Public Comment

The first public Teach-In on the UC Berkeley campus about People’s Park that included perspectives from students, professors and the community was held on February 26, 2024. A video of the event can be seen at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Jqt_PGV8Q. For the past 4 ½ years the UC administration has presented distorted facts about the need for the destruction of People’s Park. It has claimed widespread support but has never created a forum that actually allowed dissident voices to be heard. 

People’s Park is currently barricaded by stacked shipping containers topped with razor wire and guarded round-the-clock, following a midnight raid in early January by combined police forces from UC, CSU, Alameda County, San Francisco City and County and the California State Highway Patrol, organized by the UC Berkeley administration. 

Recent media reports have documented the many millions of dollars spend on these actions in January, which only adds to the millions spent on the previous attempt to fence the park and to the millions spent on legal actions and public relations to justify UC’s planned destruction of the park. 

The flood of official campus public relations communications with which students, faculty, staff and community have been inundated since the Chancellor’s 2017 announcement of plans to build student housing on the park, ignore the strong opposition both from students and the community whose interests the plans are supposed to serve. 

Campus administration has never acknowledged the National Register of Historic Places listing of the park or the need for urban green space in the densely populated South Campus neighborhood. 

“What’s Going On?” – A Teach-In on People’s Park was organized to present a broad range of perspectives from UC Berkeley students, professors and community groups. 

Time Marked for Presenter: 

00:25 -- Kristin Hanson, Professor of English, UC Berkeley 

4:15 -- Harvey Smith, president of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group 

12:22 -- Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday Books and park activist since 1969 

24:36 -- Tony Platt, author of The Scandal of Cal and affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley 

42:25 -- Sylvia T, UCB graduate, independent archival researcher and People’s Park defender 

49:33 -- Sara Peach, Historic Preservation Club, UC Berkeley student group 

53:50 -- Rohan Shinkre, UCB, Suitcase Clinic 

57:46 -- Kacie Cosgrove, UCB, Suitcase Clinic 

1:02:15 -- Margaux Bauerlein, UCB, Suitcase Clinic 

1:03:51 -- Ren Fitzgerald, UCB, Telegraph for People 

1:37:23 -- Moderator (closing remarks): Kristin Hanson, Professor of English, UC Berkeley 

For more information, go to https://www.peoplesparkhxdist.org. For upcoming events, go to https://www.peoplespark.org.