Occupy UC Davis Protester Expelled [Updated]

[Update from the comments, posted on 4/22 at 9:15am]: "on Thursday, 40 pissed-off people walked into the Dean's front office and sat and made their case until the Assistant Dean agreed to a meeting with Thomas for the following day, with his lawyer present. The following day, Thomas was reinstated at the university — this despite the rather instant dismissal and refusal to consider an appeal just a couple days before.

The Dean assures us this has nothing to do with the direct action. No, nothing at all."

An update and call from our comrades at the Davis Antirepression Crew for a Solidarity Study-In at the Dean's Office.

A UC Davis undergraduate in art studio was arrested early Saturday morning, 17 March, in his dorm room, by members of both the UC Davis and City of Davis Police. He was charged with Felony Vandalism and held in jail over the weekend and into finals week; his school supplies, phone and computer were all confiscated. With no access to his contacts nor warning of the arrest, he was unable to contact legal representation. Incommunicado in jail, he was unable to take final exams, and was only bailed out (for $20,000) when concerned friends began looking for him after he had been missing for days. UC Davis Student Judicial Affairs, which initiated the warrant for his arrest, didn’t bother to notify his home department, his family, friends, or professors to let them know the student’s whereabouts.

Several weeks later, both Student Judicial Affairs and Student Housing threatened him with disciplinary measures including eviction and expulsion, in addition to the criminal charges they initiated through Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig. The student, who entered UCD as a transfer student last fall, has since been expelled based on poor academic performance, on top of criminal charges that may carry a 3-4 year sentence and $10,000 fine. As a student prominently involved with Occupy UC Davis, arrested during the pepper spray incident on Nov. 18, 2011, these charges appear to be a means to intimidate and punish him for political activism.

The charges against this student-activist are in line with the ongoing and systematic police and legal repression of the Occupy movement. Threatening people with inflated or trumped-up charges, a familiar tactic in many vulnerable communities, is now increasingly wielded as a strategy to chill political dissent on campuses — a way of exacting punishment in jail time, legal expenses, and interference with other obligations before the opportunity for trial. “This is the new de facto regime of guilty until proven innocent, and it should be opposed by every decent person,” said Joshua Clover, a professor at Davis. The university News Service, which reports directly to Chancellor Katehi, has already expressed its enthusiasm for engaging “law enforcement to prosecute proven violations” — seeming to misunderstand the legal relation of trials, proof, and guilt almost entirely, with harmful consequences for students.

The Reynoso Task Force Report on the UCD Pepper Spray Incident just last week verified that the administration’s unfounded hysteria regarding the Occupy movement resulted in their extralegal use of force against student activists. Importantly, the Reynoso Report also underscored the need for campus authorities to handle student political protest through already established, appropriate channels; namely through the SJA and Student Affairs — and not by means of police and criminal charges.

We urge the UCD campus community and the general public to reject categorically the administration’s use of legal maneuvering to suppress political dissent.

---

Bring a cushion, 5,000 friends, your favorite textbook, and a colorful sign to the Office of Letters and Sciences! We're going to meet at the building's ground level entrance. If you can't attend this event, support Tomas at his arraignment this Friday.

FREE TOMAS! WE DEMAND HIS IMMEDIATE RE-ADMITTANCE!

On "Non-Affiliates" in the Reynoso/Kroll Report

The Reynoso/Kroll Report [pdf] has shed new light on the striking (though by no means unexpected) malice, stupidity, incompetence, and immaturity of the UC Davis administration and police department. Mistakes occurred at every step of decision making, from the senior administrators of the so-called "Leadership Team" to the responses of individual cops on the ground. In reality, though, it's probably too generous to call these command failures "mistakes" -- they indicate something else, a sort of willful antipathy combined with authoritarian paternalism directed toward the student body by Chancellor Katehi, her "Leadership Team," and the UC Davis administration in general.

