The last minute or so of this report by Aggie TV at UC Davis is pretty amazing. It shows a large group of UC Davis students sitting in silence as Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi walks from her press conference to her car. The conference had to be cut short because protesters entered the building, and Katehi’s walk occured after three hours of negotiation. This is the conference where, as John posted yesterday, Katehi announced her blue-ribbon ass covering panel. UC Davis Police Chief Angela Spicuzza also said this (via Fallows):
“There was no way out of that circle,” Spicuzza said. “They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.”
Here’s what “no way out” looks like:
As Steven L. Taylor notes, there was another incident of police brutality at UC Berkeley on Tuesday, where police hit demonstrators with batons and dragged a female faculty member away by her hair. Katehi knew that the last order to clear the area on a UC campus ended in violence, but she gave the order to clear her campus anyway. The UC Davis faculty association has called for her resignation, and they’re right, though I sense she’ll be hanging on for a good, long time.
I have to confess that I have a major prejudice against university chancellors, presidents, provosts and the like. I think most of them are sociopaths, and their pathology and immorality is in many ways worse than their corporate equivalents. At least corporate sociopaths are in it for big money, and if they succeed their stockholders have a chance of doing OK. University administrators are in it for questionable prestige, petty power and a pretty good salary, and their success redounds on no one but themselves. To get to their post, they develop a habit of pushing out the most blathery, dishonest, sounds-good-but-means-nothing rhetoric. If they disagree with something, they find a way to “encourage dialogue” that actually buries the issue in a do-nothing committee. If the disagreement continues, they paint their opponents as “inappropriate”, the all-purpose word that means nothing other than “I don’t like it”.
For example, Kathei told CNN that she found the actions of the police on Friday “inappropriate”. She can’t say what everyone else watching those videos thinks — that macing peacefully assembled protesters is illegal, immoral and disgusting. Those words aren’t in her vocabulary. If they ever were, she threw them away to get where she is now.
Joe
That cop looks like one of the pigs from Angry Birds.
ChrisB
Most university chancellors, presidents and provosts are sociopaths.
You really think that?
WereBear
This is part of the right-wing plan to dismantle civilization; when our leaders are pathetic, cringing, toadies who set the bar low; we aren’t supposed to expect better!
Mino
I wonder how much control she had to use to keep from plowing her car right over that row of crouching students? …Oops! The gas pedal stuck!
I think they are entirely too trusting.
jomo
That is the mother of all walks of shame. She looked stricken
c u n d gulag
Where do these cops think they are?
In the mid-80′s working in the perfume section at Bloomingdales?
What do we expect from the cops?
We give them all of this shit. All of those nice toys like guns, and pepper spray, and shields, and Tasers. What fun is is for them if they can’t ever use them?
It’s like letting your 5 year-old open the gifts from Santa, but telling him/her they can’t play with them.
And I guess we proles are supposed to be grateful that they’re only spraying us with capsaicin, and not electrons and/or lead.
That Chancellor needs to get jack-BOOTED out of office now!
Princess
She’s brave enough to pepper spray her students but not to face them. As a faculty member, this whole story makes me sick.
mistermix
@ChrisB: Yeah, I do. I think most of them don’t reveal their sociopathic instincts because the day-to-day operation of a University doesn’t challenge them to do so. But when push comes to shove, they abandon the principles they reference in every public communication. I doubt that Linda P.B. Kathei consulted the “Principles of Community” at UC Davis when she ordered the cops to clear the campus. And I don’t think she’s doing that now. But if you look at her website (which is down right now), it’s full of mealy-mouthed feel-good bullshit that supposedly represents her most deeply held beliefs.
t jasper parnell
“Pretty good salary”? She makes over 400k per year plus a house and a car and etc. The President of SanDiego State makes the same and his car allowance is 1k per month. These rat bastards make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year while overseeing the casualization of academic labor. Seriously, go ask an adjunct.
numbskull
And let’s not forget that the great state of California is paying Officer John A. Pike in excess of $110k in annual salary alone, exclusive of benefits. Chancellor Katehi is on the payroll for over $400k per year.
