Feature Archives

Every year on April 20, folks gather around North America to celebrate and smoke. UC Santa Cruz has historically had one of the largest gatherings around, a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts, spurred on by UCSC's unique cultural history and the occassional spotlights from outside (like Rolling Stone Magazine a few years ago). Its a big community event - a place where thousands of people can bring a bunch of friends, musical instruments, frisbees, you name it, and just have fun. This year, cops and administrators attempted to intimidate students, but the party went on.

On April 14, 2005 thousands of students and workers at UC Santa Cruz shut down the campus in a coordinated statewide strike by low-paid service workers in AFSCME 3299. The strike, organized by AFSCME, clerical workers in the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), T.A.s in the United Auto Workers (UAW), students in the Student and Worker Coalition for Justice (SWCJ) and others, was one of the biggest actions UCSC has seen in recent years and led to a new, better contract for AFSCME workers within two weeks.

April 14 should be remembered as the day the university ground to a halt. It shows the power that students and workers have if they have concrete demands, solid strategies and a long-term vision for a united university run from the bottom up. April 14 was the result of years of organizing by the unions (particularly AFSCME), as well as students and a few profs engaged in labor solidarity. It shouldn't be seen as some spontaneous event, but as the product of the anger, empowerment, and hope that many in the community felt. Read More and View Photos

bigmammoth writes: The University has required all of its employes to participate in an Online Ethics Briefing. Unfortunately several of the ethics pages went missing from the official distribution. Fortunately some pages have been recovered and posted here. It would be ideal if people could email the missing ethics pages to ethics@ucsc.edu as well as share them online to ensure that future ethical briefings do not accidentally misplace these critical pages again. Read More Satire About UCSC's Online Ethics Briefing

With hundreds of students expected to protest, U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps recruiters announced on April 17th their withdrawal from the Last Chance Job Fair being held at UC Santa Cruz on April 24th. Although the law prevents schools from banning recruiters outright, UCSC students, through massive protests, have effectively prevented recruiters from operating on campus for nearly three years.

With royal fanfare, British Petroleum just donated big money in research funds for UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, and the University of Illinois to develop new sources of energy—primarily biotechnology to produce biofuel crops. This comes on the anniversary of Berkeley’s hapless research deal with seed giant Novartis ten years ago. However, at 500 million dollars, the BP grant dwarfs Novartis’ investment by a factor of ten. The graphics of the announcement were unmistakable: BP’s corporate logo is perfectly aligned with the flags of the Nation, the State, and the University.

On April 5th, over a thousand teachers in the Hayward Unified School District went on strike. Pickets took place throughout the day in front of the 38 school sites in the 20,000-student Hayward district. There was also a noon rally of parents, teachers and other supporters in Birchfield Park.

Free Skool Santa Cruz writes: The police state is global. It extends from the US global war on terror, to the nationwide war against animal rights and environmental activists, right down to the local police crackdown on undesirables -- an effort to "clean up" the streets of Santa Cruz of the young, the very old, immigrants, the unemployed, homeless, the insane, and anyone who resists.

The police and the military are the armed thugs of the ruling class. We offer you another tool to add to your arsenal of resistance... Read More and Download Resources

more resources: Midnight Special Law Collective 510-261-4843 || ACLU of Northern California 415-621-2493 || National Lawyers Guild 415-285-5067