In a grainy YouTube video, a chaotic scene unfolds. Police in riot gear stand opposite a group of shouting students, separated by heavy metal barricades. Soon, the cops begin charging into the students, batons raised menacingly, forcing them backward.
The students push back, and the cops respond with force, violently swinging their batons at anyone within range. The fight rages back and forth.
Slowly, the students’ shouting resolves itself into rhythmic chanting: “Shame on you!” they chant at the cops, “Shame on you!”
What is happening here? Where have these students come from? What’s behind their willingness to defy the police and so many of our society’s traditional strictures and mores?
The video is called “UC Berkeley Budget Protest. The Wheeler Frontlines,” and in the background stands Wheeler Hall, at the heart of the University of California, Berkeley. The previous day, Nov. 19, 2009, around 40 protesters occupied Wheeler to protest fee increases in the UC system, issuing a series of demands. These students have been called “whiny spoiled brats” and accused of parasitically living off the taxes of hard-working Californians. But their demands, and the response from the broader student body, tell a very different story.
In addition to demanding amnesty for themselves and other students involved in the movement against budget cuts, they demanded that 38 recently fired janitors be reinstated. This suggests not the actions of a bunch of “whiny spoiled brats” but rather students seeking in their own way to make concrete links with the struggles of working people facing harsh austerity measures today.
What is perhaps even more significant about these recent events is the support they received from broad swathes of students throughout the UC system. Some might denigrate the occupiers as so many bandana-wearing anarchists cut off from the student body, but footage and online photos tell a different story.
There we see students wearing Berkeley sweatshirts and jeans, themselves the sons and daughters of hard-working Californians, being dragged away and arrested by police. Many commentators ignore this dynamic, and it is precisely because they ignore it that we should pay so much attention to it. It means that the movement at Berkeley and elsewhere has broken through the boundaries that confine this kind of radicalism to lit departments and the lofty seminars of grad school.
This movement is important because it has succeeded where others have failed. It has reached precisely those students that society has convinced to see politics as irrelevant, and encouraged them, demanded them, to risk their educations and even their bodies for their fellow students and for the broader principle of accessible, dare we say free, education for all.
But it is also important for the way it shows how quickly we learn and adapt when involved in practical political struggle. Why have students gathered around Wheeler Hall? They are there to prevent a police riot against the occupiers. They are there to guarantee that the students occupying Wheeler don’t face harsh legal charges. In the heat of struggle, students asked where the cops might carry out arrested students, and volunteered to block those exits physically to ensure the safety and freedom of their peers. We can learn much from these courageous actions.
The cops, on the other hand, were there to contain those students inside Wheeler. More practically, they were there to cut off the occupiers from the sympathetic students outside. By cutting off this access, the cops—and the administration, let’s not forget, that pays their bills and calls their shots—sought to starve the occupiers out, to force them, through exhaustion and starvation, to concede where principle held fast.
The sad irony of this situation is that the students inside Wheeler and those amassed outside showing their solidarity were fighting to secure a cheap and accessible education for the students of precisely those cops so eager to bash their heads in. They were fighting not to retain their own privileges, but to extend those privileges—namely a good education—to all people.
These lessons are deeply important to all of us at Duke University. We have conceded two great assets to our community in the firing of Juanita Johnson and Julian Sanchez. What’s more, we have done so with hardly a fight, accepting the first PR statement we heard from the administration. We are capable of more than this. In a time of rampant cynicism, where so many are so convinced of their own powerlessness, students just like you and me in California have shown us the way.
A new society struggles to break free all around us. We must have the vision to recognize it when we see it, and the courage to fight to make it a reality.
Michael Stauch is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in history. His column runs every other Friday.
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