Protest, Policing, and the UC Regents' Committee on Finance

The UC Regents are having another meeting on May 16, and tuition hikes are once again on the table. According to the budget report [pdf] to the Committee on Finance, the Regents will discuss the possibility of raising tuition and fees by 6 percent for the fall 2012 semester as well as an additional, mid-year tuition hike "in the range of double digits" for spring 2013 if Governor Brown's tax proposal doesn't pass in November. Chris Newfield's analysis of the budget scenarios is a must read here.

But there's something on the Committee on Finance's agenda that appears at first glance to be strangely out of place. Nestled between discussions of expenditure rates for the general endowment pool and plans for the formation of a captive insurance agency, we find Discussion Item F7, titled "Update regarding Report to the President on Response to Protest on University of California Campuses."

This is a reference, of course, to the Robinson-Edley Report [pdf], which was released in draft form last week to great media fanfare. The text of the discussion item [pdf] for the Regents' meeting is more or less the Executive Summary of the report. Writing at the request of UC President Mark Yudof in the wake of the November 9 police riot at UC Berkeley, General Counsel Charles Robinson and Dean Christopher Edley were charged with generating a set of best policing practices for UC campuses to use in dealing with future protests. The infamous pepper-spraying incident at UC Davis the following week only intensified the report's urgency. Over the course of 50 recommendations (although the version for the Regents' meeting appears to contain only 48 -- it's not clear which two recommendations have been removed), it suggests that the issue at hand is essentially one of free speech. As the Executive Summary states,

This Report is premised on the belief that free expression, robust discourse, and vigorous debate over ideas and principles are essential to the mission of our University. The goal of this Report is to identify practices that will facilitate such expression — while also protecting the health and safety of our students, faculty, staff, police, and the general public. (1)

Joshua Clover has recently shown how the frame of rights and free speech represents a fundamental misrecognition about what is happening on UC campuses and around the world. According to this understanding, the sequence of events goes something like this: students protest, then police respond. Perhaps the police respond a little too hard, arresting a few too many protesters, using a little too much pepper spray. So the administration steps in and formulates a new set of policing practices to ensure that in the future this kind of excessive force isn't deployed. Here, the issue at hand is one of demarcating the limits of protest as speech, of regulating the proper relations between protesters and police.

In fact, as Clover points out, the sequence of events is very different. It begins not with students arbitrarily protesting, but with the administration developing and implementing austerity policies across the UC system -- raising tuition, cutting classes, firing workers, increasing out-of-state admissions, and so on, austerity's myriad manifestations within the particular context of the post-crisis university. These struggles are not rhetorical but material; they are about how the university is run, about what, under the technocratic directives of the UC administration, the university is coming to be. By displacing these struggles onto the terrain of speech, we unwittingly let the administration off the hook: "One suspects there will be some payouts to injured students, and that a cop or two will be pastured. And the matter will be tentatively resolved, despite the economic content remaining entirely unaddressed; thus, the administration wins by 'losing.'"

This is precisely what the Robinson-Edley report does. Without going into too much detail, it's worth looking at an example. One thing that jumps out in the report is the extent to which the authors see the problem as rooted at least in part in students' ignorance: "We also were struck by a more fundamental information gap," write the authors. "[M]ost members of our community know very little about our campus police departments" (23). Apparently, this is not for lack of opportunity. "At UC Santa Cruz, for example, the police department offers a quarter-long course titled 'Citizen Police Academy,' for up to twenty-five students, faculty, and staff. Class members gain a deep familiarity with the campus police department. In addition, on some of our campuses, the police make presentations at new student orientations. But these existing opportunities for students and other members of the University community to educate themselves about their campus police departments apparently have not satisfied the community’s desire for information" (24). Predictably, the report goes on to recommend more such classes, more opportunities for students to "become acquainted with the campus police agency" as well as "with the applicable rules for campus protest -- including rights and responsibilities, triggers for an administration or police response, the response option framework, and alternate modes for engaging with authorities" (26).

The objective is to transform struggles over privatization into a sort of choreographed dance between students and police, to minimize or obscure the work of the administration, and to avoid at all cost any disturbance of the material operations of the university. Despite the much-hyped statement in the Executive Summary that administrators and police will have to stop thinking primarily in terms of "the maintenance of order and adherence to rules and regulations," this order is ultimately upheld as fundamental. In response to concerns that arose from the UC Davis pepper-spraying incident, the report recommends not that pepper-spray should be eliminated but that "event response team’s guidelines, should specify that administrators will not authorize any physical police response against protesters non-aggressively linking arms unless the protesters were significantly interfering with the academic mission of the campus" (37). In the end, order must be maintained, the restructuring of the university must continue unabated.

