The website of Occupy UC Davis is at http://www.occupyucdavis.org/
Scroll down for the Op-Ed by UC Davis Professor of English Nathan Brown, December 16, 2011.
Also on this page:
Sacramento Bee front page story November 23. Katehi: UCD police defied my orders
Katehi: Campus police were told not to use force against students
Chancellor’s remarks at Nov. 22 student dialogue and town hall
Response from President Mark Yudof
Chancellor Katehi’s comments on the incident
Mark’s message including video links
For a more legible version of this story ‘Katehi: UCD police defied my orders” see below (after the visual image of the Sac Bee story). (Scroll down!)
http://www.davisenterprise.com/opinion/opinion-columns/reviewing-the-case-for-katehi%e2%80%99s-resignation/
Webmaster’s note: Based on the information in this Op-Ed I now agree that Chancellor Katehi should resign. These are not innocent mistakes. Given the benefit of plenty of time to plan her next move she has deliberately headed down the exactly wrong path; bringing in representatives of corporate America to guide UC Davis.
December 16, 2011 | Posted by Special to The Enterprise
Op-ed: Reviewing the case for Katehi’s resignation
By Nathan Brown
Immediately following the events of Nov. 18 at UC Davis, which have come to be known as “the pepper-spray incident,” I wrote an open letter to Chancellor Linda Katehi demanding her resignation. Since then, calls for the chancellor’s resignation have continued to grow. These have been issued by:
* A petition signed by more than 110,000 people;
* The board of the Davis Faculty Association;
* The majority of the faculty in the physics department;
* The English department;
* The department of comparative literature;
* The Program in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies;
* A group of faculty in the history department;
* The outgoing chairman of the UCD Graduate Student Association;
* The general assembly of the UCD student movement;
* A no-confidence letter signed by dozens of faculty from many different departments; and
* An international letter of solidarity declaring an academic boycott of UCD until the chancellor’s resignation.
It is no small thing for the majority of the faculty in two of the largest and most important departments in the sciences and humanities, physics and English, to call for the resignation of a university chancellor. It is even more significant when this call is joined by other departments and by more than 100,000 people, including thousands of UCD students, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as residents of the city of Davis.
Despite the chancellor’s efforts to sow ambiguity concerning her orders to police, these calls for her resignation are ultimately grounded in an irrefutable fact: One week after the chancellor of UC Berkeley ordered riot police to remove an encampment on that campus, and one week after student and faculty demonstrators were brutally beaten by those police, Chancellor Katehi made the same decision in the same circumstances at UC Davis. She also ordered riot police to remove an encampment, and the same result, followed: police violence against students.
The decision to send riot police onto our campus under these circumstances was not a mistake or an oversight, but the repetition of a dangerous failure of leadership by another UC chancellor just nine days earlier. Considering the severe consequences of that failure for our students and for the reputation of our university, demands for the chancellor’s resignation are far from hasty or ill-considered. Rather, they acknowledge that while the chancellor already had ample opportunity to learn the lesson of what happened at Berkeley, she either failed or refused to do so.
Chancellor Katehi has said she accepts “full responsibility” for the events of Nov. 18. Those of us calling for her resignation agree that she is fully responsible, and we demand that she accept the consequences of that responsibility by stepping down.
Since Nov. 18, the inconsistency of the chancellor’s response to calls for her resignation has not alleviated but rather exacerbated her failure of leadership. On the one hand, she has accepted full responsibility; on the other, she has attempted to displace blame onto the vice chancellor and the police. As faculty and students have pointed out, the investigations organized by UC Davis and the UC Office of the President are riddled with conflicts of interest that belie their supposed independence and objectivity.
The cover provided by these investigations now allows the chancellor to respond to direct questions concerning her decisions on Nov. 18 by saying she is no longer at liberty to speak about the matter. While the chancellor emphasizes the need for “dialogue,” student and faculty forums organized by the administration have determined who can speak through a lottery system that seriously undermines any genuinely open conversation about her capacity to lead the university.
Meanwhile, articles have brought to light Chancellor Katehi’s co-authorship of a report recommending the return of militarized police to Athens Polytechnic University as a deterrent to the “politicization” of the campus, as well as her involvement with a program of information sharing between American university campuses and the FBI. These reports are troubling evidence of an ongoing effort to quell and suppress political dissent on university campuses through the use of policing and surveillance.
Amid these developments, the UC Davis administration has now announced the composition of a new Chancellor’s Advisory Board, which, we are told, will help to guide our university into the future. This board includes the CEOs of Bechtel and of Chevron, as well as the senior vice president of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. It also includes the principal of McGill University, who, twice in November 2011, ordered riot police onto that campus — police who also used pepper-spray against peaceful protesters. And it includes M.R.C. Greenwood, former UC provost, who left her post at the UC amid a scandal over improper hiring practices and conflicts of interest.
In other words, in the midst of international condemnation concerning the suppression of free speech and political dissent through police violence on our campus, Chancellor Katehi has chosen to surround herself with university administrators who have also used riot police to quell student protest and who have resigned amid scandals concerning the inappropriate use of administrative power. She has chosen to surround herself with the CEOs of corporations tied to war profiteering and environmental catastrophes.
While the chancellor now pretends to support the efforts of students and faculty to defend the public mission of the UC system, the composition of her new Advisory Board exemplifies a different vision: a future in which the shared governance of the university is replaced by ties to corporate interests that hasten, rather than struggle against, the privatization of the UC system.
