Call for silent demonstration at UCB -- Monday the 28th

This Monday, November 28th, the UC Berkeley Academic Senate will be holding a special session, during which professors will consider the following resolution:

“The Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate has lost confidence in the ability of Chancellor Birgeneau, EVC Breslauer and VC LeGrande to respond appropriately to non-violent campus protests, to secure student welfare amidst these protests, to minimize the deployment of force and to respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus.”

The resolution was proposed by a group of professors in the immediate aftermath of the November 9th Occupy Cal action, at which students, workers and professors were brutally beaten by police officers for constructing, and linking arms around, a small group of tents. Protesters were acting in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and were trying to create a space on campus for discussion and organizing in response to fee hikes, the laying off of campus workers, growing student indebtedness, and attacks on public education generally.

While the police violence that occurred on the 9th inspired the campus to strike the following week, and while Occupy Cal has effectively opened space for critical discussion and debate on campus, the chancellors and the chief of police have not yet been held accountable for their use of indiscriminate force on the 9th, and they have taken no concrete steps to ensure that such police aggression won’t occur in the future. A faculty no-confidence vote would begin to hold our chancellors accountable for the violence they authorized, oversaw, and subsequently justified.

In order to show that the campus community stands in solidarity with members of the faculty who are bringing the no-confidence resolution, we call on all those who were brutalized on November 9th, as well as all whose friends and classmates were hurt that day, to attend a silent demonstration outside of the Faculty Senate meeting. Please join us as we gather this Monday, beginning at 2pm, in front of the International House.

We’ll compose and wear placards that declare, in simple terms, either what happened to us and our friends on the 9th, or what the movement for public education means to us. Then, we’ll line up and stand silently as faculty and administrators enter the International House for their 3pm meeting.

We take our inspiration for this action from the students at UC Davis, who linked arms and silently watched as their chancellor walked from a press conference to her waiting car. This powerful action was a symbolic turning point at UC Davis, and helped strengthen calls for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation. Please join us as we echo the silent power demonstrated by the students of UC Davis.

Letter to Yudof and Regents from California Scholars for Academic Freedom

November 23, 2011

Dear President Yudof , Chancellors, Academic Senate Chairs, and Regents:

We write on behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom** to condemn in the strongest possible terms the egregious attacks by police forces on protestors at UC Davis and UC Berkeley in these last weeks, to object to the violation of their rights of protest, free assembly, free speech, and academic freedom. We have watched with great concern as waves of revulsion and shock have swept across the global media at the violent and injurious actions on the University of California campuses. We propose the following immediate steps.

We petition for an independent investigation of these actions to be conducted by faculty senate members and student representatives appointed by their own assemblies from the UC system free of administrative intervention or oversight. The mandate of such an investigation should establish who has authorized the police to unleash such brutal tactics of suppression and injury on protestors, and to establish a precise chain of command so that subsequent and appropriate actions, which would include censure demands for suspension and resignation, can be brought to bear on all those responsible.

It is completely unacceptable to appoint a former LAPD police chief to investigate police brutality within the UC system. William Bratton’s role as police chief during instances of police brutality against those at an immigrants’ rights rally in Los Angeles in 2007 hardly qualifies him to oversee an independent investigation into police brutality. In terms of Bratton's approach to "excessive force," he specializes in training police to deploy space-cordoning and crowd-control methods that are less violent, but which end up eliminating the idea of public space and public visibility altogether. This kind of vision is problematic for public spaces, but utterly incompatible with the notion of common spaces in public universities. More importantly, such an investigation should be led by those whose interests were directly affected by such police violence, and those whom this University is designed to serve, namely its students and faculty.

These attacks on students, staff, and faculty have been repeated over the last few years against peaceful demonstrations that have objected to the privatization of the public university system, the devastating hikes in student tuition and fees, the extreme burdens of student debt, the cutting of long-term and essential staff positions, and the increasing precariousness suffered by part-time laborers in the university system.

In particular, we object to the use of police forces with weapons to quell peaceful protests and civil disobedience actions. Protestors have a constitutional right to free speech under the US constitution, but they also have, as members of the university community, specific rights to exercise their academic freedom unimpeded and free of violent attacks.

