I'm a professor here at UC Davis.
About 3 weeks ago, students on our campus were holding an Occupy protest. They were behaving peacefully and the situation seemed quite stable. After only 1 day of this protest, the leadership of UC Davis made the terrible mistake of calling in the police to try to get the students to leave.As most of the world knows, the police attacked the students as they sat peacefully, posing no threat to anyone. The police used high grade pepper spray on the students, often spraying it right into eyes, mouths, etc. About a dozen students were arrested. The unprovoked police attack and the fact that the Chancellor of our university, Linda Katehi, pulled the trigger so to speak on calling in the police, has created both an international but also a local firestorm here in Davis. You can watch just one of many videos of the attack yourself below on YouTube. The action by police is extremely disturbing and appears unconstitutional. Pepper spray is not a food product as Fox News might have you believe, but is technically a chemical weapon that has caused fatalities.
I remain very proud of UC Davis and especially of our students, but clearly something went horribly wrong here. Perhaps not surprising, many investigations are underway to try to plumb what happened and who's to blame. Many UC Davis faculty have called for Katehi's resignation including the English and Physics Departments. Other faculty have come to her defense. It's a terrible situation. I blogged about it on my lab's blog here.
Campuses need police forces and that is certainly especially true of large campuses such as UC Davis, but the job of the police is to protect students, staff, and faculty so when you see police attacking students, particularly peaceful students apparently exercising their constitutional rights, you know something has gone horribly wrong. I think it is naive at best of any university administrator to think that calling in police to confront student protestors can lead to any positive outcome.
While this horrible incident here at UC Davis has had huge negative outcomes, I remain hopeful that in the long run this disaster here can have positive outcomes and may actually lead to more student freedom and a better dialogue. But one might say I'm being naively optimistic. The rights of everyday Americans including college students are under attack on so many levels that the future does seem cloudy at times. The students here at UC Davis who were attacked were in part protesting massive tuition increases and showing solidarity with other UC students, such as those at Berkeley who were also attacked by police.
There are multiple critical problems at work here. One is that the state of California has almost entirely abandoned the UC system. It's astonishing how little funding the state of California now provides for UC schools and this trend has had devastating consequences only one of which is making school too expensive for many students to attend. California may think it is saving money by cutting support of UC schools, but in the long run it has shot itself in the foot and perhaps more aptly one might say in the brain.
A larger problem that extends beyond California is the sense in America that our leaders are so disconnected from regular people including students that they no longer really serve the people. A second problem is that America is drifting away from being a fact-based society and is trending away from valuing science. These events have profound impacts on our children and students as they are growing up in this new world.
Here at UC Davis on the front line, I do believe that we will in the long run be a better campus as result of this painful incident and I personally believe Katehi should be a part of that future UC Davis.
But more broadly I'm not sure what the future holds across America and the world.
But conservative people are concerned about the unchecked power of government - and targeting passive students (let's be honest, UC Davis kids are not the kind of threat real police departments would worry about) is a sign that the police force feels estranged from the society they are intended to protect; over them, superior and that we exist solely to generate revenue to pay them. That sort of attitude is what turns small movements of smelly wanna-be hippies into large movements populated by us all.
Katehi is the ultimate progressive insider, the head of a university, so it isn't a surprise to anyone outside academia she relied on governmental force and showed such profound arrogance. But moving her out would just mean someone exactly the same would get the job - but someone who has not learned the lesson she just did. You aren't going to get a lot of diversity or originality in that kind of job because the political criteria are matched by very few and they are all the same by the time they get to her level.