The bathrooms, they said, could not have locked themselves. 

Two dozen of them were posted up in a large room in the front of Nelson Hall. The cloth curtains, 10 feet wide and effective, blocked outside light and peeping toms; the rows of chairs were a rookery for small groups that constantly formed and broke apart. Supply runners from outside brought in food that they piled on two plastic folding tables in the back; they brought bread and granola bars and candy and floss and trash bags, and they brought news from outside. An uneven rhythm bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the front, constant shouting broken up with occasional yelling. The nest was nice.

If only they could figure out a proper place to shit. The buckets in the closet, they said, were not cutting it. They elevated the experience by lining them with trash bags and filling them with cat litter, and everyone that used one enlisted someone to stand outside the half-closed closet to stop other people from shitting in the bucket. But the camaraderie they doubtless created by pooping as a team didn’t distract them from the hours-old poop and pee that crept up a little closer to the rim of the bucket every time it was used. There were three working bathrooms across the hall, and they could not use them. They blamed the administration for locking them, accusing them of employing siege tactics. It made them very, very mad, and they talked about the bathrooms almost as much as they talked about the reasons why they were dug into the building deep as a bloodthirsty tick digs into the meaty part of the thigh, why they hid every bit of their flesh with sunglasses, gloves, and surgical masks, why so many of them wore checkered keffiyehs and headwraps, and why they thought committing this crime was worth potentially being expelled. 

Around 20 people seized Nelson Hall on Cal Poly Humboldt’s campus on Friday, holding it until the wee hours of the next morning. It was political theater, except the stage was public university property, and the actors were desperate activists, furious at the university’s administration for not ceding to their demands. CPH’s spokespeople were clever, the occupiers said; they were excellent at presenting a simulacra of partnership, meeting with them for talks about the university’s investments that were tenuously connected to companies that sold weapons to Israel and telling them they had “made progress” without actually doing anything about it. The occupiers wanted the investments sold, they wanted the university to be as inhospitable to Immigrations and Custom Enforcement as it possibly could be, and they wanted CPH to bite the hand that feeds it and throw its weight behind the skilled-labor arm of the Teamsters responsible for maintaining CSU campuses.

Less than 1% of CPH’s $54 million in investments are tangled up in mutual funds that include defense companies, and they make up a small chunk of the portfolios they’re included in. University administrators handed the occupiers these facts — presumably with the idea that telling them that only a minuscule (and indirect) fraction of the university’s money was funding the construction of weapons for an army that has killed thousands and turned cities once filled with people into nothing — would calm them. 

But none of the protesters were the kind of 20-somethings that care about the difference between giving defense companies money through the globalized financial markets that power wealth creation or sending them bags full of cash. They were equally evil, they said.

They let me in through the front of the building. The door into the hallway was locked, and three university staff blocked the direct path into the room they were holed up in. Getting around them was easy for the occupiers. One would stand in front of the guard, using their body like a shield, and the people coming in would walk through the gap. The staff did their best to tell the protesters that they weren’t allowed inside (one literally wagged her finger at them); neither tactic worked. (I got in a different way that didn’t involve any legally questionable space-holding techniques.)

Several of them wanted to talk with me, but only if I promised I wouldn’t take a photo of anyone’s face. I waffled on agreeing to that, but it didn’t matter anyway, because everyone in there was covered head-to-toe. (None were willing to share their names, and gave me aliases instead.) 

The Medic wore duct-tape Red Crosses on sleeves of his jacket. He was the group’s medic because he had his Stop the Bleed and CPR certifications, and he said he knew a little about “chemical decontamination.” 

He is a Muslim. He isn’t Palestinian, but he has a friend who is, and he said the Israeli Defense Forces have killed 200 people in her family since the war in Gaza began in 2023. CPH enabling that with his tuition money — no matter how minor the support, no matter how few percentage points of their endowment are invested in companies that sell arms to the IDF, whether that’s $100,000 or one — is something he will push back on as hard as he possibly can. 

“We want them to stop being complicit in genocide,” he told the Outpost. “Is that small? I don’t think so.”

He said they were “forced” to capture the building. Cal Poly Humboldt hadn’t sold any of the investments the protestors wanted them to sell since the Siemens Hall occupation in 2024. Communication between the pro-divestment students and the administration broke down, The Medic and a couple other students said, when CPH Administration and Finance VP Michael Fisher and a couple other administrators met with them earlier that day to talk about their demands. The occupiers accused the admins of dodging their questions and being “condescending.” 

