Oh really?
From the Office of UC President Mark G. Yudof:As usual, it is the pictures of the brutality, not the brutality itself, that has him all worked up.
"I am appalled by images of University of California students being doused with pepper spray and jabbed with police batons on our campuses."I intend to do everything in my power as president of this university to protect the rights of our students, faculty and staff to engage in non-violent protest.
"Chancellors at the UC Davis and UC Berkeley campuses already have initiated reviews of incidents that occurred on their campuses. I applaud this rapid response and eagerly await the results.
"The University of California, however, is a single university with 10 campuses, and the incidents in recent days cry out for a system-wide response.
"Therefore I will be taking immediate steps to set that response in motion.
"I intend to convene all 10 chancellors, either in person or by telephone, to engage in a full and unfettered discussion about how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to non-violent protest.
"To that end, I will be asking the chancellors to forward to me at once all relevant protocols and policies already in place on their individual campuses, as well as those that apply to the engagement of non-campus police agencies through mutual aid agreements.
"Further, I already have taken steps to assemble experts and stakeholders to conduct a thorough, far-reaching and urgent assessment of campus police procedures involving use of force, including post-incident review processes.
"My intention is not to micromanage our campus police forces. The sworn officers who serve on our campuses are professionals dedicated to the protection of the UC community.
"Nor do I wish to micromanage the chancellors. They are the leaders of our campuses and they have my full trust and confidence.
"Nonetheless, the recent incidents make clear the time has come to take strong action to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest.
"As I have said before, free speech is part of the DNA of this university, and non-violent protest has long been central to our history. It is a value we must protect with vigilance. I implore students who wish to demonstrate to do so in a peaceful and lawful fashion. I expect campus authorities to honor that right."
This is of course standard boilerplate to avoid actually doing anything about police brutality or anything else the Institution doesn't want to do anything about. As I've said, the brutality that is being applied to students in the UC and CSU systems today has been going on for years, at least since tuition-hike protests in 2009. The President of the University knows what the protocols and policies are. There is no bureaucratic mystery.
What the police have been doing is implementing policy, pure and simple.
Everyone should know it. And insofar as they can get away with it, the administration will do nothing -- whatever -- to change the policy of brutalizing any of their charges who get out of line. The "livestock" allusion is not so far from the truth.
The only way to really change it is to take over the University lock, stock and barrel.
To that end, I append the "Occupation Cookbook."
[Note: You can click the link to go to the full-sized Scribd page for this volume, or you can click the full-page icon on the snippet below. The Occupation Cookbook describes the student occupation at the University in Zagreb, Croatia in 2009. It lasted 35 days and led to the Occupiers... taking over the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Last I heard, they are still running it. ]
The Occupation Cookbook
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And Furthermore:
This is the clearest and most coherent description of what is really going on as I've encountered. I've tried to explain it in my own stumbling way, but Nathan Brown makes it clear as crystal. Brown, by the way, is also the author of the Open Letter calling for Katehi's resignation, now signed by over 43,000 people.
http://distributioninsensible.tumblr.com/post/12867650744/five-theses-on-privatization-and-the-uc-struggle
The President of the University may well be "appalled" at the sight of the violence he's seen. But it's all but certain neither he nor anyone else will do anything about it.
Nice performance by the Chancellor. For a minute there, he sounded like Barack Obama in 2007.... Oh, yeah, look how that turned out. The Brown statement is pretty enlightening; things have gotten much worse since I was in school, something I felt but hadn't thought about much until lately.
ReplyDeleteAll through college, $2500 paid for tuition and books, per YEAR, and I thought it was a ripoff. For these kids, I can see why pepper spray might be better than what they've got.
Indeed.
ReplyDeleteThe video of Katehi's interview I just posted is illuminating. She acknowledges that the police were "following protocol." Of course they were.
As for the costs, when I got involved with the Revolution, as it were, I had no idea student costs had gone up so much, nor did I have any idea of the debt load so many were carrying - -with no chance to either pay it off or have it discharged in bankruptcy.
There was no tuition at all when I was in college. I did not know how much tuition and expenses had skyrocketed in the last few years. It's awful.
I did know about the police brutality on campus, but not the "reasons" for it. Brown sure lays them out.
It's a wonder that there hasn't been a greater explosion before now.