Occupy Education: 99 Mile March for Education and Social Justice

“Student Protests Seek to Breathe New Life Into Occupy,” Josh Harkinson, MoJo, Mar. 1, 2012.

Art on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on March 1, National Day of Action.

Occupy Cal Day of Action

The noon walkout and rally was reportedly attended by 5,000 people.

I arrived later, in time for the Initial Statement of Occupy Cal.

UC Administration apparently made no attempt to communicate with the Occupy Cal General Assembly in the afternoon.  It was entirely peaceful and non-violent until police forcefully removed the initial encampment.

Three videos below show violent police action in afternoon [1, 2, 3].

I left around 5pm (dead battery), but things heated up again at night, drawing in thousands.

UPDATE — It’s still going on:  livestream here. And here.  ABC-TV aerial .

10:30pm  What I’m hearing over the stream is that the Vice Chancellor came to speak and the tents have been removed, which was the administration’s objective.  Protesters are free to stay overnight, just no tents.

1am:  State-wide (or Everywhere?) Education Strike has been approved for next Tuesday 11/15.

Daily Cal reports at least seven arrested.  More recently tweeted (12am):  39 arrested (Verified by Daily Cal, via UCPD Lt. Alex Yao.)

“Berkeley Students Clash With Police in Iconic Sproul Plaza,” The Atlantic

The first encampment at Sproul Plaza, before police moved in to remove it (see video below). Immediately after police left, Occupy Cal replaced it with new tents.

Police beating students (by Miles Mathews):

CalTV News:

A couple tweets by Hard Knock Radio‘s Davey D

Watching kids at Penn State riot & over turn media truck as they protest firing of child molestor enabler Joe Paterno-No police beatings..

Watching students at Cal protest massive fee hikes.. 53% w/ a proposed 81% on top of that.. Police clubbing students left & right-#fail

and a longer piece by Davey, “A Tale of Two Colleges…Unrest at UC Berkeley & Penn State & Misplaced Priorities”

UPDATE (11/11/11)

SF Chronicle: “UC cops’ use of batons on Occupy camp questioned,” 11/11/11

“But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers’ tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction. . .

“Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has served as a consultant to the Oakland Police Department, said he thought the campus response was ‘unprovoked’ and ‘completely unnecessary.’ . . .

“‘The way they were using it, you’re very likely to hit the groin or kidney,’ he said. ‘I think it is an excessive action and totally unwarranted in the circumstances we see on the video.’

(Note the similarity between this and what was reported 4 days ago in the SJ Merc about OPD shooting the videographer on the night of the General Strike last week, “Experts in police use of force shocked by Oakland video,” 11/7/11)

Update 2 (11/11/11)

The Colbert Report on Occupy Cal, hilarious:

AP: "officers pulling people from the steps and nudging others with batons" (click to watch)

UPDATE: 11/21/11

UC Berkeley poetry professor and former National Poet Laureate Robert Haas, who was among those beaten by UCPD, has an opinion piece in NY Times:
“Poet-Bashing Police,” 11/19/11

“Who Wants to Rule (over The 99%)?”

“I do!  I do!”

That’s what the Vsian Vrt Museum is hoping your kids will shout with glee after spending time in the museum’s new “Who Wants to Rule?” activity room.  As with previous brainchildren of the museum’s Education and Public Programs department, this activity room instills in our children the ideals of top-down rulership, class/caste hierarchy and exploitation, patriarchal dominance, and female servitude.

Welcome to Fantasyland: Become the Ruling 1% at The Asian Art Museum.

Privilege Made Popular?

All of this comes at a time when the entire world is watching public outrage against the ruling class spread from Occupy Wall Street to your hometown.

Privilege made popular, in the midst of growing populist uprising.  Is this what they really mean by “Asian for All”?

Shameless and seemingly never-ending, it’s uncanny how the Vsian’s educators get it oh-so-wrong every time.  Or completely natural when you consider that “lead funding for the Asian Art Museum’s Education and Public Programs is provided by the Bank of America Foundation.”

After all, who benefits most from the cultural privileging of privilege and inequality?

Audacity of Asian Art Museum's lead funder of Education and Public Programs

The museum’s new logo, an inverted A, is supposed to symbolize the unexpected, but in terms of cultural politics, it’s simply more of the same:  In 2009, the activity room was “Daimyo for a Day”, where your young child could play-act the role of samurai warlord, and the museum’s blog featured photos of adorably cute children exploited to promote activities like weapon-making [pdf], all while our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raged on 8 years and counting.

Occupy Wall Street sign of the day: Sasha, 7, painting "Homes for the Homeless", from boingboing.net

V is for Vendetta

But this is the New Vsian, a fun, fresh break with the past, whose bold-faced agenda is unabashedly ticket sales/income generation, as widely reported in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

So much for the dream of a city-owned, taxpayer-funded, knowledge-based public museum whose primary duty is the stewardship of the cultural health and welfare of its communities, through the production of knowledge and creation of meaning.  In reality, it’s all about fully exploiting the strategies, tactics, and language of The Corporation, in the $400,000 Brand New Branding campaign which is all about marketing and money-making.

Society sacrifices its environment, education, and moral stance to just to try to become rich. — Ai Weiwei, preeminent Asian contemporary artist whose unlawful three month detention this spring was completely ignored by the Vsian Vrt Museum.

How have the financial ways and means of the ruling 1% and their ‘logic’ of bottom line greed become accepted or even celebrated as the driving force behind a civic institution whose primary function is putatively cultural and in service of the common, public good?

In the words of one effete cultural critic, “The ideological force of neoliberal culture has been amazingly effective.”

More voices from the inside

A volunteer of the Asian Art Museum notes on her blog Artemisia Speaks the pride that museum staff take in the fact that “Lords of the Samurai” is their second most successful show of all time.

What was the first, and what does it tell us about “what we love,” as she puts it?  Click here to find out.

Volunteer Artemisia makes the point that as far as box office success at the Asian Art Museum goes:  “Orientalism lives!”

Meanwhile, Anne, an educator at another Asian art museum, speaks to her own education staff’s efforts to bring informed, alternative perspectives and counter the stereotypes promoted by Orientalist museum exhibitions.  At this other museum, educators work — unsupported by curatorial staff or leadership — to “counter the institutional voice that assumes that exoticizing the topic is ‘what the people want,'” making the point that “it’s a myth that wrestling with important issues and having a sense of humor and play are mutually exclusive.”

Art Action: Early birds get the educators

Providing educators with the historical context omitted from the show.

Our elegant and congenial outreach staff rose bright and early over the long weekend to make sure each and every attendee of the museum’s educators workshop received the historical context that was omitted from the samurai exhibition.