the impact of the mayor’s proposed budget cuts. Citing her
public transportation, public libraries, and public health insurance as well as
public education, Romero says “those services have been how I have lived my
entire life.” Now she sees them under attack – CUNY included.
Last year, CUNY touted the creation of a waiting list for applicants as a
way not only to “manage the surge of students,” but also to “make CUNY more selective
in the process.” After last year’s defeat of a “Public Higher Education
Empowerment and Innovation Act” that would have allowed trustees to raise
tuition without legislative approval and to institute differential pricing by
type of degree, newly-elected Governor Andrew Cuomo shepherded and signed
legislation freeing the trustees to raise tuition by $300 for each of the next
five years.
Like UC Davis, CUNY Baruch has traditionally been a less political campus
than its peers. Baruch activists–many of them from Students for a Free
CUNY–held their first general assembly in a lobby there in November, with
twenty people and a goal of raising awareness about the proposed tuition hikes.
By that point, CUNY students had become a frequent presence at Occupy Wall
Street actions, and there were regular CUNY-wide general assemblies underway.
Like Davis, Baruch was thrust into the spotlight by police violence.
Students showed up November 21 to what was advertised as a public hearing
with administrators, only to be turned away by police claiming–despite video
evidence–that the meeting was full. Some students sat down with the intention
of holding their own public meeting in the lobby. “That’s when the NYPD just
kind of formed a wall of batons and started pushing students out,” says Romero.
She watched a friend who had recently had throat surgery hit with a baton in
the throat. Students above started throwing books and newspapers down at the
police.
“I was completely surprised when they would rush the students like that,”
says Baruch junior Mona Khalil. Before she got involved with OWS and Students
for a Free CUNY, Khalil’s main project was a Baruch organization aiming to
“find anyone who is remotely politically interested” and get them active–about
anything.
A week after the lobby showdown, as UC students were demonstrating on their
campuses during their regents’ teleconference, their CUNY counterparts were
marching through downtown Manhattan to the Baruch campus, where CUNY’s Board of
Trustees was voting to approve the five-year schedule of tuition hikes
authorized by Cuomo. To Romero, the trustees’ vote was confirmation that the
public institution’s stewards aren’t acting in the public interest. “They come
from the private sector. They believe that’s the way that public administration
should be run.”
Romero’s observation is damning. But it also speaks to the depth of the
challenge facing the public university occupations: saving the public—public
space, public interest, public institutions—from publicly-appointed
privatizers. The conversation may be simpler in some ways at private
universities like New York University, where graduate student Dacia Mitchell
hopes Occupy Wall Street will help expose the university as a greedy
corporation busting her union rather than a public citizen.
It’s easy to debunk the idea that a governor’s election itself justifies
whatever his appointees want to do. But it’s harder to build a governance
system that will protect public resources from being sold off to the private
sector or marshaled against the public in defense of the 1 percent. Some
classmates would charge that fighting the privatization of public goods misses
the point – that capture of government by private interests is inevitable, and
whatever you entrust to a bureaucrat will show up in the hands of a
businessman. And yet true anarchists set on abolishing the state seem an even
smaller minority among public university occupiers than among their Occupy Wall
Street counterparts. Why?
Part of the answer lies in students’ relationship to the university. Even
as they break down the ways in which its public nature has eroded, they don’t
speak as though it’s something alien. “For a lot of us,” says Romero, “CUNY is
kind of our home.” They talk less like they’re outsiders than like their
administrators are. Asked whether CUNY could serve the role of a public
university without government, Khalil says it couldn’t.
The ease with which public appointees let the public be brutalized or
bought hasn’t led many students to give up on government. But it is spurring a
sense that representative democracy is insufficient. “While we’re pushing for
the preservation of public services and public goods,” says Romero, “we want it
to be controlled by the public and not necessarily governments and cities.”
That doesn’t mean abolishing government, but it means more “grassroots direct
democracy…that balances out the government role.”
As shared, flawed, local institutions that pride themselves on free
exchange of ideas, universities may be particularly fertile ground for the
fusion of large and small goals: giving students a vote on who governs them;
running public services through participatory economics. Many of the students
involved see fixing the governance problem at the federal level as a thornier
challenge than tackling it locally and within the university, where a General
Assembly or an Open University offers a hopeful model. “There need to be more
[public] spaces created,” says Romero, “but we do have them. We need to protect
them.”
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