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Yesterday’s national action was the largest such day of coordinated campus protest since the Occupy Wall Street movement went viral last fall. But it was also the third early-March day of action to emerge from the national student movement that began with Occupy California two years earlier.
Occupy Wall Street has given the American student movement a boost, certainly. But in doing so it is merely returning a favor.
Yesterday student activists took to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York like Occupy Wall Street. They congregated in the park that was until recently home to Occupy Oakland, and marched from there to Morgan Stanley offices in San Francisco. They erected tents at UC Santa Cruz, and hung banners in the Massachusetts statehouse like last spring’s proto-OWS anti-Walker occupiers did in Madison. But they also took over administrators’ offices at DePaul University in Illinois and at UC San Diego. They also rallied for increased library hours at Harvard. They also held teach-ins at Ohio State, teach-outs at Berkeley, and a mock telethon for student debt at SUNY Buffalo.
And yesterday was no stand-alone event. Activists used Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza as the kickoff point for a 99-mile march to Sacramento, planning to arrive in time for a Monday occupation of the state capitol. That same day, students throughout New York will be descending on Albany for their own day of action.
#M1 has been described as a kickoff for the new semester, though there have been at least a dozen major campus actions in the US since January. It has been described as a reflection of an OWS “shift to the universities,” though OWS is as much the child of recent student activism as its parent. In reality, it was neither of those things. It was something quite different, and far more interesting.
It was just another day.
I wrote yesterday about the lawsuit filed by 19 UC Davis students and recent graduates who were subject to pepper spraying, other police violence, and false arrest last November 18. The students are suing fifty-six university employees for violating their constitutional and statutory rights, but the list of defendants only has six names on it.
Why? Because only one of the dozens of police officers who participated in the attack on the protesters has been identified by the university.
It’s more than three months after the incident. Video of the day’s events has been shown over and over again throughout the planet. But UC Davis still won’t tell its students which of its campus police officers brutalized them.
In addition to the pepper-spraying, which was conducted by two officers, the lawsuit alleges that one student was thrown to the ground where his head struck a lawn sprinkler fixture. Another was pinned down after having been pepper sprayed. Another was dragged, handcuffed, to a police car. Another was “slammed to the ground,” kneed, and kneeled on, then denied medical assistance.
None of the officers who engaged in these acts, other than the two who were videotaped pepper-spraying students without cause, have been suspended. As far as is publicly known, all are still at UC Davis, working alongside the sixteen plaintiffs who are still students there.
And yet the faculty of the university, in a 645-343 vote, praised Chancellor Katehi last week as “a Chancellor who engages in a full and open dialogue with students, staff, and faculty,” saying that her resignation “would have devastating effects on the moral and academic standing of the campus.”
“It is time,” say the UC Davis faculty, “to promote a constructive healing process.” When will these professors call for transparency and accountability for the campus police?
The faculty of the University of California at Davis has condemned the use of police in response to non-violent student protests, but overwhelmingly rejected a resolution expressing no confidence in the chancellor whose deployment of police in such circumstances led to the use of pepper spray against campus activists last November.
About a thousand of the university’s 2,700 eligible faculty members voted online on three resolutions addressing the question of their confidence in Chancellor Linda Katehi’s leadership. They rejected a no-confidence resolution by a 697-312 margin, while approving two — one more critical than the other — that endorsed her continued leadership of the university.
The resolution which garnered the most votes among the faculty condemned “both the dispatch of police in response to non-violent protests and the use of excessive force that led to the deplorable pepper-spraying” and opposed “all violent police responses to non-violent protests on campus.” The deployment of police against student protesters, it said should only be “considered” after other “efforts to bridge differences” had been “exhausted,” and only in “direct consultation with the leadership of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.”
It went on, however, to say that Katehi’s decision to deploy the police under inappropriate circumstances did not “outweigh” her “impeccable performance of all her other duties.” That resolution was approved 635 to 343.
A second resolution of support for Katehi, less critical than the first, passed by a narrower 586 to 408 margin. That resolution withheld direct criticism of the chancellor’s actions in connection with the pepper spray incident, which it described obliquely as “the horrific events of November 18, 2011.” Sidestepping the widespread criticism of Katehi’s orders to the police and her initial public embrace of their actions, it praised her for moving “expeditiously to to replace the flawed communications in the two days following the events with a campus-wide dialogue.”
The rejected resolution declared that the faculty “lack[ed] confidence” in the chancellor
“In light of the events on the quadrangle of the UC Davis campus on the afternoon of Friday November 18, 2011, in light of Chancellor Linda Katehi’s email to faculty of November 18 in which she admitted that she had ordered the police to take action against the students who were demonstrating on the quadrangle and said that she had had “no option” but to proceed in this way, and in light of the failure of Chancellor Katehi to act effectively to resolve the resulting crisis in the intervening days.”
The main takeaway from these series of votes is, of course, Katehi’s support among the faculty — or at least among the 65% of the 37% of the eligible faculty who voted for the most popular resolution. But it’s also worth noting that the most popular idea among all of those put forward in the three resolutions was the proposition that police force should not be used to break up nonviolent student protests.
Such a policy, if implemented, would represent a dramatic and welcome change from UC practice both before and after the November 18 pepper spray incident, and sustained faculty pressure would go a long way toward making such a policy a reality. Let’s hope that these resolutions represent a first step toward a more engaged faculty commitment to civil liberties on campus, and to the well-being of their students.
The “I hate my students” essay has long been a Chronicle of Higher Education staple, and for obvious reasons. The classroom can be a frustrating place, and sometimes a prof just needs to vent.