* * *

Why, then, are protest and policing a concern of the UC Regents' Committee on Finance? No doubt some of the recommendations in the Robinson-Edley report will require some appropriation of funds to implement -- mainly the hiring and training of police officers (Recommendation Group 4) and the surveillance and monitoring of protest actions (Recommendation Group 7). But these will be minor expenses and anyway have little to do with UC finances at large. This apparently unlikely arrangement must be read as an acknowledgment, on the part of the UC's top managers, of what campus protests are really about. They know that the only thing standing in the way of their austerity policies, of their ever accelerating and increasingly desperate attempts to tie the university to the financial markets, student tuition, and debt, are the students and workers -- and occasionally faculty -- standing in their way, literally using their bodies to keep the machine from operating.

It could not be otherwise. At the UC today, protest and policing are inextricably a question of finance.

Reflections from UC Davis: On Academic Freedom and Campus Militarization

 

The following article by Joshua Clover was just published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies. A PDF of the article is available here. We recommend reading it next to the latest piece from Nathan Brown, "Administrative Totalitarianism at the UC and the Necessity of Direct Action by Faculty."

The autumn of 2011 offered extraordinary images of police brutality against students (and not students alone) on University of California campuses. Two stand out, both seemingly following on from the national Occupy movement. On November 9, students attempting to ‘occupy’ a grassy area at the edge of Berkeley’s famed Sproul Plaza, next to the Mario Savio Steps, were batoned by riot police summoned to campus by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, first during the day, and then again that night when Occupy Cal returned. In no small part because a couple of professors were among the beaten, the event became a national news story. This would pale in comparison to events on the Davis campus nine days later, when a low-key tent occupation on the quad — Occupy UC Davis — was broken up by riot police summoned by Chancellor Linda Katehi from three jurisdictions. The images of one corpulent and distressingly nonchalant officer disbursing military-grade pepper spray to the faces of a couple dozen seated students would swiftly become one of the iconic images of the year, not just for the campus or the university but globally.

In train, there has been considerable discussion of removing the Chancellors who either authorized such actions or were too incapable to command the situation adequately. There has also been a perhaps more consequential debate around the presence of police on college campuses, regarding either their presence per se (for those familiar with the internationally and historically common situation of police-free universities), or in terms of their increasingly militarized form. And these changes in campus dynamics — toward the heavy hand bearing advanced weaponry — have prompted concerns about the implications for the intellectual and academic pursuits of the university, and what we might expect to develop from here.

I want to argue as directly as possible that grasping this new security regime as primarily pertinent to campus intellectual climate is misguided. While this line of inquiry is no trivial matter, it confuses and obscures core issues.

The confusion comes from two entangled commonplaces regarding these dramatic events (and others like them in kind, if not in media saturation). The first is the assumption that we can identify in each case a two-part sequence of cause and effect, in which students protest and police overreact disastrously. The second (with evident implications for the question of academic freedom tout court), is that this to-and-fro is to be conceived exclusively as a freedom of speech issue.

These assumptions form a unity. In this understanding, students first protest, as students are wont to do. The question arises as to the limits of protest, and to what extent certain actions — in this case, politicized camping — count as protected speech. ‘Time, place, and manner’ provisions are invoked; the police are summoned, heavy with tools. Orders to disperse are given, no dispersal is forthcoming, and then the intolerable thing happens, and everyone scrambles to understand and manage the aftermath.

There can be no doubt that these ‘overreactions’ are judiciously calculated to produce a chilling effect on student struggle. As with the endless nuisance charges levied against student (and other) organizers, they are designed to exhaust resources, both inner and material. And further there can be no doubt that this chilling effect spills over to the entire campus. In this sense it is certainly reasonable to consider the implications of these actions for free thought and intellectual exploration.

