- As the April 12th construction groundbreaking ceremony for the controversial UCB Jacobs Hall site at Ridge and Le Roy, community outrage grew about the planned destruction of a beautiful redwood grove, the damage inflicted to the neighborhood’s historical character, and major concerns about the privatized funding in general and Qualcomm’s untrustworthiness in particular. Instead of addressing the concerns of the community transparently, the University cowardly transferred the ceremony to a location that was undisclosed to protestors, intentionally suppressing their first-amendment right to express legitimate grievances publicly. Over the past several weeks, they have utilized typical tactics such as protestor intimidation, massive police presence, and lying about the project timetable. After the ceremony they moved quickly to level the site, leaving a heartbreakingly desolate scene. Caring activists returned several days later to honor the fallen trees and plant new ones in their place, expressing a renewed commitment to preserving this as forested open public space for student and community use. Now it is time to ramp up the efforts to educate one another about the many problems surrounding this project, and mobilize the community in order to prevent the University from moving any further forward with this contentious development. Please join us this Monday May 5th from 12-5pm for a day of teach-outs, organizing discussions, planting, volleyball, and picnicking. Below you will find more information about the issues that have been raised with this project.
- Neighborhood preservation groups and community members have cried out that this project further damages the historic character of this north-side region, both due to the increased exposure of Soda hall’s north face after the tree removal, as well as the addition of Jacob’s Hall. The volleyball court served as an important community building resource for Computer Scientists and others, and its removal represents a loss of valuable outdoor public common space. The redwood trees provided an excellent shady space for students to congregate for study and discussion, and the sturdy well-spaced branches could afford an exhilarating and safe climbing experience. This redwood grove destruction echoes the callousness shown by the University when they removed the Memorial Oak Grove in 2008 despite passionate and convincing please about the importance of saving this unique and sacred large-tree grove, and in spite of the Berkeley laws which prohibit the removal of large Oak trees within city limits. The University has the nerve to offer an offensive token concession that they will use the tree’s body to manufacture some of the building’s furniture, which only serves as a greenwashing measure while addressing none of the real concerns.
- Paul Jacobs is providing $20 million for the Design Institute from his family’s Qualcomm money, which is problematic due to a number of serious ethical and legal concerns. UC Regent Sherry Lansing is suspected of serious conflict of interest violations due to involvement with brokering UC investment deals with Qualcomm while simultaneously serving on their corporate board. The San Diego based company is potentially untrustworthy as a partner because they are under scrutiny for allegedly colluding with the NSA to design illegal and dangerous backdoors in their mobile phone wireless chips, and they are also the focus of a major anti-monopoly probe by the Chinese government. Even without definitively proving the criminality of Qualcomm, one should be quite concerned about the erosive effect that corporate privatized funding arrangements have on the University’s integrity and culture, and also suspicious that our public funding has been intentionally slashed over the decades in order to justify the encroachment of corporate entities into our precious public sphere.
- You are encouraged to express your condemnation of the Jacobs Hall tree removal and privatized funding arrangement in as many venues and formats as possible. It is crucial that we succeed in reaching out to more students, faculty and community members in order to educate people, inspire deep discussion, and mobilize around the possibility of preserving this space for both trees and people to enjoy without the intrusion of a contentious building. Feel free to join us this Monday May 5th from 12-5pm for a day of education and action, and stay tuned for more events throughout the week and month. We wish those lovely old trees were still with us, but we look forward coming together in their honor and moving forward with love and creativity.
- Sincerely, The Open University www.CalOpenU.org
- The Open University is a working group that was born out of Occupy Cal in November 2011, that has continued to use diverse tactics to address the crucial issues identified by this populist activist coalition. We believe in integrative big-picture activism, and are passionate about helping create more community, transparency, wisdom, sustainability, and balance in the world. We stand firmly against inequality, exploitation, discrimination, brainwashing, oppression, torture, militarism, privatization, corporatization, surveillance, colonialism, ecocide and genocide. We coordinate research about historical and current critical struggles which implicate our University, and arrange teach-outs by students, faculty and community members about repressed radical topics in outdoor spaces on campus. We reclaim public common spaces in service of coalition building, discussion facilitation, and as venues for direct action in the name of positive change. We also perform hard-hitting political guerrilla theatre in high-impact environments, which viscerally inspires the public to ask tough questions, and challenges the acceptability of the administration’s behavior in high profile spaces that they are accustomed to dominating. We are an open group of trust-worthy, dedicated, and experienced activists who welcome collaboration with anyone who genuinely cares about saving the world.
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