Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

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

Hide the following 2 comments

Index on Censorship is a CIA front

28.02.2012 22:09

Index on Censorship are not to be trusted by the activist community under ANY circumstances. Index on Censorship was a CIA front operation funded through a conduit called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, who also published the anti-Communist magazine Encounter. Both Index and Encounter were co-founded by Stephen Spender, who resigned from Encounter when the CIA link was exposed, but who was I believe happy to continue working for Index despite it's being funded from exactly the same source. According to later Encounter editor Melvin Lasky's wikipedia page, "Lasky was best known for his role as Editor-in-Chief of Encounter... In 1967, it was revealed that, unbeknownst to Lasky, Encounter... had been funded covertly by the CIA via the Congress for Cultural Freedom (aka the Association for Cultural Freedom). Despite a lack of evidence that those in charge of the magazine were aware of the source of the funding or that the CIA had ever pressured editorial decisions, the public perception of the Encounter was damaged."

 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

There's not much info about this on-line, but I found a few bits and pieces -

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


Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech