Inside Occupy Stanford

In a university library during finals week, a desk, couch and whiteboard usually become tools used solely for study: supplies to keep starved students on point during one of the most stressful times of the quarter.

At Stanford University’s Meyer Library, however, these tools have found another use. The words, “What do you do when you are on the precipice of history?” are embedded into a display with a three-foot long, “OCCUPY,” written on a whiteboard that might typically be used for complex physics problems or inundating group projects.

“The movement is different here,” said Harley Adams, a Stanford student dual-enrolled in a bachelors and masters program. “Instead of saying ‘Oh, I’m going to show up to a city park with a tent,’ I say, ‘I’m going to go chill.’ You end up sitting on this couch, having some food and having a discussion on the future of the economy.”

Adams, a fifth year student, said he is taking 38 units this quarter and has spent the majority of the previous 100 hours in Meyer. During this time he has talked to people about the movement, studied, ate and slept, as well as set up books to mimic tents all across the first floor of Meyer.

“This is a book-less floor of the library,” he said. “So we figured, why not add books?”

Adams said he has no issues with the library and is not protesting it, but is rather trying to draw attention to issues local and abroad.

“We’re trying to bring about social change,” Adams said.

The library occupation is on its 11th day so far. Adams said the strangest thing about sleeping in a library is the flickering lights of the fluorescents and the really warm heaters. “It beats sleeping outside,” he said.

He and others have been sleeping on both the carpeted floor and their adopted purple library couch, all the while engaging interested passers-by in discussion.

“The most important thing (that) I can do and my peers can do is to study, and to study in a critical way,” he said. “One of my favorite philosophers, (Slavoj) Žižek has a famous saying. ‘What we should do is go into a quiet quarter and learn, learn, learn.’”

Adams said that is all he wants to do.

“Right now what we need to do is not to be afraid and… learn about what’s going on and decide to make action,” he said.

The advancement

Adams says the size of the occupation changes hour-by-hour, from just one person when it’s early in the morning and he’s all alone to as many as 10 people during the day to typically 20 during general assembly.

In Monday’s assembly, just 11 attended to voice their concerns. Adams said earlier that about ten people from Occupy Stanford were involved in the port shutdown in Oakland, and that several were still there.

The leading issue discussed by the group was what to do when the winter break kicks in at the end of the week. The majority of attendees said they were leaving town.

Adams said some of the greatest support for Occupy Meyer has come from the librarians, and that when the time comes to leave Friday at 5 p.m. he will.

“We’ll ask if we can keep our free speech wall, and hopefully they won’t erase our board,” Adams said.

The assembly also included two guests from the Stanford Labor Action Coalition, who are circulating a petition via ipetition.com that addresses cuts made for this school year to medical benefits and vacation pay of staff members working at Stanford’s Row houses.

Occupy Stanford voted to support the petition. The group said the Row house issue also integrated concerns of using external subcontractors instead of hiring staff and paying them as well as they used to.

“Hire people, not corporations,” Cabrera said.

The ‘movement,’ abroad and local

According to members, the campus movement stands in solidarity with other Occupy movements, in the Bay Area and abroad, and several involved have been to other occupy encampments.

Carol Brouillet, one of these members, said she lives in Palo Alto’s Barron Park neighborhood and has been discussing monetary reform at Occupy encampments all across the nation, traveling from California to Chicago, and to two settlements at Washington, D.C., as well as San Jose and San Francisco. Meyer Library, though, is “the only Occupy she can bike to” from her house.

“We need to identify the source of the problems (of the economic system) and identify how to fix it,” Brouillet said.

Brouillet said her husband, a Stanford alumni in artificial intelligence, has worked at major corporations abroad and disagrees with many of her perspectives. “He would rather that I do less,” she said. “But I learn a lot from him and he learns a lot from me.”

Brouillet, who has run for U.S. Congress twice under the Green Party umbrella, said she wants people to run as well in the next election to try to “occupy Congress.”

“The existence of the ‘Occupys’ is a real positive,” she said. “The next big thing is to make real monetary reform.”

Unlike Brouillet, Jay Cabrera has specific plans to work with other local Occupy movements, like that of Palo Alto, Redwood City and Mountain View. He has been working closely with Occupy Palo Alto and has made a proposal to join efforts.

Cabrera, who is not a Stanford student, describes himself rather as a “Stanford baby.” The son of a Stanford physics professor, Cabrera said both of his parents describe what he is doing as “important work.”

“This is the first time they’ve ever said that in my entire life,” he said. “Usually they’re like, ‘Get a job!” or ‘Get a career!’ Now that Occupy is happening, they’re saying I’m doing good work. Isn’t that awesome?”

Cabrera said that Occupy requires serious thinking about what society as a whole is doing.

“The problems that we’re dealing with are so huge, there’s no good way to know what the solution is,” he said.

A frequent caller on national and international Occupy phone conferences, Cabrera said he wants to bring more to what is happening.

“What we want changed is not changeable by the current system,” he said. “We need to fundamentally rethink the system. Making demands is not going to do anything.”

Cabrera said he wants society to break from its paradigm of closed systems, removing the “top-down approach” and instead work with open systems that have multiple centers.

“The ultimate thing we need to change is ourselves,” he said. “Every single one of us, including myself, is stuck in the old system of doing things.”

Cabrera went to UC Santa Cruz and studied environmental studies and biology, focusing on plant ecology and restoration ecology.

“When you look at a valley, life looks chaotic, but it’s actually using a fundamental pattern of sustainability and the open system approach,” he said.

Accidental Occupy

Adams said Meyer Library is the only Stanford library open 24 hours a day and the only library fully open to the public, which is one reason why Occupy Stanford chose it as the site.

“The other room [in Meyer] is the all night study room, which is really quiet,” he said. “This room is a locus for testing the will of studying and pressing your corpus. We thought that was in line with Occupy.”

Adams said he has traditionally spent the majority of his time studying in Meyer, which is open 24 hours, like many other students during finals week. He’d eventually accidentally fall asleep, which he refers to as “accidental occupation.” Adams said they jokingly take photos of people accidentally occupying the Library and post them on their Tumblr site.

This quarter, though, sleeping in Meyer is intentional for a core group of the community.

“The older staff and community on campus were waiting on us to do something,” Adams said. “They weren’t going to do it themselves.”

Adams admits that students involved in Occupy Meyer “pilfered cheese” from a JPMorgan Chase & Co. recruiting event the week before, just as “the corporations pilfer students.”

“This is a campus that has so many f­---ing cocktail parties,” he said. “So much food gets wasted. We brought the food here. I’d love it if the homeless community of Palo Alto came here and ate their food instead.”

Peter Lindener, a participant of Occupy Meyer, is working on a paper about what he calls “information theoretic democracy” and how to alleviate conflict of interest in government. He said he rejects any notion that students at Stanford are the “one percent,” and says that students need to get informed.

“Most of the (students) here do not have exceeding wealth,” said Peter Lindener.

In addition to the Chase event, Adams said he and other students also protested a similar recruiting event for Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and have plans to do more of the same.

“You shouldn’t dismiss a campus like this,” he said. “These are the students who are going to work for Goldman. These are apparently the kids who are going to go work for these companies. We have the chance to talk and engage in discourse with our fellow students about the decisions they’re going to make, following in their dreams, in following capital.”

Protesting events like this is just the start of what Adams hopes is more to come.

“If you’re not going to come to the movement ... let’s bring the movement to the people,” he said. “Hopefully there’s a positive transformation and growth of the movement.”