Uncategorized

Comment: Does anyone else have protest fatigue?

May 13, 2010 9:11 am by Frances Dinkelspiel

When I heard the news on Wednesday that:

1)   The organization World Can’t Wait will be picketing the Berkeley Law School graduation at the Greek Theater on Friday to protest the presence of John Yoo on the faculty;

2)   State Senator Gloria Romero won’t be attending the Latino students’ graduation to protest the fact that UC Berkeley is underpaying its custodial workers;

3)   Author Karen Joy Fowler pulled out of the English department ceremonies for the same reason;

4) Ditto for former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg. He won’t speak at the Political Science department graduation ceremonies on May 17;

5)   The students protesting the draconian immigration law in Arizona agreed to end their hunger strike, but then blamed Chancellor Robert Birgenau for making them fast for so long, I thought just one thing:

I have protest fatigue.

This may have been a record year for protests at UC Berkeley, at least since the Vietnam War era. The crippling budget reductions and fee hikes infuriated practically the entire campus. And it seems each week brought a new picket and a new demonstration. Along the way there were a remarkable number of sit-ins, blockades, and street rampages.

While each group of protesters is admirable in its own way, it has become increasingly hard to differentiate between them, or, frankly, to summon up the energy to fully understand their concerns. I am tired, I will admit.

Summer is rolling around. The problems aren’t going away, but the students are.

Fewer students = fewer protests.

Here’s a recap of this busy, tumultous academic year at UC Berkeley:

September 24, 2009 – About 5,000 faculty, workers, and staff walked out of classes to protest budget cuts and furloughs and hold a huge rally in Sproul Plaza. After the protest, thousands of students marched down Shattuck Avenue and briefly blocked traffic.

October 2009 – protests against cuts to library hours

November 20, 2009 – Huge demonstrations on campus; students set off fire alarms in buildings and occupied Wheeler Hall. Forty-one arrested.

December 10-11. 2009 – Students occupied Wheeler Hall, pledging to “open” the university. Police arrested 66 students occupying Wheeler Hall.

December 11, 2009 — A crowd of about 50 students protest in front of the campus home of Chancellor Birgeneau around 11 pm. The Chancellor and his wife were inside. Some break lights and overturn planters. Eight people are arrested.

February 26. 2010 – Students protesting budget cuts and fee hikes swarm onto Telegraph Avenue, breaking a store window and setting fire to a dumpster. Police in riot gear come out to stop them. Two people were arrested. Accusations of police brutality are made.

March 1, 2010 — Hundreds of African-American students block Sather Gate to protest a series of racially-motivated incidents at UC San Diego, including one where a noose is hung in the library.

March 4, 2010 – Day of Action to Defend Public Education. Students, teachers, faculty, and parents from elementary schools to college protest against state budget cuts to education.

March 2010, The ASUC senate passes a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that do business in Israel, suggesting they are complicit in war crimes. The discussions, which continue for months, bring hundreds of students to the hearings.

April 29, 2010 — About 100 students gather at Sather Gate to protest Arizona’s new immigration law. They mimic deportations.

April 30, 2010 – Jewish students protest “hidden hate” on campus after swastikas are found at Clark Kerr campus.

May 3-10, 2010 – A group of students and staff stage a hunger strike outside California Hall. They want Chancellor Birgeneau to denounce new Arizona law, make the UC Berkeley a sanctuary campus for undocumented workers and students, and offer amnesty to the students arrested in the November Wheeler Hall sit-ins. Four students go to the hospital during the strike.

Then there were a number of non-UC Berkeley, but UC-related protests, including protests at various meetings of the UC Board of Regents , confrontations with UC President Mark Yudof, the car fire in front of Yudof’s Oakland house, and more.

Of course, Carl Nolte’s excellent article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle is an compelling  rebuttal against protest fatigue. May 13th is the 50th anniversary of the first major student protest, the one that really ushered in the era of student mass movements. On this day in 1960, students from San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere flocked to San Francisco City Hall to protest hearings being conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The students were not allowed in the hearing room and gathered at the top of the stairs of City Hall. Police sprayed them with high-power fire hoses, knocked them down the stairs, and hit them with batons. U.S. Senators and others connected with Senator Joseph McCarthy said the Communist Party was behind the protests. Of course that was not true and the allegations further angered the students and prompted them to continue speaking out against authority.

14 Comments

Tagged , , , ,
?
  • JNG

    I don’t know about the batons, but can we bring back the fire hoses?
    Maybe that would put a damper on every cause that feels like this is the place to come and vent their emotions at our expense.

