Occupy Cal included a series of demonstrations that began on November 9, 2011, on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California. It was allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, San Francisco Bay Area Occupy groups such as Occupy Oakland, Occupy Berkeley, and Occupy San Francisco, and other public California universities. "Cal" in the name "Occupy Cal" is the nickname of the Berkeley campus and generally refers specifically to UC Berkeley.

One stated focus of Occupy Cal demonstrations is the role of education in job creation and societal well-being.^{[citation needed][opinion]} Tuition increases for students, mandatory furloughs for professors and staff, firings or forced realignment of lower-ranking workers as part of the "Operational Excellence" reorganization, and raises for the highest-paid administrators have further fueled discontent.

Occupy Cal continued to engage in organized meetings, events and actions through March 2012.

Budget cuts, tuition increases, and unpaid furlough days affecting public California universities have been the target of protests by UC Berkeley students, faculty, and employees in recent years. The UC Regents has approved increased tuition fees nine times in seven years. In September 2009, several thousand students, faculty, and employees converged on Sproul Plaza to protest a proposed tuition increase of 32%. Simultaneous protests on the University of California and California State University campuses occurred throughout the state. The statewide campus protests did not sway the UC Regents, however, and the 32% tuition increase was approved in November 2009, setting off another round of protests that included the temporary occupation of campus buildings. Protests continued through 2010 and 2011 with Occupy Cal being the most recent iteration of a multi-year protest for affordable public education. UC Berkeley has a long history of student activism. Berkeley spearheaded the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and was a leader in the opposition to the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s.

On November 9, 2011, students and professors at UC Berkeley participated in a series of "teach-outs" around campus, a noon rally and march. Approximately 1,500 demonstrators attended the day's events. The march route included a Bank of America location adjacent to campus. Not long after demonstrators set up seven tents in front of Upper Sproul Plaza in the mid-afternoon, law enforcement officials from UC Berkeley Police, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and other UC Police officers in riot gear arrived to remove the tents. Protesters linked arms to form a human chain in front of the tents to prevent officers from dismantling the encampment. Police used 36-inch riot batons to "jab" and push back the protesters and to break the human chain.

Video footage of the afternoon confrontation shows police using batons and dragging two protesters by the hair, one of whom was UC Berkeley English professor Celeste Langan. 39 protesters, including Professor Langan, were arrested for charges including "resisting and delaying a police officer in the performance of their duties and failure to disperse when given a dispersal order." Robert Hass, a UC Berkeley professor of poetry and former United States Poet Laureate, wrote about the police response in a November 19 New York Times opinion piece entitled "Poet-Bashing Police":

The deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

Hass himself was hit in the ribs by a police officer wielding a baton. His wife Brenda Hillman was shoved to the ground by a police officer.