That’s over a half million dollars a year in brain power that we’re seeing in action.
I really don’t think we need to look much further for examples of government waste. Shouldn’t Jerry Brown be calling UC Davis HR tomorrow morning?
Given what we saw at Berkeley, the waste may be endemic to the UC system. I suspect if the UC Administration was gutted to 10% of current levels, and those remaining took a 50% pay cut, the UC system would suddenly be solvent. And who would know they were gone? It’s nearly impossible to determine what any of these leeches actually do that affects the true enterprise of the academy.
Phylllis
I saw the quote from the police chief on the Sunday Today show. What b*llsh#t. If the ‘surrounding crowd’ was the source of concern, why weren’t they the ones pepper-sprayed?
k488
Both this and the Penn State story are bringing out just how dreadful so many of the administers of our institutions of higher learning can be. I’ve watched the same sort of thing at my own place of work, and I’ve also watched as the salaries of the administration far outstrip that of the faculty. The same corruption and self-justifying inequality that has been so clear in the workplace is becoming more and more the truth of higher education. When you have these folks determining their own salaries and self-importance, this sort of thing will happen. No-one is irreplaceable, but you’d never believe it from their descriptions of themselves.
debbie
Reminds me of the Massachusetts cops of the early 1970s, back when they really did act like pigs.
Palli
The Gauntlet. This is a tactic we should use over and over again, as well as shunning.
The non-violent silent shame of the gauntlet is visually powerful for the media and psychologically unnerving to the arrogance of the powerful.
(numbskull, what an important set of facts-multiple across the nation. But then Wars are money-making ventures for the few.)
We should all remember the abuse that occurs in our nation against the many more unfortunate than us. they are the few
Samara Morgan
here you go mixie.
Occupy Press Think
hattip Jay Rosen.
WereBear
That’s my point: just as “it’s only business” and “whatever it takes” began replacing “the customer is always right” and “a good product for a good price” in business thinking, so this corruption of thought has spread through so many other institutions.
W filled the government with Liberty University clones who will do anything in service of their ideology. Is this so different?
No question that the Koch brothers are sociopaths, is there? They are straight out of a James Bond movie.
And the policies they promote require soul-less minions to execute.
willard
Powerful silence at UC Davis last night
t jasper parnell
@k488: This is totally correct; the first step in educational reform is a minimum of 50% reduction in admin wages. Followed by a winnowing of all the assistant vice junior presidents of teaching and learning and the deans, assistant deans, associate deans, and junior associate assistant deans of learner success. These people do nothing but receive bloated salaries. Oh and, as by the way, let’s get rid of the CETLs throughout the land and hire some full time faculty.
Woody
Um, pathological administrator lampreys aren’t exclusive to universities. Administrator Bloat has become epidemic in the public school systems as well. Whereas teachers are generally compelled to stay in one district, administrators are careerists – each stop serves only to fill resumes on the way to either principal a wealthy district or to become Supernintendo Chalmers. Those who make it that far are usually accomplished in multisyllabic meaninglesspeak.
RSA
@WereBear:
See also efforts to apply business productivity measures to the University of Texas, efforts led by Rick Perry and influenced by ALEC (which has funding from the Koch brothers). For example, Richard Vedder believes that tuition at UT could be reduced by 64% if faculty could be made more productive in their teaching and 850 of them were fired. His numbers, however, are questionable.
Violet
@jomo:
Yeah, she really did. She didn’t know WTF was happening or what she should do. So she took the chickenshit way out and did nothing. I think she knows she did the wrong things, but she’ll never own up to it.
@Palli:
El Tiburon
Walk of shame? You assume these people have shame.
jrg
@Joe:
I think he looks like officer Farva.
Tommy D
Gov. Brown can’t hire or fire a university chancellor, which is as it should be.
Walker
I disagree with your comments on provosts, presidents, and chancellors. Particularly provosts. Presidents and chancellors are external facing, and their primary job is to raise awareness and (more importantly) money. That is why they are so into ass-covering. But a provost is faculty facing and their job is the core academic mission of the school. A good (and typical) provost is to act as a counterbalance to the nonacademic interests.