  • http://www.davosnewbies.com Lance Knobel

    I don’t agree with every cause that provokes protests, but I think one of the great distinguishing characteristics of UC Berkeley is that there seem to be a large number of students who are passionately engaged in issues broader than their studies, the jobs they may be seeking after graduation, and the location of the best party on the weekend.

    We may not need more protests in Berkeley, but I think the world needs more people like the Berkeley protesters, not fewer.

  • tizzielish

    I am a little confused by Frances’ statement that she has protest fatigue. For an instant, when I first read her statement, that she has protest fatique, I had a flash of a woman participating in many protests at UC Berkeley this year. As I continued to read and think, I realized, her ‘fatique’ is related to hearing about many protests, or covering many protests, or fatiqued by the blur of hearing about one protest after another. She is not tired from protesting. She is tired of hearing about protests.

    If my conclusion, that Frances is tired of hearing about what can seem like endless protests, tired of experiencing a blurry awareness that people are upset about ‘stuff’ and turning to protest to voice their unhappiness.

    What am I really tired of?

    I am not tired of protests. I agree with Lance. The world needs more people like the Berkeley protestors. If more people got mad as hell about the endless injustices in this world, especially those perpetrated on the masses by our public leaders, then there would be a lot less people to worry about and a lot more people to care.

    I am recalling the lyrics to an ‘up with people’ song . . . a group of covertly religious people who tour the world singing about uplift . . . I think the group still exists in some permutation . . . here are the lyrics

    ‘if more people
    were for people
    all people everywhere
    there would be a lot less people to worry about
    and a lot more people who care’

    When our leaders, be they elected representatives, activists who put measures on our ballots like Proposition 13, appointed to administer public institutions like UC, etc, when our leaders make choices that we disagree with, we the people don’t have many ways to express it.

    I don’t have protest fatigue. Each new protest gives me more hope. With each protest in Berkeley over the past year, I hear myself saying prayers of hope. I hope a new protest movement catches on. I hope the people would the passion who protested this past year at UC Berkeley inspires fires of hope all across the country. I hope our local protests serve as a catalyze to a nationwide movement of protests, harkening back to the sixties.

    Remember, in the run up to George W’s Iraq invasion, when millions marched for peace and Bush said he couldn’t be expected to pay attention to protestors, even if there were millions of them. He once remarked that protestors amounted to no more than a meaningless focus group used to test advertising effectiveness. He said he would have to be an idiot to pay attention to such groups. How’d you like that, Frances? Did that fatigue you?

    It fatigued me, to hear our president say that the will of his constituency meant nothing to him.

    And remember how George W. started the practice of forcing protestors into remote zones so the president, and the news cameras, wouldn’t actually have to hear the protestors? Like during the Republican convention in NYC . . . protestors were forced into remote spots, removed from the crowds?

    I much prefer endless protests to silent ones.

    I hope the protestors at Berkeley this year inspire more and more protests. I hope that in the future, people remember that real change in this country begean in 2009 when students and staff protested severe budget cuts at this state’s flagship institution for higher learning, just like I associate protests at UC Berkeley in the sixties for sparking change back then.

    When a group feels disempowered, how can they bring attention to their voice without some protest.

    Rock on, protestors.

  • JNG

    Hi Lance – I appreciate your point, mine is that many of these “student” protests are nothing of the sort, they are originated or attended primarily by outside agitators who find the cozy receptive attitude here conducive to their agenda. Berkeley doesn’t need to make itself the doormat or stage of the world for every fringe cause.

  • http://basiscraft.com Thomas Lord

    On the topic of “protest fatigue” I’ll offer a wholly pragmatist observation: the world, you may have noticed, is on a good path towards going to hell in a hand basket. Economic recovery doesn’t look so certain and there are plenty of deep structural reasons to not act so surprised.

    Therefore, there will be lots of acting out on all manner of issues with some non-trivial threat of a complete dissolution of anything like a civil order.

    It’s a little too early in this game for “protest fatigue” and, for that matter, protests are better than other looming alternatives.

  • Monica F.

    I’m quite disturbed by this incredibly contemptuous dismissal of any and all legitimate protests under the pretext of “protest fatigue.” In other words, the mere fact that other causes have preceded yours is reason enough for your to shut up and not “fatigue” others with your grave concerns. How very democratic.

    We’re living complex and difficult times that are bound to trigger healthy debate and disagreement. But as someone else commented, that’s the beauty of Berkeley, that there are still enough people who care about the great issues of our times, or at least of this campus, to make their views know. If anything, I find the widespread disinterest and apathy in the general population far more troubling. It doesn’t matter if I agree with any individual protest or not. Or any, for that matter. But I applaud the spirit of those who have the courage of conviction.

