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NARR: These students haven't met, but each one of them organized anti-war events Thursday, from UC Santa Barbara to Occidental College in Los Angeles to Columbia University in New York.
ACT: My ame is Ellen McClure, I'm a second year at UCSB
ACT: My names is Phil Barney, at Occidental College.
ACT: Blair Mosener, I'm a senior at Barnard College.
NARR: Students say protests ranged in size fom 1,000 in Santa Barbara to a few dozen at UCLA. Ellen McClure says students at the Santa Barbara rally marched toward a nearby freeway, completely blocking an access road to campus, and they were stopped by police. She says a student and a women's studies professer were arrested, and that the entire women's studies department closed for the raly. McClure says that after the police run-in, students marched to the administration building, where the doors had been locked.
ACT: When we got there, the crowd was still really, really into
it, kind of pounding on the doors, but just really excited, and
wanted to be heard.
NARR: Anti-war events at Occidental College in Los Angeles ran from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., says organizer Phil Barney.
ACT: I heard from like leaders and people that were involved,
and weren't that it was the most beautiful thing that
happened on campus in years.
NARR: At Columbia, four fire alarms suspiciously went off nar the noon start tiem of the protest. Organizers had been encouraging students to "strike" against classes to join them. A university spokesman said no one has been caught. When the rally began, students gathered in the bowl at the center of Columbia's campus, at the foot of Low Library. Columbia public safetly said the crowd numbered between 300 and 400 students. Mosener stood at a microphone on the steps above the students:
ACT: We are the majority, we are not a marginalized like tiny
group of wackos who are against this war.
NARR: Another California organizer, Eric Garner, helped organized a "die-in" at UCLA. Participants were contacted via text message, and when the signal was given:
ACT: A whole crowd of people dropped, spread themselves
out and for the next, you know, 20 minutes or so, anyone
that was walking by had to step over all of these bodies. You
couldn't just, like, walk, there were too many people to be
able to walk by and ignore it.
NARR: Students who participated in Thursday's events say they organized around tools like Facebook, which allowed them to find out who was protesting and where. The "Feb. 15" protestors also organized around a Web site set up for the occasion, where they are now keeping track of post-event news coverage and first-person accounts. Denouncing U.S. "imperialism" seemd to be the hot topic of the day. The protests were much smaller than their inspiration, four years ago, but students say protesting in "solidarity" is a step in the right direction.