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Update: I’ve posted a further discussion of Chopra’s actions here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has its first major article up this morning on the Southwestern College faculty suspensions, and it, along with a couple other new stories, clears up some of yesterday’s unanswered questions.
None of those answers make the situation any less bizarre.
To recap: last Thursday a few hundred students and faculty carried out a peaceful protest against budget cuts at SWC, a southern California community college. That night four professors, including the president of the SWC faculty union, were suspended from their positions and barred from campus. The next morning the college’s president and HR director both left on extended vacations, leaving a low-level administrator behind to insist that the suspensions were “unrelated to the student rally.”
That’s what I had gleaned last night. Here’s what I’ve learned this morning…
The claim that the suspensions had nothing to do with “the student rally” can most charitably be described as deceptive. Yesterday the university clarified its previous statement, declaring that the suspensions came about because of an incident that took place during the protest, but after the officially sanctioned rally had formally ended.
SWC, like far too many American colleges, has a designated “free speech zone” in an isolated corner of the campus, and permission for the rally was limited to that area. At the end of the rally, however, a group of students and faculty marched on the offices of college president Raj K. Chopra, where they were stopped by a line of campus police officers.
SWC campus police chief Brent Chartier told the Chronicle that some of the protesters engaged in “illegal activity” at that point, that the incident is currently under investigation, and that criminal charges against protesters are under consideration. In a letter to the campus community yesterday, the president of SWC’s college district board said that “no formal charges or allegations” had yet “been made against any college faculty member or employee.”
Suspended prof Philip Lopez, the president of the faculty union at SWC, reacted with disbelief to the new statements. “If there are no charges,” he asked, “why were we placed on leave? Rumor? Reputation? Union-busting? Poor personal hygiene?”
It should be noted, by the way, that Thursday’s rally was not just a generic response statewide budget cuts. It was a protest against specific policies and tactics of Chopra’s, most notably a plan to balance SWC’s budget by cutting the number of classes the college offers each semester by 25%.
President Chopra has long been a controversial figure at SWC, and was the subject of a no-confidence vote by the campus chapter of CSEA, the faculty union, in May of this year. In that resolution, the CSEA chapter declared that a campus reorganization plan undertaken by Chopra had been conducted “with a complete lack of regard for Southwestern College’sstanding commitment to its own Shared Governance Guidelines.” As noted above and in yesterday’s post, the current president of CSEA’s SWC chapter, and one of the chapter’s former presidents, were among the four professors suspended on Thursday.
One last bit of background: The section of the California state code that allowed Chopra to kick the faculty members off campus empowers him to bar an individual from campus grounds “whenever there is reasonable cause to believe that such person has willfully disrupted the orderly operation of such campus.” It allows him to ban such an individual for no more than fourteen days, and requires that he hold a hearing on such a ban within seven days of receiving a request for one from a banned individual. If any of the three suspended faculty return to the campus before their suspensions are lifted, they are liable to arrest on misdemeanor charges that carry a maximum penalty of six months in jail.
Here’s a story with a happy ending.
Two weeks ago, Jacob Miller, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, was arrested on campus. His crime? Chalking.
Miller, along with a number of other students, had been writing slogans and drawings on the university’s sidewalks in chalk to promote a rally protesting the commercialization of higher education. A university employee called the police, and Miller was arrested for criminal damage and disturbing an educational institution.
The two charges were each class one misdemeanors, and carried a combined maximum penalty of a year in prison and $5,000 in fines. Miller had been identified through video surveillance footage.
The arrest sparked a huge uproar on campus. The following weekend a group of students began buying sidewalk chalk in bulk and handing it out by the bucketful on campus. Early on Monday morning a Poli Sci major named Evan Lisull was was arrested for writing the slogans “Chalk is Speech” and “Freedom of Expression” on campus sidewalks.
Lisull’s arrest seemed likely to escalate the situation further, but instead it brought the university to its senses. On Monday afternoon UA president Robert Shelton instructed campus police to drop all charges against the two students, and declared that the university would no longer treat chalking as a criminal matter.
UA said at the time that it would in the future handle chalking complaints “as possible Code of Conduct violations through the Dean of Students Office,” but soon it was in full retreat, announcing this week that chalkers would not face disciplinary consequences of any kind.
Chalk one up for … well, you know.
Evening update: Pitt’s chapter of the ACLU is co-sponsoring an Oakland Unites for First Amendment Rights rally on campus tomorrow at 5:30 pm. A four-point petition will be circulating at the rally — we’ll post the text as soon as we get it.