But there are also good reasons — better reasons, I believe — not to shift the debate onto the terrain of thought, ideas, expression, and so forth. It has suited all sides to allow that this drama revolves around First Amendment issues. Under considerable internal and external pressure, both Chancellors conceded that in these cases, the riot police may indeed have curtailed what really should be protected rights of speech and assembly. Katehi insisted (twice; she is in the habit of using the same formulaic language in multiple press releases) that: “Our campus is committed to providing a safe environment for all to learn freely and practice their civil rights of freedom of speech and expression” (2011a, 2011b); her counterpart at Berkeley, Chancellor Birgeneau, extolled the same virtues. Meanwhile, students did not hesitate to pillory both administrations for having failed the Bill of Rights, while dismayed if still-timorous faculty demanded that Birgeneau “respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus” (UC Berkeley Academic Senate 2011).

The fantasy at play here is that what has gone wrong somehow concerns the excessive assertion of First Amendment rights by students, or conversely, the excessive limiting of same by the administration. The logical remedy is inevitably discovered to be a rebalancing of these matters, extending adequate protections to ‘protest’ and ‘expression’ as abstract ends in and of themselves.

The underlying reality is radically different. What must first be recognized is that in neither case did we see the abstract two-part motion, protest/repression. The unity of each event is considerably more concrete: administrations must deploy force to implement austerity policies. The initiating acts were not student protests but university policies designed to assure that the costs of running an educational system increasingly devolve to students, who are at once ever more compelled to pursue higher education for competitive advantage in a forbidding employment landscape, and concomitantly less able to afford the same without increased debt and workloads.

This misrecognition of the sequence of substantive events is compounded by another, whereby the campus protests are presented as arising from the charisma of Occupy Wall Street and the ensuing national movement over the course of the preceding months. As the Occupy movement has not made a significant issue of education, and as students (especially at purportedly elite or top-tier universities) are often thought to be cushioned at least temporarily from the buffets of the economy (especially the employment market), the inference is frequently drawn that the campus variants of Occupy are lacking real content of their own, and are thus reducible to protest for the sake of protest.

What is forgotten is that the Occupy movement, doubtless inspired by 2010’s ‘Arab Spring’ and Europe’s ‘Movement of the Squares,’ has its local roots in recent US campus organizing, specifically the anti-privatization campaigns of 2009-2010 on UC campuses. They have been ongoing if uneven, and characterized throughout by police violence. The shock over recent events at Berkeley and Davis this November must be taken with a grain of salt. After all, only two Novembers before, both Chancellors called riot police from multiple jurisdictions onto the same campuses to break up anti-privatization occupations. Both times, the police attacked non-violent protestors, and lawsuits are still pending. In short, we are looking at a clearly defined confrontation that has been in progress for some time, on the concrete terrain of economic crisis — not a timeless confrontation between academic freedom and policing, on the abstract terrain of rights.

So we might say that a mistaken assessment of the sequence of events, both this November and over the last few years, allows for a misrecognition of the fundamental issue.This seems perhaps a neutral slippage; aren’t rights good for everyone? However, this reflexive motion — in which future political organizing and action turns on itself to address the formal conditions of previous actions rather than the preceding causes — in actuality serves the university administration admirably by displacing the debate into the arena of form rather than content. The administration can offer a remedy, with tonalities of magnanimous self-correction: they can promise to be more thoughtful and diligent about respecting the right to protest, and thus seem to slip out of their position in the struggle, that is, as enthusiastic co-authors of the privatization process. They themselves turn to become a context, not a class antagonist.

This is indeed precisely what has happened. One suspects there will be some payouts to injured students, and that a cop or two will be pastured. And the matter will be tentatively resolved, despite the economic content remaining entirely unaddressed; thus, the administration wins by ‘losing.’

One can see that this movement has become a substantial quagmire for the professoriat within this political cycle: what is sometimes called ‘the articulation trap.’ It is a double truism of the faculty member’s position, especially the professor’s, that she is not identified clearly with either side of the current struggle between the economic interests of students and administrators; at the same time, her job’s basic supposition (especially in the humanities) is that position-taking is itself an action. These two factors supply a powerful if implicit determination toward intervening not by entering into the content of this struggle, but by offering, at a remove, often-eloquent assessments that tend toward seemingly neutral ethical (or pseudo-ethical) categories like rights and freedoms. I fear we professors are quite often guilty of looking for our car-keys under the streetlight — that is, participating in this particular antagonism in the ways we are best equipped for, rather than in the ways that the conditions and goals demand.

