Posted February 25, 2010
This page, which we’ll continue updating from time to time, is an attempt to aggregate sources of information that will help you keep up with what’s happening in California university struggles.
When occupations, strikes, and major protests are in progress, the best way to follow them from afar is often through Twitter or Facebook. If you’re on twitter, you can follow the following lists:
ca-education-struggle list – maintained by a (G)SOC supporter
cacrisis list, maintained by Angus Johnston, a student movement historian who also writes the studentactivism.net blog
Twitter hashtags are also a useful tool for following what’s going on in the movement moment-by-moment. If you’re logged into Twitter you can click on this search and save it for yourself. If you’ve been hiding so far under a rock that you don’t have a Twitter account, here’s a collection of hashtag searches in a very readable format. (You will have to refresh periodically.)
For daily writeups, movement strategy, and analysis, it’s time to move past Twitter into the wilds of the blogosphere. If you use Google Reader, you can subscribe to this bundle. Most of these blogs are activist blogs. However, the bundle also includes some blogs by academics who regularly analyze the political economy, budgetary politics, and institutional functioning of academia, particularly in California, UCOP’s official information stream about the budget, and a few other sources.
A few highlights:
Teach the Budget is a collection of resources put together by activists at UC Santa Cruz. It is a good starting place for communicating about what’s happening with people who aren’t already activists.
OccupyCA, “the mother of all California occupation blogs.” They will often live-blog occupations, direct actions, strikes, riots, and militant protests around the state. They also cross-post major stories from other occupation-related blogs.
Studentactivism.net, maintained by Angus Johnston, “a historian of student activism and student government.” He works hard to keep up with daily and weekly events, and usually does some summation and analysis based on different sources and viewpoints.
“They Pledged Your Tuition” is a series of articles by UCSC Professor Robert Meister about UC’s use of tuition as collateral for construction bonds. Meister also wrote a new open letter in response to the 2010 tuition increase, calling attention to the centrality of student debt in university budgeting.
Independent Media Centers provide a key source of news and activist events:
www.indybay.org/california/ www.indybay.org/ www.indybay.org/santacruz/ la.indymedia.org/ sandiego.indymedia.org/Socialist Worker has regular, original reporting and analysis from all over the state you won’t find aggregated elsewhere. Well worth reading.
If you know of other important resources that ought to be included on this list, please leave them in the comments or email them to j_b_cannon@yahoo.com.
last revised December 2010