Occupy Wall Street Protesters Shifting to College Campuses

The New York Times, By Malia Wollan, Elizabeth A. Harris, Nov 13, 2011

A group of student protesters gathered in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley
 campus last week.  They had tried to establish an encampment there, but police
confiscated the tents.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Goodbye city park, hello college green.

As city officials around the country move to disband Occupy Wall Street encampments amid growing concerns over health and public safety, protesters have begun to erect more tents on college campuses. 

“We are trying to get mass numbers of students out,” said Natalia Abrams, 31, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and an organizer with Occupy Colleges, a national group coordinating college-based protesters.

Though only a handful of colleges have encampments at the moment, tents went up last week at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and here at the University of California ,Berkeley. Additionally, protesters in California have vowed to occupy dozens of campuses in the coming days.

Last Wednesday at Berkeley, about 3,000 people gathered on Sproul Plaza to protest tuition increases, and many then set up a camp. Demonstrators linked arms to protect their tents, but police officers broke through and took down more than a dozen tents, arresting about 40 protesters.

University officials said they had watched city governments struggle to deal with expanding camp sites and decided to take a stricter line: no tents, no sleeping, period.

“The present struggles with entrenched encampments in Oakland, San Francisco and New York City led us to conclude that we must uphold our policy,” the university chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, and other top administrators said in a statement.

“Our experience with these encampments is that they are never temporary,” Claire Holmes, a university spokeswoman, said. “We’ve had a long-term encampment at People’s Park for 43 years.”

Over the weekend, local governments across the country moved to keep Occupy protesters from establishing that sort of tenure.

In Salt Lake City, permits that allowed people associated with the movement to camp in a downtown park were revoked on Friday after a man was found dead. Demonstrators were given about 24 hours to clear out of Pioneer Park, according to Lt. Scott White of the Salt Lake City police department, before the officers moved in on Saturday night to remove those who remained. The police said that 19 people had been arrested.

That same evening, protesters in Denver were also forced out of their encampment — the second park they have been forced to leave since demonstrations began there this fall. Seventeen people were arrested, the police said.

A similar police crackdown at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis ended with 27 arrests on Friday night, local police said, and The Associated Press reported that 24 people were arrested in Albany, N.Y., on Saturday for remaining in a state-owned park past an 11 p.m. curfew.

But protesters in Oakland managed to outlast the threat of eviction on Saturday, defying the city’s second demand in as many days that they clear out. Those calls began after a man was shot near the protest area on Thursday. On Sunday, demonstrators received a third cease-and-desist notice from the city, demanding they stop camping in city parks.

The mood in Oakland has been thick with tension and anger since Scott Olsen, 24, an Iraq war veteran, was critically injured at a protest in October.

Demonstrators in Portland, Ore., were also able to stave off eviction on Saturday with the help of hundreds of supporters who poured into a city park and nearby street as a midnight eviction deadline passed. About 60 people on bicycles circled the camp, while drumming, dancing, and juggling lent the night a festive air.

On Sunday morning, however, The Associated Press reported that the number of protesters at two city parks had thinned tremendously, and police moved in to empty the parks.  About noon local time, the Portland Police department’s official Twitter feed reported that Lownsdale Square was “clear,” and Chapman Square was “almost clear.” Shortly after, the Twitter feed announced that police had begun making arrests.

The history of encampments at the People’s Park in Berkeley stretches back to 1969, when student protesters seized that plot of university land. In the violent mayhem that followed, the police shot dozens of demonstrators, killing one man.

In the decades since, efforts by the university to develop or alter the park — now used mostly by the city’s homeless — have been met by protests.

Despite that combustible history, the zero-tent policy and the campus police’s apparent willingness to enforce it, the Berkeley protesters say camping is an integral part of their strategy.

Over the weekend, members of the group, called Occupy Cal, gathered tents and tarps to rebuild their camp on Tuesday. That is the day the group has called for a general strike and a mass camp-out at all 10 University of California campuses, 23 state university campuses, and 112 community college campuses.

“Encampment is one of the most powerful forms of peaceful civil disobedience,” said Marco Amaral, 20, a third-year student majoring in political science and political economics who said he was involved in the protests in part because his parents lost their Las Vegas home to foreclosure.

On campuses elsewhere, university officials have taken a more hospitable line.

At Duke University in Durham, N.C., Shreyan Sen, 19, a senior physics major, pitched his tent on a university lawn more than two weeks ago. Between classes, Mr. Sen goes back the four-tent bivouac to run Occupy Wall Street teach-ins. So far campus administrators have been very accommodating, he said.

On-campus camping offers amenities not available to protesters inhabiting city parks, like hot showers, indoor pools and well-stocked cafeterias. “We have restrooms right here, so that’s not an issue,” Mr. Sen said.

The Harvard University encampment, much like the university itself, is highly exclusive. After protesters set up about 30 tents in Harvard Yard last week, university officials closed the gates to the yard, only allowing students with IDs to enter.

“Securing access to the Yard is necessary for the safety of the freshmen and others who live and work there, for the students who will be sleeping outdoors as part of the protest, and for the overall campus,” said the university’s provost Alan M. Garber in a statement.

Harvard protesters set up their tent city a week after a student walk-out of Economics 10, an undergraduate course taught by N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor and former economic adviser to President George W. Bush.

“We think that Harvard is complicit in propagating the ideology that made the current crisis possible,” said camper Amanda Haziz-Ginsburg, a second-year graduate student at Harvard Divinity School.

Back in Berkeley, Mr. Amaral worried that Occupy Cal protesters would have a hard time rounding up a sufficient number of tents. “It’s a hard thing to donate your tent knowing the police are going to take it,” he said.

Malia Wollan reported from Berkeley and Elizabeth A. Harris from New York City. Jess Bidgood contributed reporting from Boston.