By Rachel Sadon
Negotiations between students barricaded inside Wheeler Hall and campus police and administrators just broke down, as police sawed the hinges off the door and entered the room where the students are hold up.
Reports from the Berkeley campus describe students trying to arrange negotiations, and police moving in to break down barricades and make arrests.
Havoc broke out on the campus this morning in response to yesterday’s 32% increase in tuition fees in the UC system.
Wheeler isn’t an administration building — it’s mostly classrooms for English classes. But it’s right in the middle of campus, so the protest action has taken over the central campus area.
Rachel Brahinsky, a former Guardian reporter who is now a Berkeley grad student, called in with this report:
Tensions are escalating. Rows of riot cops are marching toward lines of students at the barricades. They come up to the students and barrel through. A student has been injured with either a rubber bullet or a taser, we’re not sure which.
I have personally witnessed two incidents of students getting beaten badly.
None of this is provoked. The students have linked arms, but nobody has taken any hostile action toward the cops.
According to a spokesperson for the students, Callie Maidhof, the action started early this morning. “Around 5 a.m. a group of students put barricades up and sometime before 6 a.m. police arrived and arrested three people who were unable to get up to the second floor.”
She added that bail was set at $10,000 for two of the students and $16,000 for the third (he refused to provide a DNA sample), who gave the statement “I think it’s ironic that we’ve been charged for burglary when it’s them that are stealing our futures.”
The two initial demands of the estimated sixty locked-in students were to rehire the 38 custodial workers that were recently laid off by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and to grant amnesty for all protesters involved in the events.
As the day progressed, the occupiers added two more, 3) to enter into good faith negotiations with the current business occupants of the Bears Lair Food Court and 4) to reinstate the Rochdale Berkeley student cooperative lease in perpetuity.
But of course, this is also partially the result of the furor on campus over fee hikes.
Professor and member of the Solidarity Alliance Lynn Hollander commented, “Though I would not have recommended an occupation like this, since it has happened, I am enormously proud of the students and particularly such by their initial demands. It is an act of enormous solidarity and generosity.”
According to Maidhof, the occupiers consistently requested negotiations, however, their initial calls to police were not returned. A team of faculty, including Professor Ananya Roy, helped arrange the negotiations with the students. A lawyer was initially prevented from entering the building but eventually participated in the talks, which have since broken down.
There have been several incidents of recorded police violence, including at least two protesters with hands broken. Zhivka Valiavicharska, a graduate student in the department of rhetoric, had her hand resting on a barricade and was hit by a police baton. She was taken to a hospital and will need reconstructive surgery.
This was the second occupation of a building on campus this week. On Wednesday, students locked themselves in to the administration building where capital projects are based, but the confrontation was resolved in a few hours.
Professor Scott Saul empathized with students’ frustration, “It’s totally understandable that students are very angry at this moment. Fees are skyrocketing, services are being slashed and they are concerned that the core mission of the university is rapidly eroding.
The website of the Daily Californian, the campus paper, is down after getting deluged, but the staff is still putting out twitter reports here.