It is with the specter of the "non-affiliate" that this authoritarianism manifests itself most clearly. To state this argument in stronger terms: the "non-affiliate" is the central element that both shapes the administrative gaze and reveals its operative logic. Structurally, the "non-affiliate" plays a similar role to the "outside agitator" (a figure that has for its part also made some significant appearances in recent East Bay struggles), those excluded bodies that transgress the constitutive boundaries of a particular political formation or community. What is at stake in the definition of the "non-affiliate" is a spatial politics of both inclusion and exclusion, since by defining who is excluded this language at the same time defines who is included. To the extent that the target of protesters at the UC and beyond has been precisely the privatization of public education, these protests -- which have consistently faced repression at the hands and batons of UCPD -- are about redefining the spatial logic of inclusion/exclusion that drives the decision-making of the UC administration.

The Kroll report contains a fascinating set of statements culled from interviews conducted with the high-level UC Davis administrators involved in making the decision to send in the cops:

In planning its response to Occupy-related activism, the Leadership Team discussed the presence of “non-affiliates” in the Occupy group. According to Chancellor Katehi, “We had noticed that this group, this year specifically, has people -- even when they came to Mrak -- who were not students.” “We were worried at the time about that because the issues from Oakland were in the news and the use of drugs and sex and other things, and you know here we have very young students . . . we worried especially about having very young girls and other students with older people who come from the outside without any knowledge of their record . . . if anything happens to any student while we’re in violation of policy, it’s a very tough thing to overcome.”

According to Vice Chancellor Meyer, “our context at the time was seeing what's happening in the City of Oakland, seeing what's happening in other municipalities across the country, and not being able to see a scenario where [a UC Davis Occupation] ends well . . . Do we lose control and have non-affiliates become part of an encampment? So my fear is a long-term occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student and a non- affiliate and there's an incident. And then I'm reporting to a parent that a non-affiliate has done this unthinkable act with your daughter, and how could we let that happen?” (Kroll, pp. 27-28; emphasis added)

The language of the administration depicts the "non-affiliate" as a highly sexualized, racialized, and criminalized body, a foreign, contaminating body, a body that does not belong, that, like a cancer, presents a clear and present danger, that must be quickly identified and surgically removed. As Elizabeth Freeman writes,

[T]his is a public, land-grant university, whose mandate is to be open and accessible and to serve the people. All California residents, indeed all residents of the U.S., are “affiliates” of the UC system. The Morrill Act, granting the land for land-grant universities, also contained legislation that authorized the federal government to systematically steal Native American lands by interfering with both Native American and Mormon systems of kinship and inheritance. Thus most of us are in the first place the outsiders occupying these tracts, our very presence here legitimated by the government’s enforcement of Protestant norms of gender, sexuality, and kinship. Second, since the Americas were settled, the discourse of rape has been used to terrorize people of color as potential rapists, and to limit the freedoms of white women as potential victims. I imagine that any female participants in the Occupy protests would find Vice Chancellor’s remarks patronizing in the extreme. Third, the rhetoric of “Save Our Children” has been a pernicious part of anti-gay movements since at least Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign against legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Miami. It was part of Proposition 8. Anyone knowing anything about the history of anti-gay organizing in this country cannot fail to see that invoking the specter of the violated child is a right-wing tactic.

The specter of the “stranger” raping the young has been used to legitimize all kinds of violence. I cannot accept leaders who would mobilize it to defend the use of force against political protest.

Similarly, Nathan Brown writes,

Ah, once again, “the City of Oakland,” so close to the City of Davis, and yet so far. What sort of people might one find there? But is it not the case that what was actually happening in the City of Oakland and other municipalities was egregious police violence against peaceful demonstrators -- including the near-killing of protester Scott Olsen in Oakland on October 25? And what is it, exactly, that our tepid Vice Chancellor has in mind when he refers to “this unthinkable act” that might transpire between an undergraduate and a "non-affiliate"? Does he mean rape? It seems this is either a concept he does not understand (“with your daughter,” he says) or a word he is unable to use in a sentence. But perhaps he just means “sex and other things”? Perhaps the very notion that an undergraduate -- and a “daughter” no less -- might have sex with a “non-affiliate” is an unthinkable act in the view of our painstakingly upright administrators. Confronted with the cultivated ambiguity of the Vice Chancellor's formulation, I suppose we can conclude that when you don't know what you're talking about, it's best to equivocate.

