Transcription:
Regents divest $3.1 billion
The decision is a victory for militant student direct action and as such, signals not the end but a new beginning for the use of such tactics to achieve further goals. The struggle is not over.
By JOHN HURLEY
The decision by the regents to divest the university of its stockholdings in companies doing business in South Africa is the first major victory of the reborn students movement at the university. The Campaign Against Apartheid wishes to stress that divestment is not the final goal of radical activism on this campus, and that the recent victory must not be seen as the final victory of the movement. Divestment gives us proof that the tactics of direct action that the movement has employed are effective in achieving the goals of the movement. The campus movement has many more struggles to fight, in the university and elsewhere. We have won a significant victory, but we must keep in mind that apartheid has not been overthrown in South Africa. The people of Central America or the Middle East are not safe from our country's military machine, nor has America itself become an equitable society as a result of the university's change of heart on divestment.
This divestment, the largest so far by any American institution, represents a blow to South Africa's economy, and is a small but significant aid to the liberation forces there. It will nudge American companies toward disinvestment in South Africa. Perhaps of equal importance is that just as people in South Africa read of our shantytown (which was front page news in South Africa), freedom fighters there will read of our victory at UC Berkeley and can only be encouraged by the knowledge that progressive people here support their struggle.
Through the use of militant mass actions, the anti-apartheid movement was able to force a concession from a university administration traditionally contemptuous
of student interests and wishes. Divestment was won by a movement that worked independently of the institutions of authority that govern the university. The efforts of former Student Regent Fred Gaines could not bring about a serious consideration of divestment by the regents. On the other hand, a year and a half of confronting the university with blockades, sit-ins and the oddly threatening tactic of shanty building forced the regents to ponder the cost of maintaining the explosive situation their insistence on support of apartheid had created on the campus. The magnitude of the possible confrontation awaiting the university in the next school year must have been truly frightening to the regents.
In the struggle for divestment, many students have discovered that the regents' recalcitrance was symptomatic of a fundamental lack of democracy in the university. We have found that the university is governed by authorities who have no interest in the beliefs and wishes of the academic community. Last year, the regents were unmoved by the Academic Senate's hedged support for divestment; neither were they swayed by the strong support of the students for divestment, as long as that support was expressed in words and not in actions. A few days before the building of the first shantytown, the regents refused
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UC holds 11 responsible for demo
By Jim P., Ben P.
Eleven Berkeley students who opposed official university policy have been indicted by the administration and now face possible punishment. The eleven demonstrated against the university's investments in corporations dealing with the apartheid government of South Africa The dissenters advocated divestment of their school's funds from those business, by participating in the first "shantytown" protest outside California Hall, the building housing the chancellor's offices. Activists erected the shantytown to dramatize the intolerable conditions of the black South African majority which the U.S. corporations tacitly accept.
Ten of the eleven were seized by police late Monday night, March 31, along with 50 other students and their supporters. Within thirty-six hours after they were taken into custody, over 2000 students and activists returned to California Hall to rebuild the shantytown protest That night police from a dozen different departments netted 91 persons in a nighttime raid on the protest site. Hundreds of others slipped away clustering on either side of the arrest scene.
By morning the shantytown lay in ruins again. The ever growing throngs, however, prevented a quick police exit. With the day's first classes only an hour away, material and human blockades held the officers and their prisoners until the police forced a path clear for the sheriffs buses. Police smashed their way through the wall of human bodies, swinging clubs and kicking those who fell to the ground. The wounded streamed across the Sproul Plaza while the two buses loaded with arrestees creeped to Bancroft Way. Armed guards occupied campus until the end of the week, waiting to clamp clown on any further dissent.
The chancellor later issued a pro-divestment statement in an attempt to place himself on the side of his opposition. The Alameda County district attorney who zealously prosecuted previous anti-apartheid protestors with little success in court, deferred and
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Date: September 3, 1986
Attribution: Between the Lines, September 3, 1986, f 308s.B565, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.