What is a public university?

Is it our laboratories and lecture halls?

Our libraries and theatres?

What makes these buildings

More than monumental tombstones?

Berkeley is the people

who learn here, teach here, and work here.

Faculty who could teach anywhere in the world

But choose to teach at Berkeley.

Students who were told they couldn’t come here

And fought their way in.

Workers working three jobs, who struggled for two years to gain a living wage

And now are being laid off and furloughed back into poverty.

The powers that be have made it clear that this is only the beginning of their cuts.

This walkout is our time to make it clear

that these cuts will be the beginning of our power

to be citizens of this university and state.

Privatization is like feeding water to quicksand

And realizing too late that your house is built on top of it.

What will you give up

To stand on the other side of the glass

Watching the rest of the world cave in?

How far can you run before you too are sucked under?

Warzones from Afghanistan to Richmond

Eclipsed by twitter feeds about Kanye.

What will it take for us to see this everyday war?

To see working class students locked out,

Middle class students locked out,

Students of color locked out

To ask why our prisons lock in

More Black and Latino men

Than our schools are built to teach.

As one of my professors said about this walkout:

“Do not think that this does not affect you

Or that you do not affect it.

Whether or not you choose to act

You are still making a choice.”

The word crisis means a turning point

A moment where we are forced to make a decision

A state of danger, but all change is dangerous.

Now we are forced to choose what that change will endanger:

Us or the status quo

But students are experts at crisis

Our adrenaline spikes and crashes like the stock market.

We live a constant budget crisis,

relationship crisis, roommate crisis,

my family’s far away and in crisis and I’m here in Berkeley? crisis,

a what am I doing in this major? crisis,

a write my final paper the night before crisis because my life is in a state of crisis

and I had to solve another crisis first ——– crisis.

So why are we hurting the people

who are adept at solving our personal states of emergency?

This university is a fractal of potential futures

Living in the minds and hearts of its students, teachers, and workers

So why isn’t the administration talking about solutions?

Instead of only trying to amputate the arms that could be writing them.

I never took a class from a Regent.

But if I did

I bet I could teach them

A lot more about this university

Than they could teach me.

So today we set the due dates.

We assert that another university is not only possible, but necessary.

We stand side by side

With faculty, students, and workers

Across the State

Across the UC,

Across the CSU,

Across the community colleges,

high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, and preschools.

Our problems have the same roots.

Our struggles are connected.

If a crisis is a moment of choice,

then it is time for us to make an educated decision.

Our solidarity cannot be cut.