UC Berkeley Tolman Hall Occupied

Update:

-Around 1pm, Police began physically throwing students out of the building.

-Around 50 students occupying tolman.

3:05pm – still going.

4:30pm – holding a meeting.

5:10pm – still going.

6:00pm – Message from inside: “Hi all! Folks are still here holding the building open, having discussions, watching movies, etc. PLEASE COME OVER AND SUPPORT. EAT DINNER HERE, STUDY HERE, MEET PEOPLE. BE HERE AT 10PM WHEN WE WILL NEED THE MOST FORCES. We are on the 1st Floor in the class rooms as well as [outside]“ (read more)

8:00pm – One student arrested in the hallway of Tolman while talking to the police! The details are unclear, but the one student arrested was standing outside of the meeting and was approached by police. Folks in the meeting heard screams for help, only to see him being tackled to the floor. Police claim this student had assaulted an officer earlier that day.

9:08pm – 2nd Arrest after being put in a headlock, blood on floor! Police have warned protesters to leave (without giving a formal dispersal order), but POLICE ARE BLOCKING EXITS!

9:17pm – Occupiers are leaving the building.

9:30pm – As the group of protesters leave campus, a bus full of police arrive and begin following the protesters.

9:45pm – Protesters announce to return to Tolman at 10am tomorrow (Friday).

Initial Statement:

We’ve come together today to call for a halt to the destruction of our public schools, and to insist that education be universally accessible and free. But today we are not simply pressing demands; we’re also working collectively to reclaim our campus, to make it a little more public and a little less estranged from us. Starting this afternoon, we’re opening up a university building to be used as an organizing and educational space; for teach-ins, film screenings, planning meetings, and whatever else we students, workers, and debtors at large decide will help us more effectively resist austerity.

We’ve decided to begin by reclaiming the seismically-unsafe Tolman Hall. In August 2011, The Daily Cal reported that in the midst of the “financial crisis”, unsafe buildings across the 10 UC-campuses would have to wait before they could be retrofitted. The administration has shut down 13 classrooms in Tolman Hall, which we are here to reclaim and transform. The UC administration has engaged in an actuarial risk assessment and decided that students should not be in the building but that workers are still required to labor there daily. While buildings like Tolman Hall are being closed throughout the UC-campuses, the University continues to build multimillion dollar buildings that are nominally public. Tolman Hall stands as a ruin of public education. We want to call attention to the ways in which the dismantling of public education and public services is manifested by the defunding of public infrastructures on our campuses and in all classrooms across this country – buildings and classrooms that are not simply “brick and mortar” but are the spaces of collective action and institutional memory. Today, we move to remake these landscapes of inequality and to open up a new center of resistance.

We invite all (with the exception of police officers and UC administrators) to join us in reclaiming and holding this space open so that we may begin to dream and imagine together how we can re-build a truly public university on the ruins of this. (via reclaimUC)