UCSC demonstrators pepper sprayed
Ok, no one has commented to me regarding this, so I guess it didn’t make it above the fold at major news outlets. I’ll just briefly mention it. Last Wednesday and Thursday, the UC Regents (the 26-person governors of the UC system) came to town to view the campus. This happens rarely; I’m not sure how rarely (my newspaper sources below conflict wildly on this), but a staff member told me that the when they visited the campus was during the Regan era they were not even able to get on campus. So, they no doubt viewed a return to radical UCSC with some trepidation. In this case, the causes of student/staff/faculty/community unrest were a bit more complicated: nuclear testing (an old standard), rising fees, recent rising healthcare costs, a stagnant plan for faculty housing in a cutthroat real estate climate, and the recent decision by the regents to increase the campus enrollment by roughly 30% and to physically expand by about 60%.
The Regents when they visit campuses normally allow a public comment session. In this case, it took place at the Humanities Lecture Hall, just across the yard from the Linguistics Dept.’s new digs in Humanities I. Protestors (mainly students and some faculty, the reports say) gathered a little before the 3.00 meeting (some indymedia reports suggest that the goal of the protest was to in fact to disrupt the comment session qua normal regents’ business); I had already escaped to class, knowing that my building would be in lockdown. Four hours later when I returned, the plaza outside the lecture hall was silent, but in those hours, it seems things got very ugly between protestors and the police, and the police ended up arresting three people and pepper spraying the crowd. I cannot comment on what happened, since I wasn’t there, but here are some reports: indymedia (photos), Santa Cruz Sentinel, The ULCA Bruin. The trouble is knowing how the “violence” started. A report I can no longer find online (I think it was in the Sentinel) quotes one participant as saying that some officers first started dragging a protestor in, prompting her friends to react, and thus the violence. N pointed out that this is, in a sense, “asking for it” as a protestor, since unless you go limp, they’ll slap you with battery. If the report is correct, it suggests the violence was an outgrowth of incorrect technique.
A very shameful thing.