    Personally I suffer far more from apathy fatigue than protest fatigue.

  • http://francesdinkelspiel.com/ Frances Dinkelspiel

    I say at the end of my piece that when I read the Chronicle story this morning about the students who protested the House Un-American Activities meeting 50 years ago, I reconsidered my fatigue.

    I do, however, believe that much of what has happened at Cal this year is not being taken seriously because it happens so often. The point of protesting is to get attention, to make the world stop and notice an injustice. Well, I think that many politicians and decision makers have become so numb to sit ins, arrests, etc. that they have lost some of their effectiveness.

    And I do think it’s ridiculous that the unions know they can throw up a picket any time, any place to make sure Democratic politicians don’t come to campus. There are complex negotiations over each picket. University officials call up union leaders to negotiate when and where protests will take place. Gloria Romero could have done more good talking at the Latina students graduation ceremony than she will by staying away.

  • Ellen

    @Monica, I didn’t get the sense the author was trying to discourage anyone from free speech or the right to protest, she was merely stating that she is weary. I find it hypocritical that you say you support anyone who protests anything, but tell the author to “shut up and not ‘fatigue’ others with your grave concerns”.

  • Monica F.

    @Ellen — You completely misread my statement. Please go back and read it again. I never told the author to shut up. I’d never tell anyone that. Quite the opposite. My point was that SHE (implicitly) tells people to shut up just because so many others have protested already.

    Ms. Dinkelspiel: You’re right that in practical terms each cause appears diminished somewhat by virtue of it being one among many. But that assumes that the merits of all causes are identical. They’re not. Causes can’t be lumped together like grocery items in a cart. (This is the line for 15 items or less. This university can only take 15 protests or less.) If even one of 50 protests is for a legitimate cause, it has to be recognized as such. No doubt the people protesting for that cause would much prefer they were the only group. But life is not so neat. I know you didn’t try to take their rights away, but by lumping everything together as reason for “fatigue” you diminish a tradition that should be valued in this country, not dismissed. Our nation was born out of protest.

  • http://basiscraft.com Thomas Lord

    In addition to what Monica F. says I would observe that the student protest movement of the 1960s arose out of a plethora of causes. That is, it didn’t start with one large, group ideological uniformity that then organized into protest – rather, it started with lots of separate causes, the protested, and then found areas of common cause or at least common action.

    You can see some parallel in the Tea Party movement. There, too, if you start picking out individual voices you’ll hear a very diverse set of causes – sometimes a self-contradictory set of causes. Yet, they are becoming unified and rallied around a common set of slogans and actions.

    It just seems to be how these things work.

    I still maintain that protest per se has lost much potential to cause change, these days. It’s been neutered by over-saturated and highly formulaic media coverage and by improved technologies of crowd control by law enforcement.

    It’s one thing when, shortly after the first TV satellites go up we get the “All You Need is Love” broadcast and footage of cities around the world exploding in protest. It’s another thing when such shows become commonplace, seasonal even, with the burning controversies reduced to differences in opinion about how many people actually showed up.

  • Pingback: Class of 2010: The First Class of Post-Recession Graduates | WorldWideBlog | WorldWideLearn.com

  • Pingback: UC Berkeley chancellor declares it a “difficult year” – Berkeleyside

  • Transparency

    UCB senior management is loosing its caoacity to lead University of California Berkeley. UCB Chancellor Birgeneau Loss of Credibility, Trust
    The UCB budget gap has grown to $150 million, and still the Chancellor is spending money that isn’t there on expensive outside consultants. His reasons range from the need for impartiality to requiring the “innovative thinking, expertise, and new knowledge” the consultants would bring.

    Does this mean that the faculty and management of a world-class research and teaching institution lack the knowledge, impartiality, innovation, and professionalism to come up with solutions? Have they been fudging their research for years? The consultants will glean their recommendations from interviewing faculty and the UCB management that hired them; yet solutions could be found internally if the Chancellor were doing the job HE was hired to do. Consultant fees would be far better spent on meeting the needs of students.

    There can be only one conclusion as to why creative solutions have not been forthcoming from the professionals within UCB: Chancellor Birgeneau has lost credibility and the trust of the faculty as well as of the Academic Senate leadership that represents them. Even if the faculty agrees with the consultants’ recommendations – disagreeing might put their jobs in jeopardy – the underlying problem of lost credibility and trust will remain.

  • Pingback: After last year’s tumult, UC officials optimistic | Berkeleyside