I only just got the chance to crack last week’s New Yorker, which has a big article on the University of California financial crisis and the escalating wave of protest at UC Berkeley. There’s a lot to the story, and I’m sure I’ll circle back around to it again, but for now I just want to highlight one quote.

Early in the fall semester Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, told the magazine that students “can occupy any [campus] space they like, that’s fine. Unless they damage a building, in which case they’re breaking the law, and I’d send in the police.”

That was then.

Since Birgenau made that statement, Birgeneau has sent in the police to arrest protesting students three times. On November 20, he sent cops to arrest more than forty students who were occupying Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, though the occupiers had engaged in no property damage or physical violence. On December 11, he directed the police to roust a second occupation of Wheeler, this time while the students — who had kept the doors to the building open for nearly four days — slept. Sixty-six people were arrested in that incident.

It wasn’t until that night — after more than a hundred students demonstrating peacefully had been arrested — that the semester’s first significant incident of property damage took place at Berkeley.

Nice work, chancellor. You’ve managed to create the university you feared.