Saturday, December 5, 2009

UC Protesters Invoke Free Speech Movement

UC Protesters Invoke Free Speech Movement

 

By Nanette Asimov,

Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle

December 3, 2009

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/03/BAFV1AU1LF.DTL#ixzz0YkZu2VJO

 

Berkeley

 

The Free Speech Movement lives on at UC Berkeley - 45 years to the day after a 21-year-old student named Mario Savio energized thousands by exhorting them to do all they could to stop the administration's restrictive policies.

 

Today the issue is less about freedom of speech than about freedom of access to a quality education, as thousands of students have protested rising tuition, employee layoffs and course cutbacks in recent weeks.

 

"We're the ones fighting for this to be a public university that everyone can afford!" Ronald Cruz, a Berkeley activist, told a crowd of about 100 students who gathered Wednesday on the steps of Sproul Hall, site of the late Savio's famous speech. "The Free Speech Movement is alive!"

 

On Dec. 2, 1964, Savio used the metaphor of a machine to urge student action- not just against campus policies prohibiting them from even setting up tables for their causes, but against the rampant civil rights abuses of the era.

 

On Wednesday, students repeated Savio's most famous passage en masse: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

 

Wheeler Hall takeover

 

That's what they say they were doing on Nov. 20, when 38 students and two others seized Wheeler Hall in the middle of campus and occupied the second floor for 11 hours, disrupting classes, while a couple thousand others formed a ring around the building and chanted, "Whose university? Our university!" and "No cuts! No fees!"

 

Last month, UC's governing Board of Regents approved a 32 percent fee hike to help address a budget shortfall of more than half a billion dollars this year. As state support for higher education has diminished, the 10 UC campuses have also approved deep cuts to operations.

 

Days later, about 200 police officers and sheriff's deputies in riot gear faced off against the protesters on the Berkeley campus. Reminiscent of campus unrest in the 1960s, some were filmed beating students with batons, and pushing them with metal barricades. Some demonstrators showed up at hospitals with broken fingers, saying they had been smashed by police.

 

On Wednesday, three gray-haired campus activists from the '60s - Gretchen Lipow, Anita Medal, and Gar Smith - addressed the students, recalling their own experiences.

 

"I still remember how an officer held me so another could slap my face," Smith said to loud boos. "They were white men. I discovered from YouTube that today's students are being beaten by a fully integrated police force. That's progress!"

 

Investigations begun

 

A campus review board and campus police are separately investigating allegations of excessive force by officers on the day of the Wheeler takeover. UC police spokesman Lt. Alex Yao said he didn't know when they would be finished.

 

Quietly, however, some campus administrators said policies have already changed. On Wednesday, for example, student protesters were greeted by campus police on bicycles rather than by sheriff's deputies in riot gear.

 

"I want to express my deepest regret to all members of our community at the turn of events that escalated into police action," Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said in a video posted Monday on the campus Web site. "Violence is never an acceptable response - neither against nor by the police."

 

Students also made changes on Wednesday. While they still hoisted banners opposing the fee hike and faculty furloughs, they disrupted no classes and pulled no fire alarms as some had done two weeks ago to the consternation of fellow students.

 

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Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

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