Yudof's Privatization of the UCPD Investigation

From Rei Terada (on fb):

In appointing LA Police Chief William Bratton to investigate UCPD police brutality and Berkeley law school's Dean Christopher Edley to "to lead an examination of police policies in handling student protests at all 10 UC campuses" (LA Times), Mark Yudof travesties the independent thought and autonomy that students and faculty are now calling for. Bratton has made his career as an advocate of less physically violent police tactics that control and diminish public space in precisely neoliberal terms. The last thing the UC system needs right now is advice on how to make UCPD even more like a contemporary municipal police force. Similarly, Dean Christopher Edley is one of Yudof's closest companions, best known for his end-run against the expansion of online classes in the face of faculty governance policies. A commission run by Edley is the opposite of an independent commission. Everyone who signed the petitions of outrage against the police violence at Davis and Berkeley ought to mobilize against this. (I hope the owners of the petitions can use any emails attached to the petition process to re-contact literally everybody.)

There is one thing that is good about Yudof's move: it makes in the most public of circumstances the same move that he has made throughout his career as a privatizer of public goods. Yudof has done to the UC at every level and in detail the same thing he is doing now: passing off as reform what is actually vulgar cronyism on behalf of the 1%. Now this will be visible to everybody, even far outside the UC -- if we make it so.