Page One

Friday, November 19, at the tail end of a week of protests against the University of California Regents and fee increases, a small group of demonstrators marched through the UC Berkeley campus.  

It was not a large or boisterous protest, but it was a microcosm of many of the issues and themes of the current controversies over student fee increases and UC budget cuts and reorganization. I followed along for part of my lunch hour to observe the demonstration.  

Protests like this are quite ephemeral. Not long after they conclude, people, posters, police are gone.  

Most people working on the Berkeley campus, including myself, are used to the brief appearance of television trucks near Sproul Hall and both lunch hour and end-of-the-day noisy helicopter flyovers of the campus.  

The bigger TV stations employ this predictable pattern of action to get a “live” photogenic moment, “Protest at Berkeley!” that will give them a few lively seconds of film for broadcast on the local news at noon or five p.m. 

Major media entities, however, pay little or no attention to details of demonstrations of this type, unless there’s a huge crowd or a dramatic altercation occurs and can be filmed or photographed. (The Daily Cal is a welcome exception when campus protests are involved. This year the paper has done a fairly good job of live blogging and recapping protest events.) 

From a perspective of recording UC and community history, though, it’s of interest and value to observe and document these smaller events both as unique occasions and as part of the evolving pattern of protest that has occurred at the Berkeley campus for half a century. 

On Friday, the protestors gathered at the north end of Sproul Plaza near Sather Gate. Banners briefly blocked the two side portals and part of the main arch, and slogans were chalked and written onto the Gate pillars and the pavement. 

Flyers were also taped to the Gate, as they would be to walls, light poles, and doorways throughout the march. 

How many people participated? Other press accounts I later read said 40 to 80. When the group was in front of California Hall, I counted a little over 60 individuals who appeared to be direct participants in the group in front of the building. When the marchers gathered later on the steps of Sproul Hall I counted more than 50.  

There were a couple of dozen spectators and other watchers, including police.  

Most of the protestors simply marched and chanted. Several were actively writing slogans on walls and pavement, but this seemed a shifting, individual pattern, not a highly organized activity. A person would fall behind the march or run in front of it, or perhaps stand behind a loose screen of other demonstrators, quickly writing a slogan. 

Some pulled scarves across their faces when they did the slogan writing, while others went about it quite openly. 

A light drizzle began falling during the march and was steady, although not heavy, by the end. 

The written slogans and flyers posted along the march focused mainly on the issues and incidents of the fee protests earlier in the week. One reproduced several paragraphs of a critical commentary by a UC Santa Cruz professor on the context of fee increases and student financial aid. 

Another one, frequently posted along the route, showed a photograph of the UC police officer who briefly drew his gun at one of the Regents’ meeting protests on Wednesday. The satirical caption read, “Pay Your Fees or I’ll Shoot You!”  

A third had a cartoon of UC President Mark Yudof carrying a bag of money, and this text: “Education for those who can afford it! Debt, Poverty & Degradation for Everyone Else. Be realistic; obey authority; the future will be what I say it is.”  

From Sather Gate the group went to Wheeler Hall, followed at a distance by a police contingent, as was the case throughout the march. Protestors and police went inside Wheeler and there was considerable writing and posting on the walls of the lobby. 

The march continued down the west side corridor of the building, along the north corridor, and out the northeast entrance. 

Several police watched inside the lobby and followed the group, even mingling with the march, but did not interfere with protestors as they wrote on walls and glass. At one point I was standing behind three officers while a man stood perhaps a dozen feet in front of them, writing on the face of a display cabinet. 

The doors of several rooms with classes in them were written on, but there didn’t appear to be any disruption of classes, other than the brief noise of chanting and bullhorns as the group walked through the building.

 

After the march left Wheeler Hall, it moved to the “sign wall” in front of Dwinelle Hall where a photomontage is displayed on a temporary wooden structure. This is part of the current campus fundraising campaign entitled “Thanks to Berkeley”. 

Earlier in the week the sign wall had been defaced with a large, red, slogan “Your Apathy = Your Fees”. Since then both the slogan and many of the damaged pictures had been removed leaving gaps and tears in the display. 

There was writing and posting on the sign wall on Friday as well, including alterations to the “Thanks to Berkeley” slogan. It was changed to read, “Thanks To Berkeley…I’ll be in debt forever”. 

Anger at the University Police ran through many of the written slogans. “Fuck the UCPC-Cowards!”, “UCPD – Get Off Our Campus”, “Arrest Us for Chalking”, “Who Is the UCPD Protecting?” “Don’t Cite / Shoot Me For Flyerin, Bro!”, “Stop UCPD Oppression,”, “UCPD Shame on You”, “Arrest the Regents”, “Serve and Protect Capital”, “Disband UCPD,”, “Squash Students’ Dreams! Join UCPD Today!”, “UCPD, Get That Gun Out of My Face”, “Stop Police Repression of the Student Movement”, and “End Police Brutality.” 

A selection of the other slogans written on pavement, walls, and doors: 

“Don’t push me out of Cal”, “Our University”, “Destroy The Regents”, “Fight The Power – Fire The Regents”, “Bow Before the Regents, All Ye Peasants”, “Fire The Administration”, “Fire Yudof”, “We Demand Yudof’s Resignation”, “No 8 %” (fee increase). 

