Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began as an encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011. It has since evolved, with protests moving into new cities and in a number of different tactical
directions.

College campuses around the country are one place where organizing has been injected with new energy. OWS invigorated a student fightback against the growing power of big business, both on and off the campuses—a power that comes with budget cuts, tuition increases, and attacks on working people. But new organizing since late 2011, by public and private university students alike, reintroduced some of the basic questions that all emergent movements face: “What do we want?” and “How do we get it?” There appears to be a growing consensus around the first question—students  want to leverage their power to build a student movement in solidarity with the broader aims of OWS. Yet how to do that is still being worked out. To date, the Occupy movement on college campuses remains a relatively loose network that lacks a clear target for a national campaign.

Student activists are simultaneously pursuing strategic objectives in two arenas: off-campus student solidarity work with OWS encampments, local labor movements, and poor communities; and organizing on campuses to fight back against tuition hikes and the general privatization of colleges and universities. As the student movement evolves, it will be critical to build a national campaign by adopting tactics that link students with struggles, both on and off the campus, that focus on a coherent set of targets.

Organizing Outside the Campus Walls

University students make up a core element of OWS. In a survey of 301 Zuccotti Park protesters, 25 percent identified as such.1 As one student activist reported in her blog, “The student aspect of OWS cannot be overlooked. For years, all I heard was that my generation was apathetic, that we were out of touch with reality, that there were no battles left for us to fight. The last two months have proved that wrong. Young people realize what is going on in the world. We know that we have been cheated out of the futures that we were promised.”2

But college students not only act in support of the folks stationed in urban encampments or even the movement’s broader goals. Like OWS itself, students are in the process of identifying a number of concrete areas to put their organizing energies into.

Solidarity with OWS

In the two U.S. cities with the most Occupy activity, Oakland and New York, students have been front and center. Hundreds of students from college campuses throughout the Bay Area participated directly in the so-called 2011 Oakland general strike, which consisted of a massive march to the Port of Oakland from Ogawa Plaza. While the city was far from completely shut down, many businesses were forced to close their doors. And, by many accounts, the events of the day were successful, with many local unions—including SEIU Local 1021, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, ILWU Local 10, and the Oakland Education Association—expressing support. In New York, students organized a student walkout/march on October 5, 2011. The march temporarily shut down several avenues and streets, and later met up with a larger pro-OWS march consisting of community and labor groups. It was primarily the result of organizing by students at the City University of New York (CUNY) campuses, New York University (NYU), and the New School. That student convergence served to establish a relatively well-organized network of local OWS student activists. Using an all-city listserve as the primary mechanism for engaging in cross-campus organizing, the student network hosted all-city student assemblies that took place every Sunday for the next few months in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. The assemblies created spaces for students to air grievances about issues such as educational debt and tuition  hikes, debate strategy, engage with the public, and build support for student activism and OWS. And—just three days after the NYPD raided and destroyed the nearly two-month-old encampment in Zuccotti Park—New York City students participated in N17 (November 17th), a larger day of action that included a student march that managed to halt business as usual in one part of the city. Five thousand students were estimated to have been in attendance.3

Solidarity with Labor

On the West Coast, students were active in two port shutdowns in Oakland (Oakland’s port is the fifth busiest in the U.S.).The aim was to “Shut Down Wall Street on the Waterfront.”4 The first occurred during the general strike and consisted of about ten thousand people. The second shutdown was partly sparked by the firing of twenty-six port truckers who wore Teamsters shirts to their anti-labor workplace in Southern California, and partly a show of solidarity with an ILWU contract fight in Longview, Washington. While the ILWU did not officially sanction the blockades, individuals within the union—such as ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman—expressed messages of solidarity. Students also rallied behind port shutdowns in Portland and Seattle with similar aims. In New York, students are working with Teamsters Local 814 at the Sotheby’s auction house. Sotheby’s locked out its art handlers and is pushing them to make major concessions in their contract before they’re allowed to return to work. Several students from New York campuses became very involved with the struggle, in some cases even participating in direct action, such as disrupting auctions.

