In the midst of an ongoing public
relations disaster following November's crackdown on anti-fee hike protests,
the University of California system has released a draft protest policy report.
The report presents future UC plans of privatization, falsifies the factual
record of previous demonstrations, and takes no steps to prevent future police
brutality.
The report follows an announcement
that UC officials plan to increase tuition by 6 percent for the 2012-13 school
year. UC tuition has tripled in the past decade, and Democratic Governor Jerry
Brown and the Democrat dominated legislature slashed $750 million, or 20
percent, from the school’s budget for the 2011-12 fiscal year. A recent
announcement that California’s deficit has nearly doubled to $16 billion means
that harsher cuts are likely.
The draft report, released on May 4,
and open to public comment until May 25, should serve as a warning to
California students and working people: The drive to privatization will not be
halted by the events of the previous months. The report treats further protests
as inevitable; a sign that administrators are planning to force students and
their families to carry more of the burden for funding higher education, even
as the economy continues to stall. With national student debt levels topping $1
trillion and youth unemployment in California climbing above 25 percent, the
situation for students and their families is only growing more desperate.
Far from denouncing police violence,
the “Response to Protests on UC Campuses” report, commissioned by UC President
Mark Yudof, and headed by UC General Counsel Charles Robinson and UC Berkeley
School of Law Dean Christopher Edley,it is the latest in a series of hollow
“reports” and “inquiries” meant as a veneer to placate a public that
overwhelmingly opposes fee hikes and public education cuts.
A Public Policy Institute of
California (PPIC) poll released last November found that only 14 percent of
California voters are likely to approve of the Democratic controlled state
legislature’s handling of public higher education. Fully 86 percent of those
surveyed believe that college affordability is a problem in the state, and 69
percent of respondents said they oppose any student fee hikes to balance the
budget.
Conscious of these public
sentiments, the report covers up the actions of the administrators and the
police who seek to prevent, at all costs, public opposition to the reactionary
dictates of President Yudof, the unelected Board of Trustees, the Democratic
Governor, and the Democratic state legislature. The first words of the report
give away its falsification of the historical record: “After physical conflict
erupted between police and students during demonstrations at UC Berkeley and UC
Davis in November, 2011...” As those who watch videos of the events can
plainly make out for themselves, the students were completely peaceful.
Physical conflict did not erupt
“between police and students,” but rather was perpetrated entirely by police
clad in riot gear and armed with pepper spray, batons, shields, paintball guns,
and other more lethal weapons against peaceful students, who were sitting or
standing while linking arms.
Although the report claims it 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,” this could not be further from the truth.
An email sent to students and
faculty by President Yudof in advance of demonstrations planned for May 1
outlined the true authoritarian nature of the administration. Yudof warned
students and faculty to “avoid all demonstrations as a precaution,” and
especially to avoid “cities with a large immigrant population and strong labor
groups.”
The email, which outlined Yudof’s
“tips for reducing your vulnerability,” warned students and faculty with a
thinly veiled threat of violent assault: “even seemingly peaceful rallies can
spur violent activity or be met with resistance by security forces,” the email
explained. “Bystanders may be arrested or harmed by security forces using water
cannons, tear gas or other measures to control grounds.”
Finally, Yudof explained that
students and faculty should “dress conservatively… maintain a low profile by
avoiding demonstration areas… and discussions of the issues at hand.”
In other words, Yudof and the UC
administration continue to threaten students and faculty that they faced
violent repression if they even so much as discussed issues related to
austerity, tuition hikes, and budget cuts. This is the true nature of the
administration and its coercive force: the UC Police Department. In this email,
the administration signals that it has no qualms about using violence in the
most undemocratic manner, as it has proven on multiple occasions in the recent
past.
The announcement also comes as 12 UC
Davis students and faculty face the possibility of 11-year prison sentences and
up to $1 million in restitution for blockading a US Bank building on campus.
For several weeks, UC Davis students and faculty, known as the Baker’s Dozen,
prevented the bank from operating and forced the bank to cancel its
multimillion-dollar contract with the University. Yolo County and the
University of California, Davis is using the full force of the law to make
models of these students and to prevent similar nonviolent actions from being
taken by students across the system.
In this context, the Robinson-Edley
report makes not a single recommendation that could prevent the further use of
police violence against student demonstrators. In fact, many of its
recommendations will only serve to aggravate high tension situations, making it
easier for administrators to spy on and coerce student demonstrators.
Among the recommendations the report
makes is the requirement that the University send high-ranking administrators
on protest sites to communicate directly with police commanders about when to
use violent means to disperse nonviolent protesters. High-ranking University
officials are almost always on-site at student protests, and in the case of UC
Davis last November, at the very least, administrators accepted the violence of
the UC Police. At worst, they ordered the brutal police crackdown.
At UC Berkeley, it was Chancellor
Robert Birgeneau who justified the violent actions of the police, stating, “It
is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking
arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the
tents. This is not nonviolent civil disobedience.”
Furthermore, the report claims that
administrators and police must be more vigilant in explaining to students “that
civil disobedience by definition involves violating laws or regulations, and
that civil disobedience will generally have consequences for those engaging in
it because of the impact it can have on the rest of the campus community.” In
other words, the University must be better at threatening its students about
the effects that participating in demonstrations may have on their academic
careers.
Aside from making token
recommendations that police undergo more vigorous training (presumably on how
to avoid embarrassing the University by making international news stories out
of small protests), the report also recommends that “[t]he University’s
response to protests can also be handled better and more efficiently by
building strong working relationships between police officials and
administrators.” In light of the Freedom of Information Act requests that have
highlighted undercover police infiltration of student demonstrations, as well
as complex networks designed to infiltrate student protest groups, this
recommendation can only be taken as another threat.
The Robinson-Edley report is a
shameful attempt by UC to deflect attention away from the brutal nature of the police
crackdown against students facing unprecedented tuition rates, mounting debt
levels, and little hope of secure employment. As Democrats and Republicans step
up the attack on education and other social services at state and federal
levels, so too have they stepped up the level of police violence against
protesters.
The anti-democratic attack on
students in California is just one part of a growing trend towards
authoritarianism in recent years. The Obama Administration has reserved the
right to assassinate American citizens anywhere in the world, and with the
passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, has stripped Americans of
the basic right to trial.
These measures are not
accidental—they come as the ruling class anticipates further opposition to the
attack on social rights. In order to be successful, this opposition must be
directed through the independent mobilization of the working class under the
principles upheld by the Socialist Equality Party and the International
Committee of the Fourth International.