Protesters briefly brought Thursday’s UC Board of Regents meeting to a halt, though demonstrations throughout the day never reached the scale of last year’s Nov. 15 Day of Action.
The meeting, which took place at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, was the third and final day of the regents’ November meeting.
Thursday’s protest began following an all-night encampment on the UCSF campus staged primarily by student protesters, evoking memories of last fall’s Occupy Cal demonstrations, when protesters set up tents on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.
Partway through the meeting, about 10 protesters stood up from the audience and eventually halted discussion with chants through a human microphone — a method popularized by the Occupy movement in which people around the speaker echo her words to the larger audience. Protesters chanted, “No cuts, no fees, education must be free!” and “Whose education? Our education!”
Shortly after the protesters began chanting, UCSF’s police department issued an ultimatum to either leave within the next five minutes or be arrested.
Faced with the prospect of arrest, the students linked arms and chanted their way out the door.
“It wasn’t worth it, considering the meeting would go on regardless,” said Alana Bradley, a UC Santa Cruz freshman who has been arrested before for civil disobedience. “I believe there are times when it is worth it risking arrest, but this was not that time.”
Last November’s regents meeting — which was inadvertently scheduled in the midst of Occupy Cal protests — was rescheduled due to fears for public safety.
“People naturally associate (our protest) with the Occupy Wall Street movement,” said Kelsey Hill, a UC Santa Cruz freshman and a participant in Thursday’s demonstration. “I do want to separate these two. This is not about Wall Street — this is about trying to get education for everybody.”
After they left the meeting, the demonstrators joined a group of protesters who had not been allowed into the conference building and had been demonstrating in front of it. The two groups then marched through the streets surrounding the campus.
After finishing a circuit of the campus, several Occupy Cal representatives announced plans to hold a general assembly meeting and set up an encampment on Sproul Plaza that evening.
By late afternoon, a small group of protesters had migrated to the UC Berkeley campus and set up two tents.
Campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said the administration was aware of the encampment and was monitoring the situation.
Although turnout was not as big as some expected, the protesters on Sproul remained hopeful that their efforts would have an impact on the future of higher education at the university.
“We were successful in delivering a strong message to the regents and in letting the regents know that UC students won’t tolerate tuition hikes, and we demand that they genuinely advocate for us,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Ian Saxton, a participant in both Thursday’s protest and Occupy Cal.
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I would disagree with Ian Saxton’s view. Such a small protest does the opposite of sending a strong message to the regents that students won’t tolerate tuition hikes. Now the regents are more likely to think that students don’t really care about hikes, because the protest efforts were so feeble. Maybe that is why they passed a budget that two state politicians said would result in tuition hikes.