Today starting at 8:00 am PT, a general strike, coordinated by the Occupy Cal movement, is being held at the University of California at Berkeley, historic home of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
Cal’s Occupy Movement began last Wednesday November 9, spurred by the rise in tuition fees and the high costs of public education throughout the state. Today’s open campus strike is in response to the brutal use of force by campus police during last Wednesday’s Occupy Cal demonstration, where an arrested protester was told he had no rights to an attorney and a UC associate professor participating in a peaceful human chain surrounding the campus Occupy Movement was forcibly dragged down to the ground by her hair. There were many more incidents of police aggression.
Today’s general strike will be highlighted by the Mario Savio memorial lecture at 8pm by UC Berkeley public policy professor and former U. S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in conjunction with Tuesday’s Open University Strike and Day of Action. It was originally intended for Reich’s lecture to occur an hour before the statewide board of UC Regents were to conduct their monthly meeting, however that meeting was cancelled on Monday, the rationale being that the regents were warned by UC police fearing for the regents’ public safety due to — ironically — recent campus police actions against the protesters.
According to the campus newspaper The Daily Californian, Occupy Cal protesters reached out to Reich and the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture and Young Activist Award Board of Directors last week to request that the lecture — titled “Class Warfare in America” — be moved from the Pauley Ballroom in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building out to the steps of Sproul Hall, and both parties agreed.