Walker
@t jasper parnell:
So all the faculty at your school who are hired know all about teaching pedaggy and student learning? Do you work at a research school? I don’t disagree that there are often more than these than you need, but there is a reason many top research schools are bifurcating positions into graduate and undergraduate faculty.
Maude
The headline about the outcry over the pepper spray is on BBC. She is in trouble. It has gone around the world.
She was just fine with what happened until she had to face it.
numbskull
@Walker: True but dull, as they used to say when reporting on the Vietnam war.
I haven’t seen much difference between Presidents/Chancellors vs Provosts and I’ve been in the academy since ’80. In particular, the legions of vice-provosts, assistant deans, and assistants to both groups, are completely fungible happy-talk professional meeting-goers.
It is not hyperbole to suggest that losing 90% of them would have no effect on the academy (other than to decrease costs and increase efficiencies). But, just like in the business world, we’ll never cut administration.
I mean, how can we? There’s only a limited number of humans available whose shit doesn’t stink. They’re valuable – just ask them!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yeah, Officer Pudgy McStrolly looks absolutely terrified. That’s the exact stride and level of concentration my eighty year old former neighbor used to use when watering his roses. Actually, he paid more attention to where his spray was going.
Yevgraf
So now we’re off in the weeds of college protests on poor handling of the breakup of irrelevant encampments. The 1% couldn’t have asked for a better result.
brendancalling
The end of that video is haunting, and if Katehi has any kind of conscience, she’s taking a long look in the mirror and writing a letter of resignation and apology.
But she won’t, because that would expose her even further to the lawsuits that are surely already being planned. And that’s why she’s going to lose her job: beating students up at the same campus where Savio made his speech about “throwing yourselves into the cogs of the machine” is bad enough. It’s even worse when the PR disaster goes viral. But what is going to sink this awful katehi woman is the lawsuits: she has proven to be an terrible steward of the University, costing it potentially millions of dollars in settlements. She’s gotta go, they need a fresh start.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That video is striking. Kudos to whoever thought up the silence, and to all assembled for sticking to it.
mamayaga
Interesting interview at Boing Boing with one of the students assaulted by Pike.
He makes clear the connection between the economic distress of students and the actions of the 1%, by way of privitization in education, out of control tuition increases, and student loan debt so crushing it cannot feasibly be paid back no matter how conscientious or hard working you are.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yevgraf: Dude, what is your problem with the Occupiers? I will readily admit that they are not doing things exactly as I would do them, but the y are not preventing anyone else from doing something different. In fact, I would say that there presence makes it easier for others to start. At heart, I am not really a protester. I am a work within the system guy, but, here is the thing, working within the system is not making anything move right now. If the various Occupy movements shake something loose, knock some rust off the parts so things move again, if they accomplish nothing more than that, they will have done a good thing.
DivaBabe
@Yevgraf: Either you are too ignorant to see the connection, or it is not in your interest to do so. Educate yourself before you make another such foolish comment.
Emily
I went to UC Santa Barbara. My sophmore year, 1969-70, we had three riots. During the last one, in June, the rioters were pretty much all members of the LA County Sheriff’s Department who’d been called in to help the SB County Sheriff’s Department. After a night or two of cops rioting in Isla Vista, The UCSB Chancellor, Vernon Cheedle (sp?) declared that the riot was over and the cops were going home. Sure enough, as soon as the cops left, the riot was over. Whereever Chancellor Cheedle is now, I thank him.
Josie
@Omnes Omnibus: This. I can’t think of anything more useless than someone sitting at their computer typing criticisms of those who are out manning the barricades. I admire these young people for their courage and spunk,
JCT
That video is something else and while I abhor the violence of the cops, I am really incredibly impressed by the students. They give me hope that this 30-year assault on the middle class and lower is reaching it’s peak. Having spoken to my college senior – she said that her entire campus was talking about this yesterday.