The activists didn’t admit straight-up that they had planned beforehand to take a building if they didn’t get what they wanted. Rick Toledo, a Students for a Democratic Society organizer, told me that the students felt that it was their only option, and the only way their demands might be met.

“No one organized this,” “Les,” one of the protestors, told me. “This was a spontaneous…” He started laughing. “A spontaneous…fuck.”

Three people all tried to say “spontaneous” at once. “Rosie” jumped in. “This was very spontaneous. Les! Very spontaneous.”

Les spoke and Rosie replied. “The will of the people —” 

“ — The will of the people.”

“There may have been some planning beforehand…but, the will of the people!”

“Well, there was all hypothetical — anyways.”

Then they showed me the shit buckets. 

The bathrooms were locked soon after they took the building. The activists blamed the university, accusing them of starting a war of attrition on the intestinal front. CPH spokespeople told the students that the bathrooms locked themselves. No one was convinced either way. A solid quarter of the call-and-response chants protestors wore their vocal cords out shouting were about opening up the bathrooms, as were many of the signs sympathizers scattered around campus. They updated a running tally on a whiteboard keeping track of the time they hadn’t used a real bathroom and updated it hourly with a little ceremony. 

I suggested that CPH probably wasn’t sending anyone in to unlock them because they feared being attacked; they said the only danger was, of course, the shit bucket.

The fight over the bathrooms became yet another demand on the list, and ended up becoming another example of the university’s inability to connect with the activists during a day that was full of them. They weren’t being taken seriously, they said, and that enraged them. They had quibbles with Fisher calling the meeting earlier that day an “informational meeting” instead of a negotiation and with the vague and noncommittal information the university was feeding them about ditching chunks of their portfolio. Occupying the building was a gamble that had obviously paid off. If it hadn’t, why were Michael Fisher and VP Chrissy Holliday sitting out in the hallway talking with them? Now this, they said, was a negotiation.

“Apparently, they’ve been here working ‘tirelessly,’” The Medic said, air quotes around “tirelessly.” “It’s interesting how they always start working ‘tirelessly’ after something happens, if you know some sort of like — we force their hand, and then, immediately, you know, they’ve been working tirelessly.”

Any rumor of the ordeal ending started a frenzy. A university spokesperson showed up and delivered what one of the occupiers called a “draft divestment policy;” all it had to do was float its way to the CSU Board of Trustees, and it’d be official, they said. All of CPH’s investments would be defense-contractor free. They were convinced it was happening and they were jubilant. 

It wasn’t. It was a signed statement from Fisher and Holliday telling them that CPH had “continued its work towards Environmentally and Socially Responsible investments” and that they would “commit to continuing this work.” It promised nothing concrete and used the word “continue” in every other sentence; in essence, they told the occupiers that they’d be doing nothing new. (CPH’s communications department verified the letter’s authenticity.) But its arrival sparked ebullient chaos anyways. 

Five minutes earlier someone they didn’t recognize showed up outside the building and an equally intense pandemonium broke out. 

“FED!” someone screamed. “That’s a fed!” All two dozen of them ran to the front of the room and peered around the curtain’s edges to get a glimpse of the federal law enforcement agent crashing their event. He turned out to be a returning activist who had just swapped out his disguise.

They had told me that they wouldn’t leave unless their demands were met, and they told me that they were prepared to deal with force. They ended up leaving at 2 a.m. after police officers showed up and told them to disperse, noting the .68 caliber pepper ball guns the cops were toting, one of them told me later. 

CPH will attempt to punish the protestors. A university official told the Outpost that they had identified some of the protestors, and they will “follow up using the appropriate campus and legal processes.” The occupiers had attempted to secure immunity from the university, and argued with me about the feasibility of defending their actions under the First Amendment. Maybe that’ll work. Who knows? 

They let me out the front, around the curtains, out of the incandescent room with the rancid buckets in the back, into the light. I walked away and passed two young women walking towards the parking lot. They didn’t look at the writhing mass of people shouting at a building to their right. One of them was on the phone. 

“Come pick me up,” she said, “And then we can get sushi afterwards?”