Last week’s G-20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies drew massive protests in and around the University of Pittsburgh, and now police and campus administrators are facing heavy criticism for their handling of the incidents.
Over the course of the two-day meeting, police used sonic cannons, tear gas, pepper spray, bean-bag projectiles, smoke canisters, stun grenades, and rubber bullets on demonstrators, making hundreds of arrests. Innocent students, including some student journalists, were caught up in police sweeps on the Pitt campus.
Police arrested nearly two hundred people during the course of the G-20 demonstrations, including more than fifty students. The Allegheny County district attorney has already announced that charges against four students will be dropped, and more dismissals are expected.
Update: In a reversal of a policy announced yesterday, Pitt will allow students seeking dismissal of charges to bring attorneys to their meetings with campus police officials. The university has also confirmed that no campus judicial proceedings will be brought against students whose criminal charges are dismissed.
Dozens of videos from the protests have surfaced online, ranging from the hilarious (three burly cops in face masks attempt to pass as protesters, and failing spectacularly) to the chilling (students trapped on a stairway between two sets of cops, each trying to force them to go the other way).
Two student journalists for the Pitt News were arrested while covering the Friday night protests, and eight more were tear gassed, pepper sprayed, or maced. Stories have also emerged of students being locked out of their dorms, then arrested for failing to return to their rooms.
One student has posted a lengthy account online of how she was arrested for “failing to disperse” while helping students to disperse by holding open the locked doors of one dorm building. She describes students being arrested as they entered the dorms, and other reports suggest that students were arrested while waiting in line at local restaurants, or studying in the campus library.
Violations of students’ rights on campus were not limited to arrests. One video posted online shows police lobbing a tear gas canister onto the balcony of a dorm from which a group of students were quietly watching the protest in the street below. (The canister is thrown just after the two-minute mark in the video.)
The question of what limits should have been set on the actions of municipal police on the Pitt campus is being raised over and over again in the aftermath of the G-20, and evidence is emerging that it was a subject of dispute among police at the time. Police scanner recordings obtained by the Pitt News show that a high-ranking Pitt university police officer intervened personally on Friday night to prevent a non-university police “attack team” from storming the Towers, a campus dorm.
Adding to the confusion, and contributing to the police overreaction, is the fact that Pitt’s campus is an urban one, with no clear boundaries, and and the fact that thepolice were brought in for the G-20 protests from as far away as Tucson, Arizona. Many of the cops present were unfamiliar with the location.
Pitt’s university police have also been criticized, however. The university’s text message based Emergency Notification System was not used at all on Thursday, and only two messages were sent out on Friday — one encouraging them to “be careful” and “exercise good judgment,” and the other advising them to “remain near their residences.” As noted above, a number of students were ultimately arrested at or near their dorms that night.
Pressure on the police and the Pitt administration has been building since the meeting ended, with many claiming that, as one online petition puts it, “the right of citizens — students, professors, families, community members, and media — to assemble and gather peacefully in public was not only denied and violated but suppressed with unnecessary and excessive force.”
Note: Check out What Happened At Pitt?!?! for a huge collection of links and resources.
Police forcibly dispersed a student demonstration in the northern Indian city of Allahabad on Wednesday, sparking a retaliatory riot and two more days of protests.
Students from the University of Allahabad, one of India’s oldest universities, were protesting the administration’s refusal to hold elections for AU’s student government, which was dissolved two years ago. Police charged the crowd wielding long wooden canes known as lathi, injuring more than a dozen demonstrators.
Students later took to the streets, vandalizing a number of cars parked in the area. On Thursday police returned to campus in an attempt to arrest 12 of the participants in the Wednesday protest, but left having taken only two into custody.
Students burned a minister in effigy on campus today as protests against the university and the police continued.
Sunday evening update: Protesting students briefly blocked railway tracks in Allahahabad on Friday, and demonstrations continued over the weekend.
The PA State Police sent fifteen cops dressed as college students to a Haverford dorm party Thursday night, citing more than thirty students for underage drinking.
Drinking in the dorms is allowed for over-21s at Haverford, and the party was advertised on Facebook. But cops planned the raid after checking out the profiles of students who’d put themselves down as planning to attend and finding that many of them were underage.
Police showed up at the party 10:30, hoping to arrive as it was getting underway, but by the time they got there most of the alcohol was gone. They hung around for half an hour, observing, then announced themselves and started asking partiers for ID. They detained about forty students, and issued citations to 31 of those.
One interesting tidbit: The cops didn’t give the university a heads-up before crashing the party. Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, learned about the raid when a student called him after the police started asking for ID, and Emerson arrived on the scene himself about half an hour later.
studentactivism.net 
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