Where:  UC Riverside, University Theater

When: 10:00 am- 5:00pm , May 25, 2012

In light of the recent protests across UC campuses including Berkeley, Davis, and UC Riverside on January 19th, 2012, many feel the imperative to publicly respond and engage in a dialogue about the state and future of protest and policing on UC campuses. It is hoped as well that the symposium will address the function of policing and explore alternatives models for dealing with violence, maintaining social order and creating a system of community accountability.

Continuing the discussion from part I of this event, come listen, learn and engage with a variety of UCR student activists, faculty, and guest speakers as they discuss these topics; addressing the ways in which police have functioned in the past and how they currently interact with the UCR student and faculty body as well as the greater outside community. Several speakers will be presenting on current issues pertaining to protesting and activism here on campus and how the police and administration have responded in the past to such actions. The keynote speaker for the day will be political activist, scholar, and author, Angela Davis.

The event is free and open to all.

**Early arrival is advised to obtain your seats**

Public parking is available on campus for $8 for a day pass

Program for the Event:

10:00 – 11:45
Speakers:
Pat Morton, Chair of the Art History, UCR
Jennifer Doyle, Professor of English, UCR
Shaheen Nasser, UCR undergraduate student
Taher Herzallah, student activist & Alumni, UCR
Dylan Rodriguez, Chair of Ethnic Studies, UCR

break for one hour

1:00-2:45
Greeting by Dean Stephen Cullenberg of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Science
Speakers:
Farah Godrej, Associate Professor, UCR
Ken Ehrlich, Artist/Lecturer, Art Department, UCR
Randall Williams, independent scholar and author of Divided World: Human Rights & its Violence
Mike Davis, Professor of Creative Writing, UCR
Gina Dent, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC

Question & Answer period followed by coffee, tea & refreshment break

3:00- 5:00
Live Performance by Faze Lucciano – hip hop artist/producer
Speakers:
Vorris Nunley, Associate Professor, English, UCR
Brittnay Proctor, Alumni, UCR
Martha Escobar, Assistant Professor of Chican@ Studies, Cal State Northridge & UCR Alumni
Rachel Herzing, Development Director, Critical Resistance
Angela Davis, Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UCSC
Question & Answer

Guiding Questions for Panels 1 & 2:
What has been the history and function of policing in our communities and on our campuses?
Should the university campus be a sanctuary free of administrative and police repression and surveillance?
What is the relationship between administrative power and policing? How has the administration
functioned to enhance or delimit dissent on our campus?

Guiding Questions for Panel 3:
How can we create safer and more secure communities and campuses that are free from police and economic violence?
What alternative forms of accountability and justice can we implement and practice to better serve all members of our communities?

Organized by Setsu Shigematsu

Co-sponsored by: CHASS Dean’s Office, Center for Ideas & Society, Ethnic Studies and the Media & Cultural Studies Department

Contacts: geoff.cohen@ucr.edu, setsus@ucr.edu, laura.lozon@ucr.edu

Photo source: occupyeverything.org

RIVERSIDE, CA.— A massive student protest erupted at UC Riverside Thursday after hundreds of demonstrators gathered to protest rising tuition costs.

Students from as far away as Berkeley and San Diego came to join in the demonstrations.

The students were protesting the ongoing tuition hikes as well as other budgetary related measures, such as the steady increase in the Regents salary despite budget cuts.

The students were also asking the Regents to extend the very limited public comment section of meeting a mere 20 minutes so that concerned students could effectively convey their demands.

At which point, the students successfully disrupted the Regents meeting by staging a sit-in protest.

The students made the following statement while linking arms, “We the students, ask that the regents open their meeting to a public forum.”

The group of demonstrators then began to list their concerns and invited the regents to join in the people’s assembly.

UC officials left the meeting room within minutes.The Regents switched their meeting to another room in the building.

Once the demonstrators left the Regents returned to the room to resume the meeting, this time with no public access.

Later in the day, nearly 100 officers from the Riverside Police Department and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department joined 100 UC campus officers already outside the Regents meeting.

At one point during the protest, police begun to fire pepper sprays bullets and rubber bullets at the demonstrators.

Several individuals were hit with the bullets, a number of other students claim to have been hit by batons during the confrontation.

One student, Anthony Lascano was struck by the pepper spray balls. He told the Press-Enterprise, “I saw another woman protester getting touched by officers, so we moved one of the barricades we were using over to defend ourselves against the police. They started pulling the barricade away, and one of them opened fire with the paint gun.”

Press-Enterprise has a video of the clash that shows one protester being dragged away by police around the 1:40 minute mark.

UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White told several media outlets that he blamed the sit-ins and arrests on a handful of overly aggressive students.

The organizers and supporters wrote the following letter regarding the demonstration:

Dear Students, Faculty, Staff, and Community Members,

We are writing to have our voices heard and call people to action to defend public education. Our futures are being mortgaged in order to maintain bloated administrative salaries and further privatize critical social services across this state, country, and around the world.

In the past decade alone the UC has seen a 342.2% increase in tuition and fees. This trend directly corresponds with a period of exorbitant administrative growth and devastating cuts to instruction, support services and staff, and other critical UC programs. On December 13, 2011 Governor Jerry Brown announced another $100 million in cuts to the UC system, which brings the total to $750 million this fiscal year alone.

The annual fees for attending a UC were $3,859 in 2001-2002; now they are $13,218, and estimated to increase substantially within the next four years. This trend runs completely contradictory to the 1960 CA Master Plan which calls for tuition-free public higher education in this state. Quality, accessible public higher education is a cornerstone for establishing social and economic equality on local to global levels and as such demands our active support and protection.