At the time of this writing, it remains unclear who precisely authorized the violent attacks on student demonstrators during the weeks in November, 2011. It will not do to say, as President Mark Yudof does in his missive of November 20th, that he is “appalled by images of University of California students being doused with pepper spray and jabbed with police batons on our campuses,” without taking any responsibility for these acts of police violence against peaceful protestors. Nor will it be sufficient for the President to initiate reviews of these incidences at all campuses, or to propose engaging in “discussions’ with all of the chancellors. Vague gestures designed to give the impression of administrative action—without any assignation of responsibility or any revision of policy- remain both implausible and inadequate. Although Chancellor Katehi of UC Davis claims not to have anticipated the use of pepper spray, she nevertheless takes full responsibility for her action. If she did not authorize those actions, who did? And the Chancellor of UC Merced claims that she “will neither order nor condone police aggression or force during a protest on campus in the absence of an imminent and substantial threat of harm to persons or property” (11/20/11). If this is so, does she break with UC system-wide policy in making this claim?

If the UC administration claims that it was following “established procedure,” and that established procedure violates the academic rights of students, staff, and faculty engaged in peaceful protest, then that established procedure must also come under scrutiny. The Regulations Governing Conduct passed recently by the UC Regents provoked many objections from faculty and students in the notice and comment period. The justifications offered by the administration for much of the violence of the last few weeks are spurious, citing the university’s prohibition of (among other things) structures and tents on campus (something that happens regularly for sports events, freshman receptions, and large parties). In defending the police brutality at UC Berkeley, Chancellor Robert Birgenau disqualified the linking of arms as a “nonviolent” act. Do President Yudof and the Regents endorse these blatant attempts to cast peaceful protestors as violent thugs and terrorists, by twisting the very definition of nonviolence? In the absence of any response to the contrary, these assertions suggest that the UC administration needs reminding of what kinds of actions constitute peaceful, nonviolent, and morally-motivated political protest, and require protection as such. The definitions of civil disobedience and non-violent protest are well-established and cannot be subject to ignorant or strategic interpretations of police or administrators.

It is unacceptable for any campus to criminalize free speech, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. It is unacceptable to unleash police to commit criminal acts of violence against those who are exercising constitutionally protected rights or who are expressing viewpoints that are critical of the UC administration. It is unacceptable to pretend as though police officials who are hostile to the idea of public visibility, with records of involvement in instances of police violence, can “independently” oversee any investigation of such matters. And, it is unacceptable to distort the very meaning of nonviolent protest in order to justify such acts of institutional violence.

Finally, we propose that if the chain of command is clearly established and those responsible for authorizing the use of police force to injure protesters can be clearly documented and named, that (a) those responsible be relieved from their official duties, and (b) that the UC system, in tandem with the CSU system, develop a policy that requires police to forego the use of any weapons in the monitoring of free and peaceful demonstrations on any of our campus.


Sincerely,

California Scholars for Academic Freedom**



CONTACT PEOPLE:

Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor
Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
510-642-1415
Email: jb_crittheory@berkeley.edu

Lisa Rofel
Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Phone: 831-459-3615
Email: lrofel@ucsc.edu

Carole H. Browner
Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles
Tel: 310 825 4119
email: browner@ucla.edu

Suad Joseph
Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
Phone 530-752-1593
Email: sjoseph@ucdavis.edu

Julia Elyachar
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
UC Irvine
elyachar@uci.edu
949 824-1489.

Beshara Doumani
Professor, Middle East History
Dept. of History
University of California, Berkeley
bdoumani@berkeley.edu
510 643-3147

Paul Amar
Associate Professor
Global & International Studies Program
University of California, Santa Barbara
Email: amar@global.ucsb.edu
Fax: 805-893-8003

**CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR FREEDOM is a four-year old group of more than 150 academics who teach in 20 California institutions of higher education. The group formed as a response to rash violations of academic freedom that were arising from both the 9/11/2001 climate of civil rights violation and to the increasing attacks on progressive educators by neo-conservatives. Many attacks were aimed at scholars of Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern descent or at scholars researching and teaching about the Middle East, Arab and Muslim communities. Our goal of protecting California Scholars and students based mainly in institutions of higher education has grown broader in scope. We recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.

Photo from flashmobyoga.

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.