Community Organizing

Most recently, students have been involved with anti-foreclosure activism. This involvement has been driven by a larger shift in OWS activity, rather than by an independent effort on the part of students. OWS issued a national call to occupy homes in late 2011 to stave off impending evictions at homes that were likely to be foreclosed on. From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Atlanta, activists have worked in solidarity with poor communities to protect the places where working people live. In a low-income neighborhood of Atlanta, OWS protesters saved a church from foreclosure.5 Similarly, in a Brooklyn neighborhood primarily composed of people of color, protesters helped families re-occupy their homes and resist evictions.6

Organizing on the Campus

OWS has rekindled campus-based organizing as well. Funding sources for higher education are increasingly unreliable as state legislatures facing budgetary and taxation constraints dismantle them. University administrators, like legislative officials and those in business, argue that cuts and tuition hikes have to be made because of the broader economic crisis. But students reason that if banks caused the financial crisis, and the financial crisis caused the budget crisis, then why should students, often attending public universities, be the ones to pay for it?

Activism on Wisconsin campuses was reinvigorated months before OWS. The reaction was largely against the Budget Repair Bill and Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on public services and working people. The first event, in part built by the graduate student union on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus, was a nearly two-thousand-person march to the Capitol building on February 14, 2011. The march delivered a valentine to Scott Walker that both professed the participants’ love for the University of Wisconsin and argued that the state should give it proper funding.

OWS itself drew on the approach and core concerns of the Wisconsin occupation in February and March 2011. According to Adrienne Pagac, a graduate student at Madison and co-president of the Teaching Assistants’ Association (AFT Local 3220), the occupation of the State House included many of the elements seen in Zuccotti Park—an information station, a lending library, child care services, a medical station, and lots of pizza.7

The current wave of tuition increases is a crucial element of the new austerity regime within higher education. Proposals to resist this trend are nearly ubiquitous on public campuses, with groups like the Student Labor Action Project and United Students Against Sweatshops organizing protests and occupations on campuses like the University of Central Florida and Rutgers.8 And this isn’t simply an American phenomenon. Sixty-four public universities in the United Kingdom will be able to increase their annual tuition to £9,000, up from a previous maximum of £3,290. Organizing is currently underway. Recently, the Minister of Higher Education was “mic checked” by a group of Cambridge University students. And in Montreal, more than thirty-five thousand students marched to protest fee hikes of 75 percent over the next five years.9

Campus Occupations

Tent occupations on campuses have been one response to austerity. The University of California (UC) system is embracing fee hikes of 81 percent that would increase instate tuition to more than $22,000/year on its campuses. This past fall, around three thousand people gathered in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, the birthplace of the 1960s free speech movement, to protest tuition increases. Afterwards, many set up a camp, but it was dispersed by the evening and then quickly re-established. But UC-Berkeley administrators, again, sent in more than one hundred officers from three agencies with a bulldozer and batons to tear down the encampment. Two arrests were made and about twenty tents were removed.

An even more aggressive display of force occurred in the well-publicized UC-Davis case. There, a group of non-violent protesters, demonstrating in solidarity with the students at Berkeley who were dispersed, was repeatedly pepper-sprayed by officers in riot gear. The image of Lieutenant John Pike casually spraying a cloud of orange pepper into the faces of sitting protesters rapidly earned meme status on the web and contributed to the UC strike, in which nearly sixty colleges around the country participated in solidarity actions. At Baruch College, a CUNY campus, a daylong rally against tuition increases culminated in a fierce back-and-forth between students and the police, ending in fifteen arrests. As a result, Occupy CUNY organized a mass action of several hundred people in support of the Baruch students.

Teach-ins

Teach-ins have also become prevalent. Students are struggling to reshape their campuses into venues that foster discussion and collective education. NYU4OWS, which emerged out of an October 5th rally in support of OWS, has played a leading role in organizing teach-ins in NYC. Its brainchild, The People’s University, has had regular events featuring discussions on finance, labor, hip-hop, and much more. It is an experiment in democratizing university space and has served as a way to expose students to ideas that they are not finding in their classrooms.