In thinking about campus militarization, UCSC professor Bob Meister provides an extraordinarily useful account of the relation between campus securitization and securitization of university economies, as they have recently developed. In his talk on “Debt, Democracy, and the Public University,” he sets forth the cruel historical developments through which William Bratton was retained to lead the investigation into the pepper spray incident, and what it reveals about “the link between the privatization of public universities, the financial services industry and the national security industry” (Meister 2011). Meister observes that:

Since 9/11 the US defense industry of the Cold War has morphed from being mainly in the military hardware business into a new role as global provider of security services that enables government and corporations throughout the world to outsource intelligence, policing, background checks, construction of secure sites and various operations that may need to be deniable — as well as the public relations efforts necessary to support such deniability.

Most Americans do not know that there is a huge domestic market for services provided by the defense industry....The fastest growing market for the defense and security services industry is in the area of local government and public agencies that feel threatened by political protests, such as the Occupy movement, and that have reporting and other obligations under the Patriot Act. Former LA Police Chief William Bratton was hired to build this market for Kroll Security by its parent company, Altegrity, a defense contractor that is itself now owned by a private equity firm that also invests in both for-profit higher education and financial services (Meister 2011).

While the specifics of such connections inevitably vary from place to place and situation to situation, the systemic logic is plain enough. Heightened campus security is inextricably linked to heightened campus securitization in its two main forms: the decision of universities to pursue a certain line of investment strategies which move money away from educational services and into capital projects; and the corresponding decision to cover those educational costs by shifting burdens to students at a rate which can only be financed though student loans, concomitantly providing profitable investment for banks laden with otherwise fallow capital. The rise in tuition and indebtedness within the context of economic crisis simply is the militarization of campus; they are one and the same.

It is impossible to conclude other than this: even if one does adhere to the belief that the matters of intellectual freedom, free speech, and free assembly are fundamental to this unfolding political economic sequence, the place where such things will be arbitrated is not on their own terrain — the terrain of formal rights — but elsewhere. The necessary arena in which such rights might be protected presently and for the longer durée is the arena of direct antagonism between, on the one side, those fighting against backdoor privatization and austerity programs on campus, and on the other, those who implement and enforce them. This is not a rhetorical struggle, and moreover, the retreat into the sphere of articulation risks affirming the misrecognition of the struggle’s character. Such formal rights are far less an enabling condition for this struggle than an outcome of its material content.

Professors: stand with your students, literally. It is the best thing to be done for academic freedom; it is the least you can do for them.

UC Berkeley Tang Center Cooperates with UCPD [Updated]

We've all seen the video. On November 9, UCPD and Alameda County Sheriffs used batons to beat up and arrest students and faculty who were protesting on Sproul Plaza as part of Occupy Cal. In what has become one of the more infamous examples of violence, one cop grabbed English professor Celeste Langan by the hair and threw her to the ground, where she was arrested. But Langan's were not the most serious injuries -- as a result of the attacks, demonstrators suffered everything from nerve damage to broken ribs.

After being beaten up by UC Berkeley's police force (and invited guests), some of these students went to the Tang Center, the university's health center, for treatment. And then this happened:

In the immediate aftermath of the November 9th protests, the UCPD solicited -- and received -- the medical records of protesters who sustained injuries at the hands of the police. These records were released by the UC Berkeley Tang Center and local hospitals without the knowledge or consent of the patients; they were then used to identify protesters. The fact that medical records can be turned over to the UCPD in order to incriminate victims of police violence raises serious questions about the ethics of medical care on the UC-Berkeley campus. As the many videos taken on November 9th show, students and faculty were beaten simply because they were there. When evidence of physical harm at the hands of the police is immediately read as culpability, our university has effectively criminalized protest. By funneling confidential records to the UCPD and outside bodies, our medical system corroborated this view. What university policies allowed such breaches of confidentiality to happen?

Talk about the administration's favorite bureaucratic expression: "health and safety." We already knew that UCPD works closely with other campus institutions, such as the Office of Student Conduct, and also collaborates, as we've seen from the recently filed criminal charges against November 9 protesters, with the Alameda County District Attorney. But now we know they have a working relationship with University Health Services. And this is not necessarily the result of university policy. According to the ACLU, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which you would assume would protect the privacy of your medical records, in fact does no such thing:

Q: Can the police get my medical information without a warrant?