The anger over the “rise of the admins” is reaching a real pitch at my medical school– speaking as a senior member of a research faculty, the combination of the collapse in the pay line for NIH funding (my institute is at 10%) and the amazing increase in the number of admins has created a perfect storm as our Dean has focused on firing faculty and cutting back on graduate students to balance our books. It’s pretty well captured in this book excerpt:
It’s been an amazing process as everyone on the faculty who *can* leave is actively trying to do so — mostly the middle ranking, high associate to early full professors, all funded. Meanwhile, the students are losing out as their programs are being cut back. Yet everyday we get a message about some new unter dean of hand-washing. I’m not kidding, at a place where the email server seems to crash daily we have some asst. dean of “Social Media”. I’m not kidding, a Dean of Twitter.
And the students see all of this — and when I go to meetings and everyone is complaining that our best grad students don’t go into academia anymore you can see where this is headed. I agree with the comment upthread, this is just the “business model” — applied to our fine educational system.
And I am on both ends here, with a senior in college and one headed there next year. I’m a Cal grad and my son is applying. To say that I am appalled by what is going on at Davis and Berkeley is an understatement. Looking forward to writing to the Cal chancellor to explain that the $$ I contribute every year was not meant to pay for violence against students and faculty.
/rant off
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: I apologize for the typos that are running riot though that comment. Jesus, it’s fucking embarrassing.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not to be pedantic, but protesting IS working within the system. “The system” is a liberal democracy, in which the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances is a constitutionally protected right and one of the main ways “the system” is supposed to work.
AB
There is an amazing quote in this CBS article about use of force guidelines. They interview a former police Lieutenant, who says this:
According to Kelly, curling into a ball is an aggressive move, and you’re just asking to get beat. I believe its called the “Roly Poly” fighting technique. Its extremely dangerous!
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57328289/outrage-over-police-pepper-spraying-students/
marcopolo
Wow. That is an obscenely large brush you are painting with. There are a couple of conditions that often seem to accompany posting remarks on a blog on the internet: one being a couple of folks screw up and are assholes so the entire category of those people are selfish asshole screw-ups–if not outright “sociopaths”. The second being that even though folks being criticized are human, are always bound by limited information, and have busy lives where they don’t always have the time to clearly think through to the consequences of their decisions they are evil folks (feel free to lecture me on where the banality of evil line gets crossed). I agree this chancellor screwed up. I agree she should lose her job. But it is just as likely that the she didn’t have the courage or the imagination or the intelligence or perhaps the empathy to understand what could happen out in the quadrangle at UC Davis between the protesters and the police as it is that she embodies the power hungry pathology of the typical university administrator and didn’t care.
Furthermore, I happen to live with the Vice President of Academic Affairs (the #2 position) of a mid-sized college. She has two primary concerns: that the student’s needs are met and that the faculty’s/staff’s needs are met. It is a pretty overwhelming job that requires constant juggling of priorities, frequent 12-14 hour days and being on call all the time in case of bad weather or other unplanned occurrences as well as assuaging unhappy students, faculty, staff, and parents. She sometimes has to make decisions without enough information or time to think all the way through to the consequences–and then there are just consequences that you just don’t think of.
That tends to be the human condition for a lot of folks. And for a lot of folks who get pilloried in blog comments.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus:
Me, too. I can’t quite comprehend why this movement speaks to people about income/wealth inequality more than all those charts and figures we’ve been seeing for years. Doesn’t everyone love a graph? as Lisa Simpson asked. But I’ve always been out of step with the American electorate as a whole*. Bill Clinton’s empathy made me roll my eyes, and I never wanted to have a beer with George W. Bush.
*Full disclosure: I did used to think Tom Friedman had something to say worth hearing, but in my defense, I always knew that David Broder was as relentlessly partisan as Newt Gingrich, and that David Brooks was as useless as a worn out shoe.
Emma
@willard: That was a thing of beauty. And going by the looks she gave people, she knew she had really stepped on it — and hated each and every one of those students.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: You were being pedantic. So there. By your definition, wouldn’t anything short of violent revolution be working within the system? At one level it is accurate, but it isn’t particularly useful.
