Tent City at UC Davis

Reclaim the Quad! May 18-19 UC Davis

Press Release:

We, the Reclaim the Quad organizers, are holding an open appropriation of public space on the Quad from noon May 18th through May 20th to stand in solidarity against the tuition hikes facing UC students, budget cuts in education, racist attacks on chicana/o/latina/o sisters and brothers in Arizona, and hate crimes against our students of color and LGBTQ communities.
Our use of the quad will provide a public forum through which we can foster alliances with members of different student groups and communities. We will hold political discussions and celebrate our unity with music, art, and dance, and stand in solidarity with workers and students facing cuts in the UCs, state, and worldwide. We stand against the racist immigration reforms facing latina/o immigrants in Arizona and across the country, the poverty draft leveled against these communities to serve in oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the budget cuts nationwide that are taking money from public education and services and expanding the military budget. We protest the culture of sexism on our campus and the homophobia that is attacking our LGBTQ students. And, we decry the privatization of the university that is firing workers, cutting classes, and taking money from academic departments and student services and putting it into the pockets of the rich.
We call on the UC Davis student body and community members to join us in our struggle. Bring your friends, posters, markers, records, and sleeping bags for a night of politics, art, and fun.

For many who came to the tent city, a common ground was the privatization of the University of California, which coincides with the current privatization of public education in several areas of the world. The act of reclaiming "public" space was understood as one of solidarity with students in Puerto Rico, in London (at Middlesex) and around the globe who are occupying their departments and university buildings.
However, it is not just physical space that students, faculty, and workers need to reclaim for public education; it is the diversity of interests, fields of study, and identities that need to be protected. With privatization comes the maximization of short-term institutional profit at the expense of educational quality, well-rounded college experience, affordable access, minority representation, fair labor treatment, cooperative atmosphere, and intellectual diversity. Programs that serve under-represented communities and social justice causes—disproportionately centered in the humanities and social sciences but also reside in the natural sciences as well—have been cut severely under the pretext of their to institutional profit and prestige or unimportance to undergraduate education. Therefore, it is clear that this extreme movement of privatization and prestige-and-profit maximization perpetuate such ideologies racism, sexism, and anti-immigration(ism?) by its de facto effect—if not by ill intention, myopia, or negligence also.
Additionally, these cuts reduce the number of people actually teaching and learning about these issues. In our own struggle at UC Davis this year, we have seen our departments closed (textiles, geography, esl, etc.) and staff and resource centers severely cut. The specific cuts to already underfunded departments and services and especially the tuition hikes make the whole of the "public" space that is our university increasingly inaccessible to minorities and low-income students.
No amount of temporary 'funding' for new administrators, student interns, or services can hide the long term reality that the constant tuition increases (like the ones approved last summer, in March, and on the table again for July) will make it impossible for anyone but the ultra rich to attend the university before long. Virtually all departmental faculty have been pressured to increase their profit value to the university—i.e., to alter curriculum and research agenda—to suit privatization and not educational, social justice, scientific, intellectual, and public-benefit objectives. And now as the Chancellor offers short-term fixes in funding, (which are meant to assuage and quiet the most vocal, articulate actors in the student struggle) we come together to remind our community that all the short-term funding in the pot won't change the long term transformation of the university institution [project of closing the doors of the university to all but the wealthy]. We come to build alliances with students and protesters the world over, and when we skyped with the occupied university of Puerto Rico, they said they were inspired by the occupations at the University of California this school year.