What Do We Want? Lots of Stuff! When Do We Want It? Now!

A series of student protests at the University of California last month centered on repealing a 32-percent increase in tuition. But for some, tuition was just the beginning.

As demonstrators at the Santa Cruz campus staged a multiday occupation of an administration building, they issued a 35-point laundry list of demands. Many of those items went far beyond the scope of the tuition increase and, for that matter, the authority of university administrators.

Among the demands: Stop all campus construction, impeach the university system’s president and abolish its governing board, permanently disarm campus police, keep the campus child-care center open, and forgive all student debts.

“Everybody kind of piled on,” says Don Kingsbury, a Santa Cruz graduate student in politics who acted as a spokesman for the protesters. The four-hour meeting to come up with the demands, he says, was “messy and long and contentious.”

However, the democratic process that produced the demands, which were later whittled down to seven items, was inspiring, he says. “We had anarchists working with the College Democrats club, and they were able to somehow come to a list that they could all agree on.” (The protest, like those on other campuses, ended without any significant concessions being granted.)

At Davis, where student protesters have occupied buildings several times in the last few weeks, demands were few. They included an official apology for one arrested protester and favorable terms on a cooperative-student-housing lease.

Brian K. Riley, a graduate student at Davis, calls the divergent messages on different campuses “birth pangs” of a new student movement. He hopes to see a systemwide convention to help bring everybody together.

“What you’re seeing is a lot of constituencies trying to make their voices heard,” he says, “and that’s to be expected in an organic movement like this.”