The problem with venting in the Chronicle, though, is that you open yourself up to rebuttal.
Hassenpflug is a professor of education, and she doesn’t like it when her students bring their kids to class. Because she doesn’t like it when her students bring their kids to class, she has a “no kids in class” policy in her syllabus, and she gets mad when that policy is violated.
Fair enough. But some of the reasons behind her rule — a child might sit in a student’s regular chair — seem trivial, while others arise from problems that could be easily dealt with in other ways.
I myself allow students to bring their kids to class as a last resort. Most of my students are women, many of them are moms. Stuff comes up. But yes, kids can be disruptive, so I have rules:
- Don’t make it a regular thing. A kid in class isn’t an ideal situation.
- Sit in the back of the room. Even a quiet child can be distracting.
- If the kid starts acting up, slip out quietly and address the situation.
In addition to those rules, I have a warning: My class is a history class, which means we’re going to be talking about serious, difficult topics on a pretty regular basis. I can’t and won’t alter the content of the course to accommodate a child, and I won’t ask students to censor themselves either. If you choose to bring a kid along, what they hear is on you.
That’s it. That’s what I tell them. And about once a semester a student shows up with a kid in tow, and about ninety percent of the time it’s not a problem at all.
Now, Hassenpflug’s class isn’t my class, and she’s not me. What works for me might not work for her. I’m not saying she should open her doors.
But I will say that it doesn’t really sound like she makes a habit of explaining the reasons for her policy to her students, and that I suspect that decision may be causing some of the problems she’s having.
I’d love it if every one of my students memorized every element of my syllabus, but because I know that that’s never going to happen, I deal. I remind students at the end of class that if they came in late they should see me to get marked present. I mention my office hours several times during the semester, and encourage students to take advantage of them. I announce the date and time of the final exam at the last class session.
And if something is really important to me, I say so, and I say why, and I say it clearly and emphatically. (I’ve got a whole big speech on cheating. The better that speech gets, the less cheating I see.)
In her Chronicle essay, Hassenpflug gives no fewer than eleven reasons she prefers to have her classroom be child-free, but by her own admission she’s never shared any of those reasons with her students. “The students in my graduate education courses are teachers themselves,” she writes. “They should understand why bringing children to an adult classroom is inappropriate.”
Maybe they do, professor, and maybe their “understanding” isn’t the same as yours (mine certainly isn’t). Or maybe they understand that it’s not ideal, but think of it as the least-worst option in certain circumstances. Or maybe they’ve seen other students do it in other classes (or even yours), and they consider it part of the institutional culture of your program. Or maybe they’re just not aware that it’s one of your pet peeves.
I honestly just don’t get it. It’s your classroom. You’re in charge. You set not only the rules, but the tone. If this is such a big deal to you, take a couple minutes to say so, and to say why. The professorial whine about students’ lack of socialization to academic etiquette is ubiquitous these days, but of all the problems besetting our profession this seems like the easiest to fix.
Just talk to your students. Why on earth wouldn’t you?
No time for a full treatment of this right now, but can I just point out something?
There wasn’t a Superbowl riot at U Mass last night.
The AP story on last night’s events on campus says there were no hospitalizations, and no property damage. A university spokesperson says there were a few fistfights, but all thirteen of the student arrests were for either disorderly conduct or failure to disperse.
Why the “failure to disperse” arrests? Because fifteen minutes after students gathered in a main residential quad on campus, police told them to go home. They used horses, dogs, and smokebombs, cops to clear the area, and busted folks who wouldn’t leave. From everything I’ve seen the big drama all came from the cops.
Which is part of why I was a bit disappointed to see supporters of the Occupy movement snarking the U Mass students. No, their Superbowl party wasn’t a political act, but since when do any of us only like political parties? Occupy is about (among many other things) reclaiming public spaces, opposing police harassment, and creating community. Isn’t a mass campus gathering like the one that took place last night presumptively a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing even if we call it a riot?
A couple of years ago, Malcolm Harris — then a campus radical at UMD-College Park, now a writer and Occupy activist in New York — was present at a similar “riot” after Maryland’s basketball team beat Duke. His take on that night is well worth remembering now:
I know as an activist I’m supposed to oppose sports riots. I’m supposed to complain that students are willing to take to the streets when the Terrapin mens’ basketball team wins but not when tuition increases or black enrollment drops. Sadly, I can’t play the alienated radical role today because I was there Wednesday night, and I saw more than drunk revelers.
When students took to Route 1 after a hard-fought victory over Duke, it was with joy and celebration. We chanted “Maaarylaaaand,” and we didn’t mean the buildings or the endowment or the logo. We meant one another.
Student activism (as I wrote then) has always straddled the line between politics and play, between organizing for social change and acting up for the hell of it. Either impulse can be creative or destructive, either can be deployed for positive or negative ends, but both impulses are inherent to student identity, and both are worth celebrating.
Go Terps.
Update | Aaron Bady passes along a fascinating piece on the role of Egyptian soccer fans in that country’s popular uprising. Here’s a taste:
I believe we are witnessing a natural development in an inevitable conflict between two parties that have found themselves following two different paradigms of life: the paradigm of the depression, control, and normalization of apathy versus the paradigm of joyful liberation from the shackles of social and institutional norms to create gratifying chaos.
The latter is what I call “the politics of fun”.
And another:
The key to understanding the Ultras phenomenon is to imagine it as a way of life for these youth. For them, becoming a football fan became a symbolic action that was both joyful and a means of self-expression. But the broader social, psychological, and cultural contexts were unable to adapt to the groups’ activities, in part by virtue of their rebellious nature and their defiance of norms.
studentactivism.net 
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