Brandon
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It is not just that the students were able to organize such a brilliant protest technique and have the discipline te enact it so effectively, the AggieTV folks did a good job editing the broadcast by ending it with just the scene of the this woman gingerly walking around with her shoulders defensively positioned, like she was expecting a projectile to fly at her face, walking to her car in silence, surrounding by so much silent disapproval with only the sound of camera flashes. If that was your local TV or a cable news network, they would have used the footage and talked over it, taking away the power of the moment to close with some equivalence about the 90-day committee or perhaps even a little idiotic banter about ‘healing’, ‘common ground’ or other such nonsense.
So Kudos to AggieTV for knowing how powerful that footage was and presenting it accordingly.
numbskull
@Yevgraf: It’s good that you’re missing the point so effectively. You make the rest of us feel that much better about ourselves.
cathyx
The UC Davis chancellor has had second thoughts about her decisions:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/uc-davis-chancellor-pepper-spraying-task-force.html
PIGL
@Omnes Omnibus: Thanks for this. I agree.
Lee
I wonder if the cops and their overseers will ever figure out that the times have changed and they can no longer get away with “It was self defense” when there are multiple cameras on them.
Every time they try to use that line with over whelming video evidence to the contrary, they are losing more credibility. Thank the FSM that we have a liberal media that would never point that out.
James
An provocative, more sociological view of what’s going on with the authoritarian response to OWS.
Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike – Alexis Madrigal – National – The Atlantic
Interesting this:
…after James Baldwin.
Side note: Interesting that the police response to the Tea Party and anti-Muslim protests remains in the Negotiated Management phase. Why is that?
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, pretty much. And at least in theory that’s how it’s supposed to work. The civil rights marches, to take the most obvious example, were “working within the system” and by the system’s own rules, which is one major reason they worked.
mamayaga
@James:
This is something I’ve been harping on. It has almost become received wisdom in this country that the First Amendment only protects right wing speech. The people raving about how inconvenienced they are by the OWS protests (and therefore OWS protesters should all be sprayed, tasered, and bashed) did not rave when they were inconvenienced by the Tea Party protests, because freedom of speech that’s why. I think we need to keep pointing this out. It has become too much an unstated assumption that some peoples’ political speech is more privileged than others’.
RSA
@cathyx:
Actually, I think that the students have good reason to be proud of themselves. Katehi seems to mean some sort of institutional pride, which of course is part of the problem (cf. Penn State).
Yevgraf
@Omnes Omnibus:
Because the unnecessary encampments – particularly the irrelevant ones away from where the New York focal point – have overwhelmed the “protest the 1%” part, and there is a heavy miasma of professional left ratfucking which oozes from what the movement has morphed into.
This would be the same professional left which has provided nihilist conservatives with an open field run for the past 50 years.
Isn’t five decades of “fail” enough?
Raging Thunderbolt
If the disagreement continues, they paint their opponents as “inappropriate”, the all-purpose word that means nothing other than “I don’t like it”.
Oh, I didn’t know that when I say grown men touching little boys is inappropriate, I just meant I don’t like it.
Elizabelle
@JCT:
interesting to hear about the 99/1% split in academia too
Mark S.
@James:
Oh bullshit. “I was just following orders” hasn’t been an accepted defense for 70 years.
trollhattan
@Maude:
You’re right, it’s on the BBC’s front page, and has been a lead headline on NPR the last day. (Forcing people around the globe to
reach for the atlasGoogle-map Davis, Calif.)The question has arisen as to what Gov Jerry might be able to do. The chancellor is hired by the board of regents and the gov sits on that board, so he’s at least at arms length, but I’m positive he’s appalled at this incident and will respond to whatever degree the law allows. The man is nothing if not hands-on, unlike his predecessor (whose hands were busy elsewhere).
McJulie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Me neither. I find shouty angry conflict between people way too stressful, and I instinctively shy away from powerful groupthink crowd dynamics of that kind. (I might have learned to distrust them because of the way they were used in my evangelical upbringing.)But I sure admire them. To me they are brave soldiers on the front lines, fighting for the future of this country.
The De-Lurker at the Threshold
And this is what Katehi became known for during her tenure as provost at UIUC:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-u-of-i-clout-04-jul03,0,3160889,full.story
James
@Mark S.: You should read the piece. It’s really quite interesting, and not at all what you are thinking.