A: Yes. The HIPAA rules provide a wide variety of circumstances under which medical information can be disclosed for law enforcement-related purposes without explicitly requiring a warrant. These circumstances include (1) law enforcement requests for information to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, witness, or missing person (2) instances where there has been a crime committed on the premises of the covered entity, and (3) in a medical emergency in connection with a crime.

In other words, law enforcement is entitled to your records simply by asserting that you are a suspect or the victim of a crime.

This is a very important point, something that anyone involved in any kind of demonstration should keep in mind. By seeking out medical attention, we may be putting ourselves at risk. This is not to say that one should never go to a clinic or a hospital. Not by any means. But it's important to understand the possible consequences. At the same time, this knowledge underscores the importance of street medics, of learning how to heal ourselves and our comrades as best we can.

[Update 1, 8:09pm 3/13]: The ACLU of Northern California has denounced the charges against the November 9 protesters, and further confirms the collusion between UCPD and the UCB health services: "We also know that at least 2 of the students sought medical treatment at a University health facility, which then handed information about them to the alleged assailant, UCPD."

[Update 2, 9:10am 3/16]: And now the Chronicle has followed up: "Tang gave police more than a dozen reports of injuries from Nov. 9, police said. It's what happened afterward that compounded the mistrust, students say. Several of the injured . . . were contacted by police and asked to answer questions about what had happened. Two also received letters from the District Attorney's office that they were being charged with 'resisting' and 'obstructing.'" The Daily Cal has an article too that quotes this post.

The View from the Other Side of the Barricades [Updated]

From our comrades at Occupy Everything comes this email from UC President Mark Yudof to UCSD Professor Charles Thorpe regarding the police violence at the most recent Regents' meeting at UC Riverside. In the course of the demonstration, police beat protesters with batons and shot them with rubber bullets (for an extended analysis of the day's actions, see this post). Videos like the one above (more here) remind us of what it looks like to face off against a line of riot cops, wildly swinging their batons, cradling and reflexively caressing their firearms, staring out like robots through the foggy visors of their riot helmets. But Yudof's email reminds us of what things look like from the other side of the barricades. Not the cops' view, exactly, though they overlap significantly, but the view of the regents and senior managers themselves. Worth a look.

[Update 3/8, 3:23pm: Read the original letter that Professor Thorpe, along with nearly 50 other faculty members, sent to Yudof and the rest of the UC Regents.]

Trial Against UCPD Begins Today [Update 1, 2]

[Update 2, Friday 2/10]: Closing statements were made this morning; as of about 5:30pm the jury has returned a verdict: not guilty. There will be no accountability through the courts.

[Update 1, Tuesday 2/7]: Today the UCB grad student whose hand was smashed by UCPD Officer Brendan Tinney on November 20, 2009 gave her testimony and was cross-examined by the university's lawyer.

The trial continues tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8:30am, same time same place as before [scroll down]. Tomorrow's testimony will be worth checking out: first, Officer Tinney himself, who makes over $97,000 to assault Berkeley students, will take the stand. He will be followed at about noon by star Berkeley Law student Thomas Frampton, who we last saw successfully defending two students from UCB's incompetently nefarious Office of Student Conduct. Finally, the prosecution will call police expert Roger Clark.

Thursday won't be that important for folks to attend (the defense will call their medical expert and their own police expert). But Friday will be the most important day of the trial. That's when both lawyers, John Burris for the prosecution and Claudia Leed for the university's police-impunity machine, will make their closing statements and the jury will start making their decision. Pack the courtroom on Friday morning in solidarity! 8:30am, same time same place.

On November 20, 2009, outside of Wheeler Hall, UCPD officer Brendan Tinney used his baton to smash the hand of a UC Berkeley graduate student who was standing behind a metal barricade. Her hand was smashed to pieces, and she had to be rushed to the hospital for reconstructive surgery -- even so, the attack left her disabled for life. (The above picture was taken just before the brutal attack.) UCPD's internal investigation, not surprisingly, completely exonerated Officer Tinney from any wrongdoing, finding that his actions were "proper, lawful, and appropriate":

The Board’s goal was to look at the actions of the officer and determine if they fit within the parameter of reasonableness. The officer clearly communicated several warnings to you with instructions for you to keep your hands off the barricades. In fact, you initially complied with those warnings and temporarily removed your hands from the barricade. It was only after your failure to heed the repeated warnings that the officer increased his level of force from a verbal admonishment to a strike against the rungs of the barricade. When you again returned your hand to the barricade, the officer applied the next level of force by striking you. The Board determined that the officer used a continuum of force that was within reason and within his authority during these circumstances. The Board’s finding of your allegation is exonerated.

