Cops Off Campus

Students at the University of London occupied a building to stop the university from taking private investment money and closing the student union. Police cleared them out. Some students got hit. Some got arrested. More action’s planned.

The occupy-police-clear cycle is predictable enough. You sit down in a place you’re not supposed to be. That’s kind of the point of it. They come with uniforms and authority and move you. Sometimes it’s rough. Sometimes people get hurt. This time it was rough.

What lingers afterward isn’t the immediate outcome. It’s the question about whether anything shifted or whether the administration just filed it under student unrest and continued as planned. 2011 gets cited constantly whenever London’s streets tense up, like some measuring stick for how far escalation can go. But mostly what people remember is that they did something significant enough to require a police response. Whether the institution remembers is the part you never really know.