Category Archive

The panel discussion I participated in yesterday at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC is now online. It was a good discussion, I think, and particularly timely given the events of the last week in California.

http://www.americanprogress.org/images/rd2/flash/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf

Along with myself, the panel included Tiffany Loftin, vice president of the United States Student Association, and PIRG campus organizer Dan Herb. Louis Soares of CAP and White House education policy advisor Zakiya Smith gave opening remarks, and the panel was moderated by CAP Policy Analyst Julie Morgan, lead author of a new report on student involvement in higher education governance.

C-SPAN broadcast the panel live, and they’ve got a copy of it up as well. (Not sure why they chose to title the event “Students Discuss Higher Education,” by the way. Though two of the three of us on the panel were young activists, none were actual students.)

A recurring theme in criticism of the students pepper-sprayed at UC Davis last week is that in forming a ring around police and their fellow activists they were violating the principles of nonviolent resistance. “A fundamental tenet of civil disobedience is to accept arrest when protesting injustice,” Berkeley Daily Cal columnist Casey Given wrote yesterday, and so the UC activists of today have no right to “compare … their struggle to … the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s.”

Casey Given is right that civil rights activists mostly submitted to arrest willingly (though one of the movement’s greatest unsung heroes did not). But to invoke the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as an example of this supposed rule of nonviolence is a deeply strange choice.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was christened on September 30, 1964, at a sit-in following the citation of eight students for violating the university’s leafleting policies. The very next day, on the morning of October 1, the university administration escalated the conflict by arresting former student Jack Weinberg for tabling in support of the civil rights movement in Sproul Plaza.

When police told Weinberg he was under arrest, he refused to move, and the officers were forced to call for backup. As they waited, the crowd grew. Eventually a squad car arrived. As police carried Weinberg into the car, the students standing nearby spontaneously sat down, blocking it from leaving Sproul. Police ordered them to move. They refused. Soon Mario Savio climbed onto the roof of the car and declared a noon rally at that location.

Savio was granted a meeting with university administrators not long after, at which he declared that the students surrounding the police car would disperse if and only if the administration released Weinberg, dropped charges against him and the eight students cited the previous day, and opened serious negotiations on campus regulations. Several hundred students spent that night surrounding the car, many of them in sleeping bags. (The demonstrators continued to use the car’s roof as a podium, denting it severely. They also deflated its tires.)

It was not until the following evening, after the administrators had accepted most of their demands, that the students allowed the police car to exit the plaza.

This is the history of nonviolent student protest at Berkeley. It is the history of peaceful student organizing, yes, but it’s also a history of students disrupting police business, refusing to submit to arrest, damaging police property, even holding police hostage.

That is the history of the students of the University of California. That is the inheritance of the student activists of today.

From the homepage of the UC Davis Department of English:

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.” Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis.

This morning at ten o’clock I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC, discussing the student role in university governance and policymaking with a White House education policy official, the vice president of the United States Student Association, and a USPIRG campus organizer.

The panel will be streaming live here, and there are apparently still a few tickets available here, so feel free to peek in or stop by.

The UC Davis story has gone global overnight. Here’s a taste of the morning papers:

• New York Times: UC Davis Calls for Investigation After Pepper Spraying
• BBC News: US University Investigates Campus Pepper Spray Use
• Washington Post: Investigation, Calls for Resignation Follow Spread of Calif. University Pepper Spray Video
• CNN: California University to Investigate Police Use of Pepper Spray
• Los Angeles Times: UC Davis Chief Launches Probe Into Pepper-Spraying of Occupy Protesters

But see what they all did here? They all led with Linda Katehi’s promised investigation of the incident, which she announced in a statement yesterday:

I am forming a task force made of faculty, students and staff to review the events and provide to me a thorough report within 90 days. As part of this, a process will be designed that allows members of the community to express their views on this matter. This report will help inform our policies and processes within the university administration and the Police Department to help us avoid similar outcomes in the future.

That’s it. That’s the entirety of the relevant portion of the statement. No word on how the task force will be constituted, what its composition will be, how its student and faculty members will be chosen. No hint that it will have any actual policymaking authority. And it’s got 90 days before it’s expected to report — does anyone really think that this situation is going to stay static until mid-February? Does anyone think that the release of this report is going to be a major event?

Come on.

I get why the press is going with this angle for their ledes. It sounds like a big deal. It sounds serious, momentous. And it’s something you can report without seeming to take sides. An investigation! A report! That’s just the thing to get to the bottom of this situation!

But here’s the thing. We’ve already gotten to the bottom of the situation. We know what happened. UC Davis police used unwarranted force on a group of peaceful student demonstrators in violation of university policy, and then top university officials lied about why. That’s the story. That’s the situation. If the task force reports that, they’ll be telling us all what we already know. If they don’t, they’ll be engaging in an act of utterly pointless misrepresentation.

A lot of important stuff happened yesterday. New videos emerged that helped to prove the university’s original cover story false. Katehi was asked to resign, by multiple people in multiple venues, and gave a series of not particularly forceful responses. University officials gave a press conference at which reporters greeted their continuing attempts to justify Friday’s violence with barely concealed scorn. And then Katehi hid from a peaceful crowd for two hours before emerging to slink back to her car in silence and shame.

All that stuff happened. And any of if would make a great lede.