In brief, all that the pathetic and infantile discourse of the “Leadership Team” has to offer in its defense is the danger of sex and drugs, of “older people,” and the terribly frightening specter of “Oakland.” One needn’t look far to find an identical sexist, paternalist, pseudo-moralistic discourse deployed in the most unbearably racist, xenophobic contexts. It is always the same thing with authoritarian bureaucrats who send in police to guard the young and innocent against those who “come from the outside”: they are more than willing to sanction brutal violence to buttress whatever obscene fantasy of purity serves as their faulty moral compass.

As Freeman and Brown effectively demonstrate, the report points to something that cannot be fixed by implementing some policy or other, clearer guidelines for crowd-control, a more effective organizational structure for the pathetic "Leadership Team," or sanctions of individual police officers for their brutal oversteps. Even in the few cases where they are laid out clearly and forcefully, such policy recommendations would represent piecemeal attempts to manage the symptom of a problem that runs much deeper. The problem has to do, rather, with a particular way of seeing the world, with the administrative gaze. What activates the administration's response, its rapid and reflexive turn to its repressive arm, the UCDPD, is the shimmering and intangible image of students as "very young [white] girls" threatened by outsiders, "older people" from "Oakland." At the same time, it is precisely the student's abstract nature in the eyes of the administration that enables and rationalizes the violent assault against its real, flesh-and-blood counterparts.

This authoritarian paternalism -- Vice Chancellor Meyer even refers to UCD students as "my children" in his statement to the Kroll investigators (p. 39) -- also has a legal significance that so far has received somewhat less attention. One of the most striking parts of the Kroll report is the widespread confusion among UC administrators and their police counterparts about the legal basis for the police action. The report identifies three legal justifications that were given for the raid. The first is a subsection of California Penal Code Section 647, which reads "Every person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor: (e) Who lodges in any building, structure, vehicle, or place, whether public or private, without the permission of the owner or person entitled to the possession or in control of it." Students who were arrested on the day of the pepper-spraying were charged with this, though the DA later opted not to press charges. Not coincidentally, it's the same Section (though a different subsection) with which the Davis Dozen are being charged by the Yolo County DA. (It turns out that this particular subsection was originally intended to "criminaliz[e] African American civil rights protests in the 1960s.") Since the arrests were made in the afternoon, however, the point here is that "it is not clear that the arrestees were, in fact, connected to any of the tents or had in fact 'lodged' on University property" (Kroll, p. 112). Likewise, the second legal basis for the police action was a UCD policy prohibiting "overnight camping" on university grounds. Again, since the arrests took place in the afternoon, this policy is entirely irrelevant.

The third and most significant legal basis for the police action circles back to the figure of the "non-affiliate." The report cites a letter from Senior Campus Counsel Michael Sweeney to the Kroll investigators. Dated January 13, this retrospective letter contains the clearest statement from the UCD administration as to its official position on the legality of the action: "The law that most clearly applies is California Code of Regulations, title 5, section 100005, enclosed, which prohibits non-affiliates from camping on University property." "Thus," the Kroll report continues, "in response to questions about the legal basis for the police action the administration cites legal authority that only applies to non-affiliates" (p. 29).

The "non-affiliate" stands at the heart of the (il)legality of the police operation, whose entire premise was the abundance of "non-affiliates" insidiously dispersed throughout the student body on the day in question. Chief Spicuzza stated that "her officers had told her that 80 percent of the people out there weren't students, that we had non-affiliates here" (Kroll, p. 56); while "Officer F" reported that "through conversation with the occupants, it was determined that the majority were NOT affiliated with the University [but were] part of the 'Occupy' movement" (Kroll, p. 38). The absence of "non-affiliates" -- or at least the administration's incapacity to demonstrate a "non-affiliate" presence -- means that not only the arrests but very nearly everything the police did on that day was illegal: "Without the legal authority to demand that the tents be removed, the police lose the legal authority for much of what subsequently transpired on November 18, including the issuance of an order to disperse and the declaration of an unlawful assembly" (Kroll, p. 110).

