Here is the thing about the Wheeler Hall occupation and the protesters being charged with "burglary" for entering in the middle of the night.

The issue of access to Wheeler has come up intermittently in the department for years. Wheeler is an old-school building that the university will not pay to keep up (they want the English department to pay), so it has old-school locks as well. Grad students don't have keys to the building.

When the faculty inquired about this, they were told by campus police that grad students could not be given keys for two reasons.

1. It was a security risk to give out that many keys (we have approximately 150 grads at any given time).

2. The windows in Wheeler Hall stick, so if grads really needed to get into the building they always could.*

YES. I know.

The protesters were doing what campus police told grad students they could do in lieu of having keys.

* blithely ignoring the ADA, of course

[Aaron on the occupation]
[Twitter list]
[Oakland North's article on the protest]