Our public institutions of higher education are being actively privatized and glutted by regents, trustees and administrators who are deeply invested in large private business interests. These people and the interests they represent want to continue profiting from a drive to remake our public institutions in the image of private-for-profit models.

We are asking that all of us continue to take a stand and fight back to defend our public institutions against the betrayal of many of those charged with their protection. As the students, faculty, and staff who run California’s public colleges and universities, it is our responsibility to assert every day that these are OUR SCHOOLS and that we are not powerless to further the mission of maintaining affordable, accessible and quality public higher education not only in this state, but around the world. An accessible educational experience is important for people everywhere to be able to obtain if they so choose that we might construct a more equitable, just and peaceful world for everyone.

The UC regents are invested with the responsibility of “managing” the UC system. They have insistently refused to engage in constructive dialogue with students, faculty and staff on critical issues that have been repeatedly brought to their attention. Some of them are personal friends and/or business partners of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or other influential politicians and that is precisely how they obtained their initial appointment as regents. A vast majority of the current regents have no professional background in public education and a corresponding majority of them maintain direct ties to business interests that seek to develop financially profitable relationships with the UC and other public institutions.

Banks and other corporations get bailed out and we get sold out, time and again. The regents’ silence in Sacramento fits the destructive model of privatization that they have in mind for the UC. As part of this agenda, it also fits their interests to raise the salaries of administrators even as they tell the rest of us that we need to “continue making sacrifices.”

We are the instruments of change and the power to create it lies in our hands. Enough is enough. We will let our voices be heard and continue to demand that the UC regents and administrators be held accountable. Please join us for a day of non-violent protest at the regents’ next meeting, which is scheduled to take place at UC Riverside on January 17-19, 2012. A day of mass mobilization to defend public education is being called for Thursday, January 19, 2012 at UC Riverside. Come join us as we continue the fight to defend and maintain quality and accessible public education not only in this state but around the world.
Sincerely,

Concerned Students, Faculty, Staff and Community Members of UC Riverside

Please click the link & sign the Regent Reform petition:
http://www.change.org/petitions/uc-regent-reform

Palestine Awareness Week is an effort to educate the campus on the Israeli- Palestine conflict. The group seeks to present the truth on the ongoing conflict and present the withheld facts to the public;  to promote justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people.

The group advocates:

• An end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.

 • The establishment of either a fully independent and viable Palestinian state in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or of one secular, democratic state over all of modern-day Israel and Palestine.

• An end to Israel’s system of apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as its system of discrimination against the Arab population within its own borders.

• A solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.

Monday, May 2nd the group presented Ambassador Edward Peck to speak on the ongoing Israeli- Palestine conflict. Ambassador Peck  spoke at length about U.S. relations with Middle Eastern countries. He  focused on U.S. Foreign Policy toward the Israeli- Palestine conflict and how it has had a detrimental effect on peace-making in the region.

Peck stressed that due to several factors the American public is largely unknowledged in regards to the Middle East. Everything is based on “perception” and American preception of the Middle East is largely far from veracity.

He argued Americans lack knowledge about the Middle East because we live in isloation and we are powerful country, which leads the population to feel secure and self content and extremely ethnocentric. Consequently, U.S. foreign policy looks out for its own national interests, not the best interests of another state.

In the context of peace, Ambassador Peck stated “If you were to look at a map of wars over centuries and millenia you would see that virtually every part of the world has been over-run, invaded and occupied by peoples of different languages, histories, cultures and religions. Up until WWII many countries were stilled pacified such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, only within the past few decades attaining independence and ‘peace’”.

Ambassador Peck argued that you cannot logically have peace while being occupied it is simply unattainable, the situation is Palestine a prime example of this phenonmenon.

As far negotiating Ambassador Peck  claimed this as virtually non-existent between Israel and Palestine. He stated, Al-Haq who works with the Palestinian negotiation team claimed there is no negotion going on only begging on the side of the Palestinians.

Peck maintained that Israel has no intentions of negotiating with Palestine and never has. There are currently “526 obstacles” in the West Bank, their main purpose: Security? No, harassment.”

On Wednesday, May 4th Rabbi Yisroel Weiss spoke on the Palestine and Israel conflict.

The Rabbi made it a point to discern between Judeaism and Zionism. Rabbi Weiss claimed that Judeaism has existed for thousands of years while Zionism is a fairly new ideology created in the past 100 years.

Zionism, Rabbi Weiss argued that Zionism was created by a non-religious European faction that sought to create a Jewish state. Zionism is a form of nationalism, a political ideology not a religion, and particularly unrelated to Judeaism.

Zionists use the Torah, the Rabbi claimed, as its deed to the land; continually, they turn to the holy text as a legitimization for their right to the territory.

In actuality, the larger Jewish population rejects Zionism and the legitimacy of the state. He explained that Jewish communities have in fact thrived in practically every Arab country in the past, until about 100 years ago with the creation of Zionism.

Ultimately, Rabbi Weiss urged the peaceful dismantling of the state of Israel as the logical and moral solution to the conflict.

Disney’s lecture is titled “Women as Peace-Builders.” She is best known for her many documentaries and her work as the founder of Peace is Loud, an organization that supports female voices and encourages international peace-building through nonviolent means.

Currently, she is working on a five-part television series, “Women, War & Peace,” for broadcast on PBS this year. The ground-breaking series will focus on women’s strategic role in the post-Cold War era. It will feature unreported and moving stories of women in Bosnia, Columbia and Afghanistan and how the post Cold war dynamics of globalization, trade, and arms have created a “new type of war”.

Where: UC Riverside Alumni and Visitors Center

When: Thursday, May 12th at 4p.m.