Today, over two years later, a trial against Tinney is finally set to begin. Jury selection will start at 8:30 am in Courtroom 15 (15th floor) of US District Court, Northern District of California, located in the Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate Ave, San Francisco (near Civic Center Bart). We will be bringing you updates from the trial as frequently as we can and posting them here.

Cops and Cowards: Reflections on the Recent UC Regent Protests

[Update 1/23: the original post has been slightly edited for clarity; the same changes have been made below]

From anti-imperialist inc.:

The event on Thursday, January 19 at UC Riverside was a strategic experiment for Southern California organizers and nothing that occurred should be taken at face value and assumed useless. What the press hasn’t been showing is the most important point in the entire protest: when students drove the police into a corner and off the campus in the protest’s closing moments. An action that We can most definitely learn from...

i am not particularly concerned with a majority of the activity that occurred Thursday, January 19th at the UC Regents meeting in Riverside, because the energetic ad hoc efforts of the student organizers from all of the participating UC’s speaks for itself. The day represented a solid advancement for Southern California student activism. It is an advancement that has been growing and will hopefully continue to fuel a sense of urgency for Our struggle.

What i am concerned with in this essay, is what has been lacking from the critiques of Thursday the 19th: creativity, tactical analysis and above all: a look into the events that unfolded while the cops still maintained their presence on campus post-meeting. This moment, for me, crystalized an idea that has been floating around the UC community/blogosphere for some time now, the struggle cannot only pertain to austerity and fee hikes, but the opportunity has been widening for making domestic militarization a central focus of Our praxis in the student movement. A decision that has the potential to connect the struggles of students fighting tuition increases and eroding access to education, to the struggles in the prisons, to the struggles anti-violence groups face, with the struggles of immigrants rights groups and with the struggles of communities across the state.

Earlier accounts of police violence at the Davis and Berkeley campuses have been vainly provincialized, described as epic calamities – where moral outrage was merely the result of police crossing the boundaries of whiteness. So with this understanding, i do not want to dismiss the importance of acknowledging the privileged perceptions amongst the liberals and a majority of UC advocates, as a barrier between understanding modes of domination in the US and within the UC community itself. This understanding is the basis of my politics and this essay should be read with an assumed understanding of the context in which it is written from.

It should be also addressed that this is not an attempt towards a superficial inclusion (occupier “semantics”), let alone a crass stab at progressive coalition, it is a call for a genuine movement against domestic militarism, institutional racism, and all that is imbedded within the logic of Western law enforcement. It should be made very clear that a militarized police presence is, nonetheless, the divide between Us students and any dream of completely controlling Our educations. The police were the physical wall between Us and the Regents on Thursday the 19th, they were the lurking force that surveilled organizers prior to the meeting, and outside of the University they are the physical embodiment of all that is so completely fucked in Our society.

South Exit Occupied by Students

Book Block Holdin' it Down

First off, i want to make clear that reflections on the event’s engagement with the police cannot be allowed to fall victim to the same institutional press coverage and useless chronological recaps of events. We are battling on a new terrain. Many of the Southern California campuses have never seen political activity of this magnitude, so Our organizing efforts have to be fresh and creative. As well, Our reflections on actions like this need to be conducted in a manner contradictory to the norm. If We are going to conquer the new terrain before Our oppressors, We must squeeze every drop of creative and theoretical juice possible out of the body of information generated from Our actions. Whether it be strategic, theoretical, artistic or humorous, alternative forms of reflection will always have the potential to breathe new life into the praxis of SoCal student activism.

So in this manner, i do not want to make this piece a summary on the entire event itself, but rather a conceptual analysis on its conclusion and epilogue. Our practice of protest in Southern California is embarking on something this region has never experienced, but with that comes the responsibility of not falling into the patterns of the system inherent in the liberal-conservative SoCalian University atmosphere.

