Category Archive

California residents oppose fee hikes at the state’s public colleges and universities by a two-to-one margin, according to a new poll, and 57% believe that state spending on public higher education should be given a boost.

The poll, released yesterday, found that 62% of Californians oppose raising tuition in the UC and Cal State systems and the state’s community colleges, with just 35% supporting such increases.

Nearly half (49%) of all respondents said they would be willing to pay more in taxes to support higher education in California, up eight points in just a year.

The poll was conducted in late October and early November, before the University of California and California State systems announced plans to raise fees for the 2011-12 academic year. The UC Board of Regents will be voting on an $822 fee increase later today.

For nearly two years now the University of California has been criminalizing peaceful student protest. University officials have arrested activists as they slept quietly in a campus building, resting after a day of hosting workshops and seminars during a pre-finals study period. Campus police have used batons and tasers and pepper spray on protesters who meant them no harm and posed no physical threat. The university has distorted and abused its student conduct policies, deploying judicial sanction to suppress lawful dissent.

And all the while the dismantling of public higher education in California has rolled on. The state’s governor and legislature have at times responded to the activists’ passionate defense of their institution, but the institution itself has not.

The administration of the University of California has hollowed out the space at the heart of the university where productive dialogue and robust disputation should reside. They have thwarted students’ efforts to devise a creative, productive response to the current crisis, to build common cause in the shaping of the educational community. (The faculty, meanwhile, have mostly stayed silent and disengaged.)

And now a campus police officer has drawn his gun and pointed it at students who, seeing no alternative, were — in the words of Berkeley’s own son — putting their bodies upon the wheels and upon the apparatus, trying to make it stop.

The chief of the UC San Francisco Police Department says the students took the officer’s baton. But video footage shows that officer standing alone, apart from the crowd, letting the baton fall from his own hand as he draws his pistol. She says that a student beat the officer with that baton. But video footage of the five-second scuffle that preceded the officer’s act shows no such beating. She says someone yelled “take the gun.” But video footage shows no such aggression in the moments before the gun was drawn, just confusion that turned to shock and fear as the weapon appeared.

And yet the chief of the UC San Francisco Police Department says the officer who drew his gun and pointed it at a group of rowdy but fundamentally non-violent student protesters showed “great restraint.”

Forty years ago, in the spring of 1970, law enforcement agents twice opened fire at angry student demonstrators on American college campuses — first at Kent State University in Ohio, and then, ten days later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Six students were killed. Twenty-one others were wounded by gunfire. One remains paralyzed to this day.

In the wake of those killings Richard Nixon appointed a presidential commission to study the crisis in the nation’s universities, and when that commission published its report a few months later, it called the Kent State and Jackson State shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” A nation “driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth,” the commission declared, “is a nation on the edge of chaos. A nation that has lost the allegiance of its youth is a nation that has lost part of its future.”

California in 2010 is not Ohio or Mississippi in 1970, of course. Two years ago I would have scoffed at such a comparison.

I’m not scoffing today.

Today I’m worried. Today I’m sad. Today I’m angry.

A University of California police officer drew his gun and pointed it at students protesting meeting of the UC regents this morning, and the UC San Francisco police chief’s explanation as to why doesn’t seem to hold water.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, UCSF police chief Pamela Roskowski told a press conference today that the officer drew his weapon after a protester took his baton and hit him on the head with it, but that claim appears to be contradicted by a video recording of the incident.

In the video, posted on the Chronicle‘s website, the officer lunges into a crowd which is surging toward him. With his baton held in both hands in front of him, he tussles briefly with one protester. For most of the scuffle, which lasts for less than five seconds, the baton is visible in his possession. As he breaks away from the protester he is clutching the baton in his left hand, and he only draws his gun after the baton has fallen from his grasp to the floor behind him. The officer’s helmeted head is visible throughout the altercation with the protester, and there is no indication that he is ever struck with the baton or any other object.

I’ll have more to say on this incident tomorrow.

Update | Here’s another copy of the same video, from a local television station’s website. At 0:42 in this video the officer is holding his baton in both hands. At 0:45 and 0:49 he’s holding it in his left hand in the same orientation. The only time it’s even possible that he could have lost control of the baton is the three seconds (or less) between 0:42 and 0:45, and his head is clearly visible during that entire period.

Second Update | Here’s raw video of the altercation and its aftermath. Although Roskowski claimed that someone said “take his gun” before the officer unholstered his weapon, no such statement can be heard.

Morning Update | Here are some more thoughts on yesterday’s events, and what they mean for the University of California.

November 26, 2011 | I tweeted a link to this post this morning, as it seemed worth mentioning in light of recent events. Unfortunately the videos linked above are no longer online, and I have been unable to find footage of the entire incident. You can, however, see video of Officer Kemper pointing his gun at unarmed students here.

The Carleton University Student Association is having a busy November.

CUSA sued last week to force their university to release some three million dollars in student fees that the administration has been holding hostage in an accountability/autonomy dispute. And now they’ve moved to de-charter Carleton Lifeline, a campus pro-life organization.

A letter from CUSA’s vice president for internal affairs, Khaldoon Bushnaq, to Lifeline cited the following student association policy as the basis for their decision:

CUSA and CUSA Inc. respect and affirm a woman’s right to choose her options in case of pregnancy

CUSA further affirms that actions such as any campaign, distribution, solicitation, lobbying, effort, display, event etc. that seeks to limit or remove a woman’s right to choose her options in the case of pregnancy will not be supported. As such, no CUSA resources, space, recognition or funding will be allocated for the purpose of promoting these actions.

The association’s pro-choice policy has been in effect since 1997, and it is not clear why Carleton Lifeline, which was chartered four years ago, has been allowed to operate as a recognized organization until now. A Lifeline representative speculated, however, that CUSA’s decision may stem from an October incident in which five Lifeline members were arrested while attempting to display graphic anti-abortion posters on campus.

CUSA has given Lifeline until tomorrow to submit a revised constitution that comports with the association’s pro-choice policies.

It’s seven o’clock in the morning in California, and the November meeting of the UC regents is scheduled to get underway soon. Topping their agenda is another steep tuition increase.

When the regents met last fall at UCLA some three thousand students were on hand to protest their imposition of a 32% fee hike, but at least some student activists expect a smaller turnout this time around. Ricardo Gomez, External Affairs Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of California, told the Daily Cal this week that the meeting’s staging at UC San Francisco Mission Bay — a medical center and teaching hospital with no undergraduate student body — is likely to suppress student turnout.

Buses and carpools are heading to San Francisco this morning from across the state, however, and some activists are still hoping to shut the meeting down.

8:10 am PST | Tweeter @reclaimuc says that “approx 200” protesters are on the scene, with more en route.

9:00 am | Reports on Twitter suggest that student activists faced off with cops in a parking garage on campus. Police are said to have arrested at least two students. “Most” of the regents are said to have made it into the meeting, and protesters are apparently leaving the garage. A tweet from the student regent says that the meeting has begun.

11:20 am | Activists apparently made an effort to storm the meeting not long after my last update. Several more arrests have been made, including a vice president of the Berkeley student government. Police have pepper-sprayed a number of demonstrators, and one source has claimed on Twitter that an officer on the scene unholstered his gun and pointed it at a protester.