UC Davis Strike Call

The UC Board of Regents, who not only represent but actually are this state’s richest one percent, has repeatedly shown itself to be utterly unfit to manage and represent the interests of the students, faculty, and workers who constitute the University of California.

Following two successive years of sharp tuition increases, accompanied by millions in department and resource cuts, layoffs, and furloughs, the board had the audacity to propose a new 81% fee increase and drastic budget reductions.

Undergraduate student fees have tripled over the past ten years, as we have seen an unprecedented explosion of student debt; and departmental budgets have shrunk, as academic and non-academic workers experience diminishing benefits, swelling workloads, and non-existent job security.

In the midst of the economic crisis, the Regents have intensified their pursuit of the project of privatization and de-funding that diminish the quality of education and quality of life for those across the UC, while consigning students’ futures to greater and greater sums of debt.

The Regents’ theft of an ostensibly public resource to fund “capital projects” such as construction projects and private research initiatives, demonstrate a clear conflict of interests that benefits a narrow administrative elite—both the Regents and their local appointees (chancellors and vice chancellors)—at the expense of the greater faculty, staff, and student body.

The familiar rhetoric of austerity demands our resigned compliance, as our learning and working conditions progressively deteriorate. We have seen recently and in years past that political dissent is met with increasingly violent displays of force and repression by University police.

The continued destruction of higher education in California, and the repressive forms of police violence that sustain it, cannot be viewed apart from larger economic and political systems that concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the few.

Since the university has long served as one of the few means of social mobility and for the proliferation of knowledge critical to and outside of existing structures of power, the vital role it plays as one of the few truly public resources is beyond question.

The necessity of reclaiming the UC has never demanded such urgency, as it continues to shift towards the corporate model, pursues dubious fiscal partnerships (such as those with the defense department and international agribusiness), and engages in disturbing collusion with financial institutions like US Bank (which is one of the largest profiteers from student loans).

As such, I propose that in light of the upcoming Regents’ vote [concerning the possible 81% student fee hike] on Monday the 28th, (which will be occurring on four campuses simultaneously, one of which being UC Davis), that we call for a general strike this same day, with the aim of shutting down campuses across the state and preventing the Regents from holding their vote.

In response to the intolerable effects privatization and austerity and the horrific repression of student dissent that has occurred throughout the last month, the GA, as a governing body of all concerned UC Davis students, will prevent the Board of Regents from continuing its unbridled assault upon higher education in the state of California.

This will entail total campus participation in shutting down the operations of the university on the 28th, including teaching, working, learning, and transportation, as we will collectively divert our efforts to blocking their vote[s]. In doing so students, faculty and workers assert the power—and the will—to effectively represent and manage ourselves.

UC Davis English Department Calls for Disbanding UCPD

The following statement was read to a crowd of thousands during today's rally at UC Davis and posted on the front page of the UCD English Department's website:

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 genuine collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the UC Davis campus community.

Aerial View of UC Davis Today From http://publiclaboratory.org/home

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!

Monday: UCB Open University, UC Davis Accepting Donations

@UCD

From Occupy UC Davis: accepting donations of pizza and tents for the rally on Monday. Those wishing to donate pizza can order some for delivery at Woodstocks, (530) 757-2525. Those wishing to donate tents can order them online through this link http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3T6Z62WIDOER7/ref=ord_cart_shr . Tents ordered in this way will be automatically shipped to a donation site and used for our continuous occupation of the quad.

@UCB

From Occupy Cal: Open University. Monday, November 21: Noon -2pm, Sproul Plaza. (If it is raining, follow the signs and join us in the Multicultural Center (MCC) in MLK.)

Why the Open University at Occupy Cal?: Coalitions and the Open Classroom
How can we think about the classroom and the University as spaces to build coalitional politics? How can we link questions of sexuality, immigration status, age, disability, race, gender, and class in our political actions?

Open University Teachers for the day:
Jeff Chang: Cal alumnus; founding member of CalServe; author of award-winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, founding editor of Colorlines magazine; Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts + Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University.

Juana María Rodríguez: PhD in Ethnic Studies, UC-Berkeley; Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies; Director of the LGBT minor; author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces.

Monday’s Schedule:
12:00: Introduction and Welcome to the Open University
12:15: Presentations by Jeff and Juana
12:45-2pm: Open Discussion

2:30: Meeting of the Open University Working Group, all are welcome!