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Labor and student activists held a series of on-campus demonstrations at the UC Berkeley this week coinciding with the two-day meeting of the UC Board of Regents on the Clark Kerr campus. 

But with distractions ranging from the Cal-Stanford Big Game Week celebrations to Laotian Awareness Day folk dancers to the unseasonably warm fall weather, demonstrators found it hard to get the attention of most UC students. 

On Wednesday, the Coalition of Union Employees (CUE) held an hour-long noontime Sproul Plaza rally protesting low wages for UC workers. On Thursday morning, students organized by the statewide Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) marched up the hill from Sproul Plaza to Clark Kerr and held a morning demonstration on the lawn outside the regents meeting to protest the regents’ decision to raise university student fees. 

While the Clark Kerr protest was going on, a group of high school students organized by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) led a march through the UC campus to the steps of Haviland Hall to call for the firing of an UC Berkeley undergraduate advisor accused of using racist and sexist language against a UC student. 

At the Clark Kerr demonstration, while most protesters held up banners stapled to sticks, one creative student carried a loose cardboard sign with the notation “Sold The Stick For This Sign To Pay For My Tuition.” 

Inside their meeting at Clark Kerr, regents approved stiff fee increases for both undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students. 

The CUE rally on Wednesday featured a pig motif, with demonstrators rattling pink plastic piggy banks, a paper maché pig head with dollar bills dripping from its mouth to symbolize the UC administration, and signs with winged pigs reading “When Pigs Can Fly UC Labor Relations Will Never Lie.” 

Many students seemed oblivious to the rally, however, walking through the demonstrators as they marched in a circle in front of Sather Gate. 

Four years ago, affirmative action demonstrations involving high school students devolved into incidents of violence and vandalism along Telegraph Avenue, and Berkeley police officers were on prominent display during Thursday’s BAMN activities on the main campus. 

Officers on foot and on bicycles congregated at the Telegraph Avenue entrance to the campus, and officers on bicycles—as well as an officer on foot operating a \ the BAMN demonstrators as they marched through the campus. There were no reported incidents.t