Open Letter in Defense of UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Library
Join the Occupation to Save UC-Berkeley’s Anthropology Library!
2nd floor of AAPB (Anthropology & Art Practice Building, near Bancroft + College, Berkeley)… Join by 9pm for our night meeting and to sleep over!
Tell Chancellor Christ to keep the library open! (Sample email)
chancellor@berkeley.edu & cchrist@berkeley.edu
CC your email to bamncalifornia@gmail.com to share with the occupation!
BAMN Open Letter:
BAMN stands whole-heartedly with the students and campus community members leading the fight to defend UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Library. Chancellor Carol Christ is trying to close this precious public resource, impacting not only UC Berkeley students, but other important research, including crucial projects by and for California’s Native communities.
The commitment of UC Berkeley’s students to preserving a fully-staffed, accessible, public anthropology library on our campus makes clear that the greatness of this university stems from the fact that it is OUR university and we are determined to fight for it.
Our past struggles have taught us how to win. BAMN was part of leading the successful fight to save the Anthropology Library from a similar attack eleven years ago. This proud history can be replicated now and can result in another victory. UC academic workers just won a historic strike, the largest higher education strike ever conducted in the nation. When we fight we can win.
In 2012, after several days of occupying the Anthropology Library, and after protests, marches, and occupations in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, BAMN and other UC-Berkeley students, faculty, and staff defeated an Administration attempt to slash library services. We won our demands to restore the library hours to the previous Fall 2011 levels and hire a full-time new librarian to permanently staff these hours. University Librarian Tom Leonard signed an agreement written through a democratic process with the students and community occupiers that fully met the occupation’s demands (see agreement language below).
Three vital factors made the 2012 occupation unique and successful: 1) The faculty supported the students’ leadership and the occupation, but they did not interfere with the occupation or the negotiations. 2) The students and community members who stayed in the library made it 100% clear that we were committed to maintaining the open-ended occupation until we won our demands. We would not be moved. 3) Our occupation came on the heels of a massive series of protests, marches, and occupations in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. These protests aimed to stop an onslaught of policies of austerity and privatization at UC Berkeley and defend the free speech rights of students against police brutality by UCPD, ordered by then Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. The immense power of that movement carried over into the Anthropology Library occupation. We need to act on that power again now.
This is our university, our library, our research, our education. We want an Anthropology Library at UCB that respects the histories of our indigenous and immigrant peoples and ensures they are accessible to study by the people themselves. UC Berkeley’s Anthropology students and department are transforming the fraught history of the discipline into a beacon of study that supports the lives and histories of our surrounding communities.
Our movement is making its own history. We will not let anyone turn us around.
In Strength & Solidarity,
Yvette Felarca
Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary
2022.03.28, revised 2023.03.07
