University of Birmingham Students Defy Occupation Injunction
IMC Birmingham | 22.02.2012 00:00 | Education | Public sector cuts | Repression | Birmingham
On Wednesday 15th students from around the country joined students from Birmingham to protest the injunction the university has obtained banning all forms of occupational protest for 12 months. The university has been heavily criticised by human rights groups including Amnesty, Liberty and the Index on Censorship calling the actions aggressive and censorious. Sabina Frediani, campaigns co-ordinator for Liberty has been quoted as saying “Universities should be places where ideas and opinions can be explored and they should be engaging with the students in their care – not criminalising them. How exactly will taking out court orders against protest encourage future applications from aspiring undergraduates?”
The march started at the guild of students and several attempts were made during the march to gain access to various buildings on campus but were stopped by the overly aggressive security who had the backup of police, on standby around the campus. The route of the A to B march was quickly abandoned in favour of something a bit more impromptu and resulted in a demo outside the building where the disciplinary hearing was taking place for Simon Furse, the only student in the country to be disciplined by a university for taking part in an occupation. The disciplinary had already been disrupted once earlier in the day as a group of students stormed the room and read out statements.
The march continued on in an impromptu fashion after this until a door with no security was found, at which point the march became an occupation, breaking the injunction. The building in question just happened to be the University’s Corporate Conference Centre in Staff House which was occupied in November, the first in this latest round of occupations.
On the Newswire: Calling all students, take back your campus | Occupation - Defending the Right to Protest | University of Birmingham Corporate Conference Centre occupied - over 100 students | Take back your campus
Related Features: Your Education is Being Sold: Occupy the Academy! | Student’s squat gatehouse at University of Birmingham | Birmingham University Students Occupy Corporate Conference Centre | Council House & universities occupied: students reject cuts and fees hike |
The demonstration, supported by NCAFC was a protest against the actions taken by the university against the freedom to protest on the campus and the human right of freely expressing discontent. This is something the university management has been widely criticised over, the repressive regime headed by vice chancellor David Eastwood, has received a fair share of bad publicity recently including anger over Eastwood’s ever increasing outrageous salary (he’s one of the highest paid VC’s in the country) compared to the pay cuts most of the staff are facing and the tripling of tuition fees faced by students.
It was also an act of defiance over the disciplinary action taken against Simon Furse, who was the only student identified, thanks in part to the collaboration of the student Union President Mark Harrop with university management, as taking part in the previous occupation. As a result he is the only student in the country being disciplined and victimised by their university for taking part in an occupation. The same occupation which also resulted in the injunction being obtained. The disruption of the disciplinary, which had the power to expel him, resulted in it being cancelled meaning the disciplinary process must now restart from the beginning.
By re-occupying it shows the students don't fear the university's scare tactics or the prospect of a disciplinary and are prepared to break the injunction, face arrest and all the consequences that go with that.
Two students were arrested but were later released without charge after spending six hours in police cells
IMC Birmingham
Comments
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Index on Censorship is a CIA front
28.02.2012 22:09
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_J._Lasky
There are 2 things to point out about that passage - first (whether this can be evidentially proven in retrospect or not) Lasky knew perfectly well where the money was coming from, as did everyone who worked for Index and Encounter, and second that one of the "many publications" was the CCF funded was Index on Censorship. Index and Encounter commissioned contributions from many high-brow liberal and leftist intellectuals (Q: How to get liberals behind a Fascist program? A: Pay them!), and believe me in principle I've not nothing against people who oppose Stalinism and dictatorial Communism, but if anyone doubts the political agenda CIA sponsorship ultimately served, the CIA funded Index and Encounter at the same time that the CIA-sponsored Junta was rounding-up and torturing left-wing dissidents in Greece, and at the same time the CIA was supporting General Franco's murderous Fascism in Spain.
After the CIA link was blown the CCF stopped funding Index but last time I looked the Ford Foundation - another CIA front - were still funding Index. Ironically you won't find ANYTHING about the Congress for Cultural Freedom or the CIA on Index's Wikipedia page - maybe someone from Index censored it?
Alot of the actual content in Index is OK, so it's hard to say how much of it is deliberately false, but I know genuinely great liberal writers whose credibility has been completely fucked among the ordinary people of the authoritarian countries they were writing about because no-one from Index had the integrity to mention to them that the publication they'd been writing for is CIA linked.
Frances Stonor Saunders "Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War" (UK) 1999 and "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" New Press (US) 2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonels
http://www.voltairenet.org/article30039.html
Newswire
Index on Censorship and the CIA
28.02.2012 23:16
1. There's a download of the left-wing investigative magazine Lobster, which talks about the CIA / CCF funded magazines, referring to "Index On Censorship" as simply "Censorship" -
http://www.8bitmode.com/rogerdog/lobster/lobster11.pdf
"The Congress for Cultural Freedom... was set up in West Berlin in 1950 as the CIA's major cultural offensive during the cold war... an international organisation of anti-communist intellectuals, CCF sponsored seminars, congresses, and funded a string of prestigious magazines and information services including:
1. Preuves Informations
2. El Mundo en Espanol
3. Encounter and Forum Information Service
The groups round Encounter and the Forum Information Service, a low-level feature service*, formed the centre of CCF activities in Britain. In 1965 the CIA decided to shift Forum to a new identity as a supposedly straightforward commercial firm, to be called Forum World Features... Directors of Forum World Features were:
• Samuel Culver Park Jnr.
• Walter Avery Kernan
• Thomas Coolidge
• Murray Mindlin
Lobster goes onto say that Murray Mindlin "was a shareholder of the original CCF-backed Forum Information Service. He moved to FWF as secretary in 1965. In 1966-67 he was editor of the magazine CENSORSHIP sponsored by the CCF. Later he became secretary of the British Pall Mall Publications which was then owned by Frederick Praeger in the U.S. (Praeger with extensive publishing links to CIA.) Publisher and front for a number of CIA books and publications". Lobster 11 pages 50 and 55 (Murray Mindlin's real first name was Meir, btw)
* meaning a news agency, or intelligence organisation if you look at it from another point of view
2. There's a download available from the Harold Weisberg archive at Hood College USA of an article called "Asset Unwitting - Covering the World for the CIA" by Russell Warren Howe, More Magazine, Oct 1978 -
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/C%20Disk/CIA%20Forum%20World%20Features/Item%2001.pdf
"In 1965, the Congress (for Cultural Freedom) gave Mindlin funds to start another enterprise, a quarterly magazine called CENSORSHIP, which investigated overt and covert limitations on free expression around the world. Although most of the articles concerned communist and other authoritarian regimes, these were carefully balanced by pieces on thought control in Japan, or on press taboos in America or western Europe [illegible]... Did Mindlin think the Congress was just a private foundation program, or did he actually know it was a CIA front? Interviewed in a London hospital bed in 1976, he told me "I should have guessed". He claims that he was successfully duped, but he says it with a suspicious absence of bitterness or irritation. He was more bitter about being fired".
Westy