Like the "outside agitator," the "gang member," the "prisoner," the "illegal alien," and the "terrorist," the "non-affiliate" marks the limit of the rule of law. But this limit is constantly being contested. Through direct actions like occupations, pickets, and barricades, we generate new lines of care, affinity, and solidarity that reconfigure these boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. On one hand, the UC administration pushes poorer students and students of color off our campuses while replacing them with corporate and financial capital. On the other hand, the anti-privatization movement pushes capital off campus while repurposing and opening up the university's spaces and resources for everyone -- not just for the benefit of the administrators and police who, in this age of austerity, make our lives increasingly miserable, precarious, and violent.

FOR A UNIVERSITY OF NON-AFFILIATES
NO COPS / NO BOSSES / NO CAPITAL

Solidarity with UC Davis and UC Berkeley Protesters Facing Criminal Charges

Direct Action Gets the Goods, UC Davis Edition

From the Bicycle Barricade:

On March 12, the parasitic US Bank notified its hosts customers that, as of Feb. 28, it had officially closed its UC Davis branch.

The bank’s closure was the result of a quarter-long blockade, in which an autonomous direct action group effectively prevented bank operations.

Despite sustained efforts at intimidation by bank managers, private security guards, UC Davis police and administrators, the bank blockade stood its ground, even when faced with arrest threats, student judicial sanctions, and physical confrontations.

The successful blockade is clear proof of the efficacy of direct action, in which a committed and organized group, willing to place its “bodies on the gears, . . . upon all the apparatus” can achieve victories against the capitalist system that transforms our classrooms into spaces of exploitation and forces us to sell our lives, our futures, to bankers and profiteers.

This action was part of an ongoing campaign to free the university from the grip of capital. Every space we retake from the managers, the bankers, the administrators, and the self-elected résumé polishers of ASUCD represents a step towards the autonomy required to transform this corporate university into the people’s university.

We celebrate this victory by planning our next action and restating our intention to remove the chancellor and police from our campus as a necessary step towards liberation.

Needless to say, the UC Regents aren't happy with this development. Their lawyer recently sent off a letter describing in detail the many efforts they made to get US Bank to stay. They really want the banks on campus. Above all, the Regents were hoping for US Bank to help them deal with the protesters -- as the letter states, "The Regents repeatedly asked for the Bank's assistance and collaboration in addressing the problems created by the protesters, and the Bank has either refused to provide such assistance or has delayed responding in a manner that has caused reasonable suspicion that the Bank was not genuinely interested in maintaining a long-term presence at the Davis campus." The bank, apparently realizing this was a losing battle and recognizing the potentially disastrous PR implications, was "unforthcoming in dealing with the Regents' representatives in Davis."

Pobrecitos, no one to bail you out this time...

[Update 6:01pm 3/18]: For a more detailed analysis of the Regents' letter as legal argument as well as a related statement from US Bank and the original contract, see this pro bono legal advice for the UC Regents.

Solidarity with the Egyptian Rebels from Occupied California #J25

At one year from the Egyptian uprising, much love and solidarity from the occupied Crush Culture Center at UC Davis. For more on the occupation, see the Communiqué from the Occupied Crush Culture Center and the Communiqué for a Radical Occupation.

Also, this anecdote:

“Yesterday, hanging a solidarity banner with Egypt, written in Arabic, with two of my closest comrades, a Palestinian man and a queer Iranian-jew, we were told by a group of mostly white women that our ‘movement’ was run by straight white males.”

Occupying Education: The Student Fight Against Austerity in California

[from the November/December 2011 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas; download the PDF version here]


(photo by Andrew Stern)

By Zachary Levenson

On November 18, University of California (UC), Davis police attempted to raid a student occupation on the campus. When a line of UC Davis students refused to move out of the way, Lieutenant John Pike covered their faces with military-grade pepper spray. He returned for a second round, making sure to coat everyone’s eyes and throats.