James
@mamayaga: Yes. Exactly. This piece I linked to really underscores the differences in the response to rightwing lunatic demonstrations, where you see no riot police and fully armed angry men waving their flags and spitting on Congressmen are given wide berth for their
Free Speech, while peaceful, unarmed, sitting students are violently beaten.
Carl Nyberg
@Mark S.:
I think Glenn Greenwald would say that “I was just following the implied orders of shareholders to maximize profit,” has been an acceptable defense. And it’s increasingly acceptable to use this as a PR defense, not just a legal defense.
I also think there should be research into what training police officers receive on the duty to follow orders and disobey illegal orders.
When I asked a friend who had been a cop, she said there was no training on the possibility that orders from above are illegal.
Cops are taught they are indemnified.
When have cops been criminally prosecuted for violating the rights of citizens when following orders?
Chicago police officers under the command of the Cook County State’s Attorney executed an assassination of Fred Hampton. The only accountability was a civil settlement paid by taxpayers.
What are cops taught about orders being illegal and how to properly decline illegal orders?
scav
If anyone’s in a reflective mood, there’s some new stuff coming out about the UK riots earlier this year. Short recap: it’s complicated but also, oh looky, the official version of events about Duggan look somewhat, shall we say, fabricated? New questions raised over Duggan shooting (Guard). Also some academic research into the riots that also complicates things by pointing out nah, they weren’t exactly all just criminal thugs out on a mindless binge but again, complicated. Myths, mobs and moral panics — understanding the reasons for the riots (Guard again, sorry, that’s as far as my morning has progressed). While I’ve no doubt things will get complicated on this end as well, those students at UCD done themselves proud.
Yevgraf
@Elizabelle:
My oldest was lamenting her tuition increases the other day, and wondering if it was professor pay. I told her it was about administration bloat and support of each new endowed chair and program.
She further advised that her 300 level classes are overcrowded and little better than freshman seminars.
MikeBoyScout
Egyptian military police fight protesters in square
Three-nineteen
@Raging Thunderbolt: Yes it does. Grown men molesting little boys is criminal, disgusting, and wrong. So is pepper-spraying peaceful protesters in the face. If an action is “inappropriate”, that means in other circumstances that action would be appropriate. “Inappropriate” is something you apologize for and promise to not do again, like farting in church.
JCT
@Elizabelle:
@Yevgraf:
Exactly — and the pall it casts over the next generation of researchers is profound.
And major link FAIL from my other comment. Sheesh.
The Scientist on Admins vs Faculty
Joel
Sometimes the occupy protestors don’t manage to make me proud, but shit am I proud of these kids. Fallows’ second piece on the confrontation is a nice piece of analysis, too.
cat48
@Yevgraf:
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Okay, in theory, you are spot-on. In practical terms, however, the Occupiers are not operating within the normal parameters of political discourse. They are not applying pressure on standard levers in standard ways. They are, in fact, operating outside of the conventional system.
pete
@cathyx: The chancellor had an opportunity, when setting up the task force, to denounce the actions of that cop. She absolutely failed to do that, instead making it seem that her (second) thoughts were all about herself. The use of pepper spray, she said, in a scripted statement, “is chilling to us all.” She did not say, is wrong, is unjustifiable, is evil. It’s chilling. I’m getting madder as I write. Chilling is a subjective reaction; what you feel when you see a horror movie. This was not a pretense, it was a real action, that caused real pain to real people.
I am very glad she had to walk that gauntlet of shame. I hope she never returns to the campus. Just email the damn resignation.
Yevgraf
@cat48:
Just like counterculture in speech and appearance worked so well, just like kneecapping Jimmy Carter with a bruising primary from a guy who was barely 10 years beyond a drunken vehicular homicide, just like putting Jessica Lange in front of a Congressional committee to talk about the plight of family farmers, these guys still can’t do anything right.
The original OWS idea was great. The encampments, not so much.
ornery
@cat48: Oh good, someone shows up with an agenda to … attack our side.
