Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

What  is it like being a professor of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)  at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business when the Occupy movement takes the campus by storm?

For one thing, it makes for some great teachable moments.

Professor  Kevin Sweeney, former executive of Patagonia, began talking about the  Occupy movement with his class on Oct. 5, when protesters began  camping out in San Francisco. But recently, they’ve had to look no  further than the school's own backyard, with Occupy Cal protesters making Sproul Plaza their home base.

From  Sweeney’s perspective, businesses and corporations should not be  surprised at all by the Occupy movement if they are practicing corporate social responsibility.  According to him, businesses should use NGOs and activists to read the  tides of change. Sweeney likes to use a surfing analogy to prove his point.

“When you surf, you reach a point in the wave where you either ride  that wave or you just get hammered by it... You try to find the people there who know the break really well... and  they can say, ‘That bump out there, that’s a big hairy wave, we’ll get  trapped by that one.’...You want to find NGO activists who can look out on the  horizon and see which of those bumps are really going to be big  waves... When you do that, you’re not surprised by Occupy Wall Street.  This is a wave you can’t ignore,” said Sweeney.

And  it has been hard to ignore the action on the UC Berkeley campus. Two  weeks ago, protesters were  met by UC police in riot gear. Several protesters were jabbed with  batons as they attempted to block police from taking down tents that were erected on Sproul Plaza.

By: Denise Tejada, Turnstyle News

On Wednesday, 20 students -- along with a civil rights group, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) -- will file a lawsuit against UC Berkeley administrators, the UC Police Department, and Alameda County Sheriff's officers. The lawsuit is demanding compensation for police brutality and false arrest, and the violation of students' First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights, during a peaceful demonstration on Berkeley's campus on Nov. 9.

On that day, police were filmed shoving and beating protesters, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, on campus during a peaceful demonstration. Some of the students were arrested after the ordeal.

Students were shocked by the treatment they received from police. “A police officer jabbed me three or four times in the lower abdomen,” said Ashley Pinkerton, a UC Berkeley Peace and Conflict studies student. “Each time it was a jolt more than the pain because my adrenaline was rushing so much, so I didn’t really feel that stuff till much later.” Pinkerton found herself standing up against campus police after helping another student who she saw being “strangled” by officers.

Pinkerton has been a supporter of the Occupy movement and has attended the general assemblies in Oakland. She said she's now proud to support the Occupy movement at her school. “I think, overall, just being in something that is so collectively active, it gives you this really righteous feeling...you share something really intense."

Rachel Krantz, Turnstyle News

As students and faculty strike on the Cal campus today, UC regents have announced they will be canceling a meeting scheduled for November 16 at the UCSF Mission Bay campus. The regents cited "a real danger of significant violence and vandalism” as their reason for canceling tomorrow’s meeting. University police told them "rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting." Whether or not these threats to the regents are real, it is true that Occupy Cal had called for a protest of Wednesday’s meeting. Activists say the regents are acting on behalf of the 1%, implementing budget cuts and fee hikes for university students. Occupy Cal points out four board members in particular as part of the problem: Monica Lozano, Dick Blum, Leslie Tang Schilling and Paul Wachter. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

"It's telling that the regents don't want to face people who are calling on them to make the 1 percent pay for re-funding public education - including their own companies, like Bank of America and Wells Fargo," said UC Berkeley doctoral student Charlie Eaton, an organizer with the graduate student employees union, which has worked on the protests with a group called Refund California.

Lawmakers have cut hundreds of millions of dollars from UC's state allocation over the past few years, including $650 million this year alone. Another $100 million could be cut this winter if state revenues fall short as expected.

At the same time, the regents have consistently raised tuition and fees, tripling them in the last decade to $13,218, while cutting campus services.

Three UC Berkeley freshmen won prizes for their extraordinary responses to the On the Same Page contest which challenged students to submit a poem, essay, song, etc. related to the theme of personalized medicine and personalized genetic testing. The theme relates to the “Bring Your Genes to Cal” program, that asked incoming students to submit DNA samples to be analyzed for three specific gene variants. 