“When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood,” described Assistant Professor of English at UC Davis Nathan Brown.[1]

Within 24 hours, a video of the incident had gone viral on YouTube, and the media feigned outrage. UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi apologized for the incident, and UC president Mark Yudof announced a task force to address the police violence. UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau was also forced to apologize after campus police clubbed UC Berkeley students and faculty while they also nonviolently defended an encampment on their campus two weeks before.

This is hardly the first time that California students have faced brutal police repression in recent years. This sort of authorized police violence has been a constant feature of campus administrations’ response to students as they have continuously mobilized against the privatization of their public universities over the past two years.


***


Early in the morning of November 20, 2009, 43 students from the UC Berkeley occupied Wheeler Hall, the building with the most classrooms on campus. When police arrived a couple of hours before classes began for the day, they found the doors barricaded and a small contingent of supporters gathered outside. Within a few hours campus unions were picketing, and students and workers had surrounded the building, chanting in solidarity. By midday, the number of supporters outside Wheeler Hall had grown to over 2,000, now actively defending the occupation in an impassioned standoff with hundreds of riot cops sent in to enforce order. Hanging from a second floor window was a spray-painted banner reading, “32% HIKE, 1900 LAYOFFS,” and the word “CLASS,” circled with a line through it. Purportedly in response to state funding retrenchment, the UC Regents had approved a 32% tuition hike for UC students across the state the day before. Students were livid.

In fall 2009, across the state, students launched dozens of occupations, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and blockades against the tuition hike and austerity measures. The police responded with repression, using batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and even Tasers. During the Wheeler Hall occupation demonstrations, one student was shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet at point-blank range, another ended up in the hospital after her fingers were nearly amputated by a police baton, and dozens reported being beaten.

“Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops,” read a graduate student nearly two weeks later, standing atop a chair, at a forum organized by the UC student government in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Police Department (UCPD). “The privatization of the UC system and the impoverishment of student life, the UC administration’s conscious choice to shift its burden of debt onto the backs of its students—these can be maintained only by way of police batons, Tasers, barricades and pepper spray. These are two faces of the same thing.”[2]

When he finished reading the statement, the students rose to their feet and followed him out of the room.

Keep Calm and Study On

If Yudof thinks of us as corpses, Katehi wants to see us as cows. "Keep calm and study on."

(via fb)

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.

Nathan Brown at UC Davis Rally

What will depose this authoritarian administrator is not letters or petitions; it is your direct action on this campus. That direct action must continue until the Chancellor resigns. The Chancellor has said that it is not appropriate for her to resign at this time. We know that the Chancellor is not a very good judge of what is appropriate.

I propose two demands moving forward:

1) The immediate resignation of Chancellor Katehi;

2) All police forces ordered permanently off of UC campuses.

Chancellor Katehi and police forces are the primary threat to the health and safety of our university community.

No Cops, No Bosses

Original post here.

Posted on November 20, 2011 by crank

By now much of the world has seen video and photos of Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police department as he discharged a canister of burning chemicals into the faces of students seated in the center of the university quad. Most viewers are outraged, and justifiably so. Much of the outrage has been directed at John Pike. He deserves it. But we should remind ourselves that Friday’s police violence was only an aberration because it happened on a university campus not easily assimilable to the stereotype of “Berkeley radicals” and to students who are perceived or portrayed as mostly white and as resisting passively. Whiteness is brought up here, not to chastise those who only now denounce police violence that has been routinely applied to non-white communities and individuals—this itself is a misperception of Friday’s events: a majority of those arrested were not white—but to invite readers, new and old, to extend the critique of police violence beyond the walls of the university to the communities whose life it damages every single day.

Friday’s punitive violence, as terrible as it was, is not an example of bad policing. It is an example of policing.

