March 4 Protests to Defend Public Education
Students and teachers in at least 32 states and as far away as South Africa participated in a March 4 Day of Action to protest cutbacks, higher student fees, and the privatization of education. Estimates as high as the hundreds of thousands made this the largest coordinated student protest in many years.
The actions grew out of demonstrations and sit-ins last fall in Berkeley in response to the University of California Board of Regents decision to raise undergraduate fees an additional 32 percent. The protest rapidly grew in size, geographic area, and political scope. The Day of Action focused on the right to equitable public education from preschool through graduate school, and tied student rights to defense of teachers and other staff.
Ricardo Gomez, a third-year student at UC-Berkeley and founder of Berkeley Students Against the Cuts, was interviewed on Democracy Now!:
"The thing that’s really galvanizing students isn’t just the massive fee increases that students are seeing this semester and are going to see next year; what’s really galvanizing students is the idea that their public universities are being privatized. The different services that we have on our campuses—IT services, bus services, dining services—are facing union busting by administrators. . . . More corporations are coming onto campus to do research that [doesn’t] align with the ideas, the values, of public institutions. . . . And so, as much as this is a battle about fee increases or this is a battle about K through 12, it’s a battle about fighting against privatization, and reaffirming and reasserting the public good."
Marches, sit-ins, and rallies were held at hundreds of California university, state university, and community college campuses, in addition to demonstrations at city and government offices in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, and other cities.
Demonstrations across the country included a sit-in at SUNY Purchase in New York, a mock funeral for public education and health care at the state capitol in Olympia, Wash., and a protest at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at which police pepper sprayed the protesters.