To briefly summarize the conclusion of the protest: During the majority of the meeting demonstrators blocked ALL three possible exits a number of exits the Regents could use and their parking lot entrance/exit as well, shifting from exits to exit throughout the course of the day, unfortunately never occupying them at the same time. However, once further police violence erupted and the riot police began kettling demonstrators, folks got caught up in their emotions and in the spectacle of violence – serving as the initial distraction the regents needed to slip out of the third (least occupied) exit.





Note for further actions: it is an extremely hard thing to do, but organizers must be able to step outside of the moment and see past the short sightedness that everyone else inevitably has when in protest. Constantly preparing for what is going to happen next is key and it is an imperative that organizers try not to get too caught-up in the action itself. Students did an extremely good job of this on the 19^th up until the masses of riot police came trucking in from the north side of the campus (Context: at this point everyone in the event was exhausted, mentally and physically... It was quite understandable).

The distraction only held temporarily, and protestors rushed after the regents as their vans drove away. In the unfolding action, the protesters at UC Riverside organically regrouped. Hundreds of students lined and then cornered the police forces that previously escorted the regents from the meeting.

When the Regent’s presence disappeared completely, the legitimacy of police authority was emptied of all its value. A mere hour after police kettled, shot and arrested demonstrators, the power relation had reversed, and a mass of students cornered the police into a state of tactical retreat.

This was a revolutionary moment – a moment beginning when the chants started changing from rhetorical protest clichés to “Leave Our Campus!” and “Fuck the Police!”

Southern Californian organizers should not take this moment for granted. This is how Our movement will succeed. If We see the police and the Regents as being no different from one and other – two sides of the same coin. The movement towards taking back Our schools cannot physically materialize (literally) into anything unless We confront the issue of the police. Hence, a radical movement that truly believes education is a right. The police are a hindrance on Our ability to speak and learn freely.

One fellow protester and i rationalized the events as they unfolded before Our eyes as “going overboard,” and at face value they did seem likely to be just that. But in reflection, the empowerment this moment gave to a campus on the cusp of mind-numbing political apathy and eternal “fratability,” the final confrontation is not something to be taken for granted. So to clarify what “going overboard” really is: an example would be the regents escalating Our tuition year after year after year after year.

The cornering of the police was a revolutionary moment that cannot be dismissed as anything other. To most, revolution sounds chaotic, and revolution seems messy. To be honest as i reflect on the epilogue of the protest, it is the very sloppiness and chaos of the closing hour, that made this day so beautiful!

Prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore articulates power as being not “a thing” but rather “a capacity composed of active and changing relationships enabling a person, group, or institution to compel others to do things they would not do on their own” (247). In this moment the students acknowledged their own capacity for power. In the events that unfolded after the Regents’ cowardly exit, the police lost their legitimacy as a presence of authority on the student’s campus, and proved that when students unite they are a force to be reckoned with.

Instances of police infiltration into privileged environments are as productive of moments, as they are counterproductive. How We reflect on them is the difference between creating a movement against police violence that understands the entirety of the struggle, or having it concede to the coercive forces of progressive politics and liberal who-rah-rah. The student movement must understand that police violence is structural and proliferates daily not even 100 yards away from most University campuses. In fact, a dialogue on real police brutality and real police violence (legalized racist murder per say) can even lead into possible discussions on how the institution of the University is unnatural and coercive in itself (though I’ll reserve that discussion for another time).

Our generation’s student movement is growing, but the structural imbalance of power that the few who make decisions hold; whether it is in the realm of the pedagogical, economic or the state’s monopoly on violence, entails a Praxis that must involve more than hikes and cuts. Want to knock power off its pedestal? Then aim at its pillars to get to the top.

Not one person who confronted the police that day can say the events on the 19^th didn’t change their perception of the University. For a display of anger to occur at this magnitude, in the historical and geographical conditions in which they existed: a campus on the remote outskirts of the geographical and ‘Political’ UC system, should be seen as a catalyst for activist organizing on Southern California campuses. And above all it should serve as the beginning of the dismantling of the historical and physical walls that divide Us and the possibilities of controlling Our own education. Walls which encompass the Regents, the Police, the bloated salaries of administration and the fee hikes/loans (*cough* chains) that hold us down.