What these developments since Nov. 18 confirm is what many students and faculty already realized then: that the chancellor’s decision to deploy riot police against students demonstrating in defense of public education was no “mistake” and had nothing to do with the “health and safety” of the campus community. Rather, it was the political content of the students’ protest that had to be suppressed due to the chancellor’s own political commitment and her own vision for the future of UC Davis: a commitment to the privatization of a great public university and a vision in which the interests of corporations and administrators take precedence over those of students.
Those of us calling for the chancellor’s resignation do not share that vision. There are many of us, and that is encouraging. For the good of the university, we continue to insist that the chancellor needs to step down.
— Nathan Brown is a professor of English at UC Davis. Reach him at ntbrown@ucdavis.edu
Katehi: Campus police were told not to use force against students
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By Sam Stanton
sstanton@sacbee.com
Published: Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011 – 12:00 am | Page 1A
Last Modified: Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011 – 6:12 pm
As the tent city on the University of California, Davis, tripled in size, Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi insisted Tuesday that the school’s police department defied her orders when it used force against students in last week’s pepper-spray fiasco.
“We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment,” Katehi said in an interview with The Bee in her office inside the administration building, which remains locked down to the public.
“We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it. And then we told them we also do not want to have another Berkeley.”
In her most expansive comments since Friday’s attempt to remove the tents spiraled into the pepper-spraying of students, Katehi said she still does not know who decided to use pepper spray and was stunned when she first saw video clips of it Friday night.
“It looked horrible, horrific, I would say … , ” Katehi said. “I can tell you that I woke up Saturday really early in the morning, like 3 a.m., and I felt like it was a disaster on our hands.”
She also said she never would have approved the use of full-scale riot gear by officers sent in to remove the students and that Police Chief Annette Spicuzza was part of an emergency conference call before the incident.
“We told her that it has to be peaceful, that anything else would not be acceptable,” Katehi said one day after Spicuzza was placed on administrative leave along with two officers who used the pepper spray.
Spicuzza did not respond to a message left at her home Tuesday, but she has previously said the officers used the pepper spray because they were being cut off from other police by the students. Video clips that have surfaced so far do not show that happening.
Katehi said Spicuzza indicated Saturday that it was Lt. John Pike who decided to use the pepper spray.
“I believe on Saturday when I spoke with her I said, ‘What happened?’ ” Katehi said. “She tried to explain that it was the decision of Lt. Pike.”
Pike’s voice mail has been full since Sunday, and he could not be reached.
Video clips of the officers spraying students who were sitting peacefully on the ground have been viewed online by millions of people since Friday and resulted in widespread calls for Katehi to resign.
She has resisted those calls and met with student groups several times Tuesday, including an afternoon session at which she called for all charges against 10 individuals in Friday’s incident – nine of them students – to be dropped.
She also said UC Davis and the UC system would cover all medical expenses incurred by students who were pepper- sprayed.
The effort last Friday to remove the campers, who had gathered to protest tuition hikes as a part of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, backfired almost immediately.
After a Monday rally attended by thousands of students, faculty and others at which Katehi apologized, groups once again began to erect tents on the quad. By Tuesday, there were more than 75 tents, and Katehi said she would seek negotiations to coax them into leaving rather than take renewed police action.
Meanwhile, she has ordered police to remain ready to help campers if some sort of emergency arises, but to stay out of sight.
“They are on call, but they are not visible,” she said, adding that the school has brought in portable restrooms and is looking into providing facilities for food and drink to maintain a healthy environment.
Katehi visited the growing encampment at least twice on Tuesday with mixed results. In the morning, she said, she was able to speak with 20 to 30 students and “had a very good discussion.”
She was invited back about 11 a.m. during the group’s general assembly. But after she waited quietly for 20 minutes, the students could not agree on whether to deviate from their agenda to allow her to speak and she finally walked away.
On her way back to her office, Katehi was greeted by a number of students who expressed their support for her and said they do not believe she had approved of officers using force against the students.
“She was worried about the safety of the students,” said Kiran Ashan, a psychology junior.
“And I just feel that those (campers), some of them are from Occupy Sacramento, they’re not even Davis students,” Ashan said. “What are they doing on a Davis campus?
The use of force by campus police at Davis and Berkeley against protesters has resulted in a systemwide review by UC officials, and the Legislature agreed Tuesday to hold hearings on the matter.
In addition, UC President Mark Yudof announced that he has asked William Bratton, who has headed police forces in Los Angeles, Boston and New York, to conduct an independent review of Friday’s incident.
Katehi said the policies that campuses use to respond to encampments need to be changed as a result of the latest incidents.
University officials must “recognize that we are a campus of the 21st century, and students have different needs and different expectations of how to express themselves, and yet we have protocols of 30 or 40 years ago,” she said. “And we have a police force that has been trained for the incidents we dealt with 20 or 30 years ago.”
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Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/23/4074993/katehi-campus-police-were-told.html#ixzz1ebpZWd8I
Related stories:
http://chancellor.ucdavis.edu/speeches-writings/2011/town_hall_notes_11.22.11.html
Chancellor’s remarks at Nov. 22 student dialogue and town hall
11.22.11
(Chancellor Katehi delivered the following remarks at the Nov. 22 student dialogue and town hall.)
Chancellor’s remarks (PDF)
We all know that UC Davis is a wonderful, strong and peaceful community and that the events of last weekend were a terrible shock to all of us.
Over the past few days I have been meeting with student groups large and small and of course, I am pleased to be here this evening.
I want to unequivocally apologize to the entire community for the appalling use of pepper spray. It betrayed our values and did not reflect well on this university.
You have my word that I will do everything in my power to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.
I also want to be the first to tell you:
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I am requesting that all charges against students who have been arrested be dropped.
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Any medical expenses incurred by any students involved will be refunded.
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As I requested, an independent task force will examine the events that took place and report directly to UC President Mark Yudof.