Debt Strike

Student debt has also played a big part in OWS campus organizing. By late 2011, total outstanding student loan debt surpassed $1 trillion. Making matters even worse, the prospects for finding a well paying job once students graduate are bleak. In such a context, students involved in OWS are comparing the heavy debt they carry from college into the workforce to indentured servitude. To make the point loud and clear, in late March approximately three dozen students were arrested during a protest in front of the student loan provider Sallie Mae’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

However, the group Occupy Student Debt proposed a solution to the problem—don’t pay back the money. Once it obtains one million signatures, the group proposes to launch a debt strike—although they are very far off the mark as it stands. While the student loan campaign comes the closest to a national campaign with a clear target, it faces major challenges. Firstly, student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. The federal government, and other lenders, will take invasive measures to go after outstanding debt. They will garnish wages, take borrowers to court, and dock tax returns, ruining credit scores in the meantime. Secondly, since these loans are government guaranteed, a million-person debt strike is essentially passing on costs to the federal government, and eventually the average taxpayer, rather than to the private centers of wealth that are the real targets of OWS. These issues compound the difficulty of this approach. But while the campaign is risky for those that choose to default, mass default could wield significant leverage.

Challenges and Prospects

There can be no doubt that OWS has reinvigorated campus activism. It has both strengthened existing campaigns and been the catalyst for many students to become involved in politics for the first time in their lives. Still, student activists face many challenges.

Tactics that prioritize mobilizing people around diverse concerns associated with corporate power, both on and off campus, are the backbone of the student movement. Yet identifying a clear target that can transform a loose network into a more coherent national movement remains an ongoing challenge. While there is no clear single direction available for the student movement right now, and there are many equally worthwhile causes around which to organize, students face hard choices about where to put their energy. When students in the OWS movement negotiate between these competing tactical approaches in their own activism, they should choose those tactics that are able to both organize new participants into the OWS movement and yield substantive gains. If the broad goal of OWS is to challenge, and ultimately restrain, the power of corporate America, it needs to speak to the needs and experiences of ordinary Americans, both on and off the campuses. And it needs to do so in a way that identifies a target at the national level. Whether such a campaign will materialize within the context of occupying homes, occupying student debt, or some other national issue—remains to be seen.

 

Notes:

1. See “Occupy Wall Street Survey
Results, October 2011,” Fordham University
Center for Electoral Politics and
Democracy, available at www.fordham.
edu/images/academics/graduate_
schools/gsas/elections_and_campaign_/
occupy%20wall%20street%20survey%20
results%20102611.pdf.
2. See Rebecca Nathanson’s blog,
available at http://rebeccanathanson.
wordpress.com/2011/11/20/
reflecting-on-ows-and-n17.
3. Student solidarity work with OWS
encampments has also exploited more
institutionalized channels. For instance,
the University of Washington Student Senate
approved a resolution, 51-26, that supported
the principles of OWS (not surprising
given Washington State Governor
Chris Gregoire’s proposal for a 15 percent
cut in state money for education during
the next legislative session). See Katherine
Long, “Occupy Protest Sparks UW Debate,”
Seattle Times, November 24, 2011, available
at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
html/localnews/2016849776_occupyuw25m.
html.
4. Gavin Aronsen, “Will Occupy Shut
Down All West Coast Ports?” Mother Jones
December 10, 2011, available at http://
motherjones.com/mojo/2011/12/
occupy-oakland-west-coast-port-shutdown.
5. “Occupy Atlanta Takes on Bank to
Save Historic Church from Foreclosure,”
Huffington Post, January 13, 2012, available
at www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/01/13/occupy-atlanta-foreclosed-
church_n_1205470.html.
6. “Occupy Wall St. Joins Fight against
Foreclosures,” video available at http://
therealnews.com/t2/index.
php?option=com_content&task=view&id
=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7685.
7. From Adrienne Pagac’s correspondence
with the author.
8. See the websites of the Student
Labor Action Project and United Students
Against Sweatshops, available at www.
studentlabor.org and http://usas.
org/2011/12/23/top-eleven-2011.
9. “35,000 Students March against
Tuition Fee Hikes in Quebec,” Coop Média
de Montréal, November 11, 2011, available
at http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/
video/35000-students-against-tuition-feehikes-
quebec/8928.

New Labor Forum 21(2): 50-55, Spring 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/12 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.212.0000008