The goal is not “thoughtful” piecemeal reform with the Regents, which of course is going to garner national media attention Chancellor White... um duhh... calls for reform always fit in well on propaganda networks. It is total control of Our educational opportunity and the means for learning that we want. On January 13th there was no loss in the real struggle to defend education, because the real struggle isn’t to defend it, but to revolutionize it. Wanting “engaging” and “provocative” discussions with the Regents can only get so much. The goal is to end the hierarchical control of education and the defeat the family structure of Our higher education system, that as UCR’s student body president once said (roughly paraphrasing): “students should be the children, and the administrator should be like their parents.” Having someone telling you how to learn is a little different then someone teaching you how to learn. So don’t blur the two prez. Free education! Free the UC’s! Embrace radical pedagogy! And ftp.

Gayatri Spivak On UC Davis Lt. Pike and Chancellor Katehi

[Update 2, 11/27, 10:11pm: In the comments below, the person who originally posted the statement on their blog as having been written by Spivak notes that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Spivak apparently had forwarded the statement in an email, but had not in fact written it. We apologize for the confusion. See the original post, which has been updated, here.]

[Update: As the title of this post mentions, this was not written by Reclaim UC but rather by the well-known postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak and posted here. Thanks to those commenters who have pointed out some errors in her observations. Most important is the fact that the person who accompanies Katehi as she leaves the building is not, in fact, the chief of police. Please keep this in mind as you read.]



UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi



Lt. John Pike

From trinketization:

It has now been covered in the NY Times, USA Today, Time Magazine, CBS, CNN, and across the entire mediasphere. The various UC Davis police assault videos have been watched hundreds of thousands of times. Various searches related to UC Davis and pepper spraying were the *top searches on Google* in the US today — think of what that means. By mid-afternoon, UC Davis had already backed down and the Chancellor had released a damage-controlling and mealy-mouthed promise to investigate. But it was too late.

By monday, millions will know about Lt. Pike and his chemical assault squad, and the $400K per year (plus free housing, travel, and vehicle) Chancellor who gave the order to cut the protesters down to the point that some were hospitalized, and including forcing open students’ mouths and spraying directly into them. I kid you not.

And something remarkable happened at Davis tonight. I’ve been watching the live streams and following the blogs since late this afternoon. It was a very important moment.

Chancellor Katehi was preparing to give a news conference to take another crack at spinning this story and controlling the growing, viral character it has acquired.

UC Davis students showed up in large numbers to this conference, and were kept out of the small building (Surge 2, for those who know the campus) for lack of press passes (ha ha). They surrounded the building and their numbers grew over several hours to over 1000 student protesters. Reports came that Chancellor Katehi was afraid to leave and go through the student protesters, or even that she was being kept from leaving, as if it were a hostage situation. Cops were *not* summoned, however — or at least they were kept back. UC Davis appears to have learned at least a tactical lesson already.

Through patient OWS style organizing, worked out over dozens of mic checks, they arranged to clear a wide path, determined that they would be silent and respectful when she came out, and sent word that they were not keeping her hostage in the building, just there to call for her resignation. Hours went by as the situation got more and more tense, but the students showed remarkable discipline and organization as their numbers kept growing. Finally, they negotiated with Chancellor Katehi’s people and she left the building to walk to her taxpayer-paid $70,000 Lexus SUV with one aide. The students maintained *absolute, total order and silence* — really, not a word — and stood aside, except for the couple of journalists asking her questions on the livestream feed. It was eerie and powerful and Chancellor Pepper Spray was clearly feeling the shame of a thousands of eyes on her around the nation (the livestreams were overloaded as they were joined by students across California and then the nation).

Only once she began to pull away did the crowd erupt into a roar: WHOSE UNIVERSITY? OUR UNIVERSITY! dozens of times as they marched off to consume the pizza ordered for them by people around the nation.

It was so powerful — and remember this all happened on a day when virtually no news (except Demi and Ashton’s divorce or the 30 year old Natalie Wood death investigation) gets reported on mainstream outlets. This *all* happened online, and drew a huge national audience in the process, enough so to force a major university into damage control freakout.

Last night’s video now has nearly 25,000 views. A better one has now been released of Katehi’s “Walk of Shame.” Turns out that was not just any “aide” — it was the UC Davis police chief (Spicuzzi) walking with her [Update: we've heard that the person accompanying Katehi was actually Kristin Stoneking, a minister who wrote a brief analysis of her role in the walk of shame here]. This new video shows the final mic check to get everyone to be silent and stand back before Katehi and Spicuzzi leave the building. If you are sending this story around, this video is better in that it shows how deliberate and well orchestrated the silence was: