Around 8am on 4/19 all 18 of the students who were arrested during the sit-in of President Powers office were released from Travis Country Jail. The University of Texas is currently pressing criminal charges on the students and is threatning to pursue academic dicipline using Student Judicial Services which could lead to expulsion from the University. Students were sitting-in to protest the University of Texas’s agreements with the notoriously discredited Fair Labor Association, a labor monitor which has done next to nothing to eliminate sweatshop labor conditions.

Students took lessons that they learned in the classes taught here at UT, in departments like anthropology, geography, ethnic studies, sociology, political science, and philosophy and applied them to the real world situation of the conditions of their own education and asked the university to commit to real monitoring agencies under the Workers’ Rights Consortium.  Instead of being praised for their convictions, the administration has sought to vilify them for “trespassing.”

Sign the Open Letter to UT Administration: Drop the Charges against peaceful protesters. We think that it is time for this pattern of responding to protest with police to stop in favor of a policy of active engagement with student concerns.  We demand that the charges against the students arrested be dropped.  We demand that the University revise its policies in dealing with student protesters.  But most importantly, we demand that the university drop its commitment to the Fair Labor Association and actively support the Workers’ Rights Consortium.

Cartoon Provokes Conversation from The Daily Texan on Vimeo.

Occupy UT members called upon students to picket the Daily Texan after publishing a racist comic. Nearly 100 students came to hold down the picket between classes while the Editorial Board apologized for being insensitive and ignorant to the struggles students of color have to go though, on a University that has a history of institutionalized racism. Within a few hours of the protest the Editorial Board gave in to the pickets 3 demands which were widely circulated through an online petition the night before, publicly apologize, denounce the cartoonist and refuse to publish any more of her work, and open up the editorial section to allow students and faculty from the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies to write on the issue.

More importantly, the Daily Texan promised to require all employees to participate in a seminar each semester about the relationship between race and the media. This helps us set a precedent for providing mandatory anti-oppresion trainings for all incoming students, which is a solution that was provided by students of color after the last racist "Round Up" incident. Unfortunatly Dr. Gregory J. Vincent, Vice President of Division of Diversity and Community Engagement refused to implement the solution and tried to push a watered down version of the proposal in which all student organization officers would recieve an anti-oppression training. The Picket was a victory for students on campus, just like the tuition referendum and the vote that proves students don't want budget cuts or tuition increases, especially when UT has one of the biggest endowments and highest paid administrators in the nation. If we keep building on these victories, we can challange all the systemic injustices of the University.

Texas Students Against Sweatshops is a student activist group at the University of Texas at Austin and is affiliated with United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). We meet weekly, currently working on our campaign to get UT to affiliate with the Worker Rights Consortium. We believe that every group members is a leader--we have no officers. We believe that every group members is valuable and has something to teach and to learn, and that in practicing horizontal leadership we can further develop leadership potential in everyone of us.We meet Thursdays at 7:30, MEZ 1.206.

www.tinyurl.com/utusas

UT students deliver their second letter to President Powers to demand for WRC (Worker Rights Consortium) affiliation! After 10+ years of UT refusing to sign onto the WRC, the only independent monitoring organization for our collegiate apparel factories, USAS is layin' down our demand in a big way to tell President Powers we are done supporting exploitative working conditions and want to make UT Sweatshop-Free!

Uproot.it is an ad hoc group of student occupiers, autonomist internauts, social hacktivists, and media militants who make media together and then disseminate it through communication channels, whether that's by taking back the commons or through sharing things on the Internet. Uproot currently has the following projects. More information can be found at http://uproot.it.

1. #chat (http://chat.uproot.it)& #students (students.uproot.it) chat hubs
for uproot and for student occupy movements, respectively. The International Student Movements ( http://ism-global.net) site will also link to the chatroom.
2. #rhizome -- we.uproot.it: privacy-friendly social network for all.
3. #occup2p --- coding collective to build computers for activist-artists
with Linux + free software as well as free wifi mesh network for cities that
will redirect DNS from corporate websites to pro-community alternatives
4. #adblockStreets -- replacing ads with community bulletin boards and art
5. #interfax - link community spaces through fax network
6. #arg - augmented reality (map.uproot.it) -- bulletin board list, edible
plants, abandoned houses, etc. on a community edited map (not up quite yet).
7. #indyportal: aggregated alt.media rss feed publication
8. #pitchplant: the installation of planters with signs in public spaces
that discuss the militarization of these spaces since social upheavals in the
mid-20th century
9. W3/\R-HAUS: a community space in Austin, Texas, USA for groups like The
Challenger Street Newspaper& as a hackerspace open 9 am - 9 pm or people to
collaborate and produce media
10. #mediamass -- hackathons with DJ's and musicians as well as free food
from groups like Food Not Bombs

Follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/uprootit and on Facebook at
http://facebook.com/uproot.it .

This call to action is from the Occupy AISD working group of Occupy Austin.

CEO of Pearson, Marjorie Scardino, will be a "keynote" speaker at SXSWEdu conference!

Picket this Wednesday! Gather at 4 pm at the corner of Cesar Chavez and Trinity.

This year's "SXSWedu" conference features people described as the entrepreneurs of education to be celebrated by the Austin Chamber of Commerce. These so-called "rock stars" of the education "reform movement" include Arne Duncan (Obama's Education Secretary whose Race to the Top program is driving privatization and high-stakes testing mania), Marjorie Scardino, (the CEO of education testing / publishing giant Pearson), and Steven Farr (Teach for America Chief "Knowledge Officer").

These people have not made any improvements in quality or equity in schooling; rather they promote practices that have made our schools more unequal and more driven by out-of-control high stakes testing. We will protest to say: SXSW and its sponsors should not use the SXSW brand to give cool points to private interests who are hurting public education and making money in the process.

We are calling for a picket at the Austin Convention Center while Marjorie Scardino is giving her keynote address.

Scardino is the CEO of Pearson, a massive publishing and educational services conglomerate. It holds a $500 million contract with the State of Texas to administer standardized tests, which have recently come under heavy criticism in Texas. Pearson is also being investigated by the New York Attorney General's office for possible ethical violations for its practices in lobbying for business from state and education officials.

For in-depth discussion of Pearson:
http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/the-pearson-graduate

This call to action is from the Occupy AISD working group of Occupy Austin. More info: occupyaisd@gmail.com

Facebook event:
http://www.facebook.com/events/314278671969087

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