The hope was that by asking students to submit their own DNA to be analyzed, students would engage in discussions about personal genetic testing and personalized medicine, according to the UC Berkeley News Center.  The three winners of the contest received cash prizes. 

Juliana Green, 18, who runs with the cross country team at Cal,  is interested in the relationship between nitrite and performance.  “Bring Your Genes to Cal” gave her the idea of creating a nitrite test strip to monitor cardiovascular wellness.  “If she can arrange to manufacture easy-to-use, self-check NO test strips for saliva, she wants to see whether monitoring this biomarker for NO can help athletes, or anyone, regulate their diet,” said the article.  This paper was so impressive to the University, that biochemist Michael Marletta invited her to join his lab and conduct the research.

Josephine Coburn, who tied for second place made a parody music video of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” song and titled it, “Chromosome.”  Throughout the video, the singers describe the different traits of chromosomes - it's worth taking a look.

Christopher Allen tied with Coburn, with his submission of a paper that argues, “In the face of the incredibly exciting but daunting potential unlocked by a new scientific field, philosophy may be the best tool for understanding our place in a rapidly changing world, a world that may not turn out to be as foreign as it at first seems,” according to the article. His paper was noticed by the humanities dean, who was impressed by the connection between philosophy and the future of science.  

Can you imagine being pulled over because police think you look like an illegal immigrant? How does an illegal immigrant look anyway? These are the questions protesters at UC Berkeley were asking on Thursday regarding Arizonan’s new immigrant detention law. Bill 1070 gives authorities the right to detain people who they suspect are in the country illegally.

About 500 people gathered at UC Berkeley’s campus to show solidarity. They were also requesting UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau to make Cal a sanctuary campus.
 

BERKELEY-

BERKELEY-

Faculty, students, and supporters of California public education will be out in force at massive statewide protests for the March 4 Day of Action to Save Public Education. A 21-year-old UC Berkeley student from a working class San Francisco Bay Area family says local communities aren't represented at the university.

 As we've been reporting, student frustration at rising tuition is at a boiling point.

This junior says all the classes in her ethnic studies major are impacted, even as expensive capital projects dominate the university landscape.

BERKELEY, CA—Cal Bears overpowered Stanford on Saturday 34-28 in their 112th big game. Winning their rival team wasn’t the only exciting news. They also made huge academic gains. According to a recent data by NCAA showed that nearly three-quarters of Coach Jeff Tedford’s first recruiting class graduated. This new data shows that Cal’s rate of football players graduating is closer to that of Northwestern and Stanford.

• Seventy-one percent of the Cal football players went on to graduate within the allotted six-year window. That's close to the rate for all of Cal's male student-athletes (78 percent).

• Cal's players graduated at a much higher rate than the national average for major college football programs (55 percent). Just a few years ago, the Bears were below the national average. via The Oakland Tribune

Coach Tedford is not only their football coach, but he is heavily involved in his players' academic life. Each player has a black spiral-bound planner—kind of like a playbook—except that this book keeps track of their class schedules, assignments, and grades.

One chapter is called the "Scouting Report." It provides a place to record all homework, projects, quizzes and tests.
The "Lineup Card" is where players keep their daily, weekly and monthly schedules. Grades are recorded in the "Scoreboard" section. There's a column for "possible score" and a column for "earned score."

But that’s not all. Every Sunday and Wednesday night throughout the season—and other nights during their off season—the players meet with their position coach to review their “academic playbook.”

Previously:

• The Football Diet
• College Football
• The World's Favorite Sport...Except the U.S.

UPDATE 3:30 PDT:

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA-- Hours after a student walkout protesting massive budget cuts in the UC system began at UC Berkeley the protests continue. Gathered here are excerpts and photos from Youth Radio's coverage originally reported on our Twitter feed @youthradio:

@youthradio #UCwalkout they've taken over bancroft way

 For more on the student walkouts see "UC Students Energized By Diversity, Turnout at Budget Cut Protest"

Original post follows after the jump...