“Reverse the Fees”, “Education, Not Militarization”, “Protect Free Speech”, “Student Power”, “Worker Power”, “UC for Education, Not Profit”, “Students Have A Right to Rebel”, “Fight Back”, “Fight the Fees”, “No Fees”, “UC Betrays Savio”, “Don’t Be Afraid”, “No More Fee Hikes”, “New Fees – Same Fight”, “Cut the Police – Chop from the Top”, “Hands Off My Education”, and a Smily face with a sad frown and “UC” below the eyes. 

“For Sale” was chalked on Sather Gate, and perhaps the timeliest slogan, since it was Big Game Week, was “Beat Stanford, Don’t Become Stanford.” 

From the sign wall the march went north to the main east entrance of California Hall. The doors there were locked, as they usually are during protests, and the mass of marchers briefly formed a barrier across the middle front of the building. 

At least three individuals climbed through the hedges and up onto window ledges and wrote slogans on windows. Others attached flyers to the doors.

 

Again, police watched from the east side of the roadway next to California Hall but did not interfere during the period I was watching, confining themselves to videotaping the gathering. A number of other people taking photographs also stood in a loose half circle above the demonstration. 



From California Hall the march went to the main north entrance of Doe Library. There, the police may have blocked access, or the group may have chosen not to go inside. I was not at a point where I could see, but a group of police went quickly past me and through the crowd, one of them telling the others that they had been told by radio to go inside. 



Most of the protestors stood in front of the entrance. Slogans were written on the glass doors of the entrance, and two people climbed on windowsills and wrote slogans on the windows of the Morrison Library, which is at ground level on this façade.

 

From Doe the protest retraced its route past California Hall to Sather Gate and turned east, then south, to enter Sproul Hall through the north entrance. 

Here was the first and only sign of direct confrontation I saw on the march. A couple of protestors carrying a large, rigid, banner at waist height looked like they were trying position it crosswise inside the vestibule, blocking the north doors. Several police went into the building and there was a brief scuffle inside, which I couldn’t see clearly. 

Two officers then opened the doors and dragged the sign out and threw it down the steps. It wasn’t confiscated, however, and some of the demonstrators quickly picked it up again. 



The protestors then emerged from the main entrance of Sproul Hall onto the Savio Steps where they remained during the remainder of the lunch hour, chanting and calling to those passing by to join them. They stood below a banner mounted to the façade advertising the Big Game Bonfire Rally that night. 

There was a steady flow of pedestrians through the Plaza but few, if any, went to join the demonstration, although many stopped to take pictures.

 I saw perhaps half a dozen young people—looking like high school age visitors to the campus—run up to briefly join the demonstrators in chanting, then walk down the steps a few minutes later. 
 






The Daily Californian live blog reported on parts of the demonstration I didn’t watch after the lunch hour was ended. The protest march apparently went, after Sproul Plaza, through the classroom floor of Barrows Hall then down Telegraph Avenue to the Unit III residence halls. The numbers of marchers decreased along the way. 


I did see two groups of police were stationed near Bancroft and Telegraph and small contingents, three at a time, went down Telegraph and Durant, but the police eventually disappeared along with the demonstration.

 

Barrow Lane, however, behind Sproul Hall was packed with police vehicles through the morning and midday. There were not only the regular patrol and unmarked cars of the UC Berkeley police, but a shuttle van from UCSF, two other unmarked vans, and several other unmarked vehicles with the subtle hallmarks of law enforcement transport, but no agency markings visible.  



Among the officers following the protest I saw both UC Police badges and Alameda Sheriff’s badges. At one point at least twenty officers were visible, but through most of the protest they were scattered, some following the march, some inside buildings along the march route, and others apparently waiting at other locations. 

The lobby of Sproul Hall, north façade of Doe, the A & E Building entrance, the west half of the main floor corridors of Barrows Hall, the east façade of California Hall, much of the lobby and main floor corridors of Wheeler Hall had all been the target of written slogans and posted flyers. 
 

Without having made an exact count, I would estimate there were from 70 to 100 separate pieces of protest writing on interior building walls, doors, and other structures such as Sather Gate and the sign wall, in addition to slogans chalked on the ground. 

Scores of flyers taped to walls and doors. 

 Some of the slogans were written in ordinary colored chalk. Plastic stick dispensers of what appeared to be a form of liquid chalk were also used. I looked at one after it was discarded, empty, by a protester; it was labeled “Window Marker” by Loew Cornell. 



In most cases the slogans were written on glass or painted walls, although several were also written on stone exterior walls. 

UC Physical Plant vans and trucks were in evidence around the affected buildings and most of the posted flyers and signs quickly disappeared. 

After the workday ended, as dusk fell, I walked through the campus again. Most of the written slogans still appeared on interior walls, although those written outdoors were melting away in the rain, slowly dripping and fading away. Most of the hand-posted flyers were gone. 

Physical Plant workers were at Sather Gate with a high-pressure hose, methodically washing the chalked slogans off the pillars. The damaged sign wall had already been covered in black plastic.  

The lobby of Wheeler Hall, a centerpiece of protest actions both this year and last, was almost empty. To the strains of classical music from a boom box, two students practiced ballroom dancing across the lobby floor, past the display cases and walls that still displayed the protest slogans.