We’ve seen this kind of violence used before on California campuses, and not just in response to the anti-privatization protests and occupations of the past two years. We’re seeing it used now to suppress dissent in cities across the world, from Oakland to Cairo.

When UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza says she is “very proud” of her officers, who “did a great job,” she is convinced that this is true. It’s not simply a public relations strategy, it’s a reflection of the fact that her officers did what cops are expected to do: employ violence against those who challenge authority.

This is why we do not demand the dismissal of Lt. John Pike, although it would be welcome.

Our demand is COPS OFF CAMPUS. Period.

Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi is working feverishly to control the media narrative about Friday’s police attack on protesters. She tried to hold a press conference yesterday, but we shut it down with our voices and bodies. It’s telling that the press conference was held in a building meant to accommodate satellite trucks and internet broadcasting, but whose size and peripheral location bar students from attending. Katehi’s press conference was meant to calm a national public outraged by her use of force against students. Addressing students and, more importantly, listening to them, was not part of her agenda. We were locked out of the building yesterday, but we let ourselves in and stopped the propaganda session.

Although we posed no danger to her, Katehi refused to leave the building for two hours, perhaps waiting for rain, or nightfall, before walking past a silent wall of students and ducking into her luxury automobile. She could have addressed students there, of course, but she preferred the leather-lined cocoon of the car and the comforts of a phone interview with CNN, conducted immediately after she left.

For Katehi, students are a nuisance, an obstacle standing in the way of her plans to privatize and internationalize the campus. This is apparent in the email missives that she sends to everyone, trying to justify her use of force. She invokes safety and health concerns.

[T]he encampment violated regulations designed to protect the health and safety of students, staff and faculty.

Here, the health and safety OF STUDENTS become empty abstractions that must be protected FROM STUDENTS.

Similarly, in the Chancellor’s tiresome rhetoric about the university’s mission and standards, the word EXCELLENCE loses any educational significance it may have had; it becomes a quantifiable property of the university, indistinguishable from reputation or ranking. “Excellence must be maintained,” recite the administrators. Like health and safety, it must be protected from students, whose disruptive protests mar the university’s image. The careful construction of this image often takes the form of actual construction—the so called capital projects, the gleaming buildings featured so prominently on university websites.



The fee increases, pepper spray, beatings, arrests, and student disciplinary procedures of the last two years are not the unfortunate consequences of a dismal budgetary situation. They are the primary vehicles for maintaining “excellence.”

Katehi makes repeated references to the presence of non-students among the protesters who were attacked by police, as if community members and alumni had no right to set foot on the campus of a PUBLIC university, as if they had no stake in the fate of a PUBLIC university. Our administrators prefer the university’s connections to the public to be mediated by formal contracts with agribusiness giants. They prefer alumni to mail checks from a distance. They prefer that the city not interfere with its project to increase the size of the student body and expand its physical footprint. They prefer visitors to be chaperoned through campus on tours that highlight statistics, amenities and, most of all, the buildings—the shiny new buildings and construction projects financed by student debt. Against the administration’s attempts to keep the community at a distance, the students of the University of California, Davis invite alumni, community members, and everyone else to the Quad on Monday, November 21 at noon, for a conversation about the university’s future. We ask Davis residents to support us in our struggle against a university administration at war with students and with the notion of a public university.

We second calls for Katehi’s resignation. She must go. But we don’t want to replace her with another Regental appointee or an interim chancellor. We don’t want to replace her.

The administration, as a managerial class for whom the ideal university is a massive corporation in imperialist partnership with other massive corporations and banks, will never accede to our demands for self-management, greater student and community participation in university governance, and better working conditions. The administration at UC Davis and every other UC campus has proven that, when faced with these demands, they will unleash violence in our learning spaces.

We demand the abolition of the administration and the transfer of all their functions to workers, students, and faculty.

As a necessary precondition to self-management and for our safety, we demand that UCPD be disbanded and that the University be declared a sanctuary space, free of interference from law enforcement personnel. Universities outside the United States already enjoy this freedom. We must demand it here.

Cops and administrators off campus!