Blame Nader!
scav
Factoid for consideration. Number one viewed story currently on the BBC main news page is this pepper spray one. Apparently the equivalent on the US & Canada page is something on Natalie Wood (but that may be from Saturday). If certain portions of the US are ignoring this, it doesn’t quite look like the rest of the world necessarily is (nor those portions of the US that don’t rely exclusively on the US media). Still, beacon of democracy we’re running here, right?
Yevgraf
*guffaw*
So now the professional left is on our side when it comes time to lay in some criticism?
Roy G.
If anybody here hasn’t already, I strongly endorse the blog of Zunguzungu, who is a PHD candidate at Berkeley. He was effectively exposing the roots of the rot in the UC system prior to Occupy, and has since been writing from the front lines of the conflict:
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/
I’d be interested in finding out what the salaries are for both tracks of faculty at Davis, and why a campus cop is making more than they are. Davis ain’t South Central, despite the paranoid fantasyland the cops there appear to be inhabiting.
I think Officer Piggy Pike is the real sociopath here. This clearly goes beyond any sort of ‘just doing my job’ excuse, and far into a personal desire to hurt the students. Maybe i’m wrong, but I doubt the usage guidelines for the pepper spray calls for spraying it down people’s throats. I don’t care if my tax money goes to paying it off, that’s a lawsuit right there.
cat48
@ornery:
I don’t know how listing things that have actually occurred is attacking anyone.
John X.
Yevgraf,
It kind of sucks to see your own impotence and irrelevance staring you in the face. It’s almost like this whole citizenship thing is about more than yelling at the hippies in the clouds.
So keep screaming about the professional left. That sort of sober action has accomplished a lot in the years you’ve been at it. There’s so much change left for you to accomplish.
Darkrose
@numbskull:
Just make sure that those of us non-academic staff don’t get counted in that, please? Believe me, the fact that Katehi gets 27% more than the previous Chancellor, not including housing and transportation allowances, and that no one below manager in my department has so much as sniffed a COLA in four years isn’t winning her many friends.
xian
@mamayaga: don’t tell yevgraf that, though, or we’ll be subjected to yet another concern-troll angle
Roy G.
I just read that Alexis Madrigal piece on The Atlantic, and I think it’s digital fishwrap. While I might applaud the sentiment he is trying to raise, it manages to whitewash and banalize Officer Pike’s behavior. It almost seems as if Madrigal didn’t even watch the video, he just wanted to make a point. And get some ad hits or whatever. Yeah we get it, cops are people too, but that ignores the sociopathic element that goes beyond ‘doing my job.’
Yeah, Alexis, you go have a beer with Officer Pike, i’m sure he will use your liberal empathy for all that he can – like a true sociopath.
numbskull
@Darkrose: Of course, that’s a given. From my 30+ years in the academy, I’d say in terms of useful work getting done, the categories break down as:
staff>faculty=students>administrators
There are, of course, exceptions. ;)
(PS: I’ve been in all four categories and currently “inhabit” two).
Petorado
How else are these “confrontations” supposed to end other than with brutality and violence. We have cops who are dressed for war, with their kevlar vests, battle helmets, and face shields — a veritable cloak of invincibility. Then we arm them with an arsenal of lethal and non-lethal weapons and set them loose on unarmed crowds. When the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The cops literally have no skin in the game. A non-violent resolution is highly unlikely to occur when cops are quite literally prepared for and spoiling for a fight.
If instead police were sent there far less heavily armed and with only their normal uniforms, they’d have to rely on their wits, their diplomacy, and their mere presence to fulfill their mission to protect and serve. Instead they are girded to act violently and with impunity. On 9/11, police and firefighters were universally regarded as brave, public heroes. In 2011, the cops now look like cowardly thugs preying on non-violent civilians. What a difference a decade makes.
g
I have to confess that I have a major prejudice against university chancellors, presidents, provosts and the like.
Having been employed or otherwise associated with three major public universities throughout my life, I have to say you can’t paint them all with the same broad brush.
You also can’t condemn administrators alone when often the source of dysfunction is the faculty themselves. The joke about academia is that the disputes are so bitter because the stakes are so low, and it’s true. I know a humanities department that is so dysfunctional its faculty refuse to speak to one another, or go out of their way to avoid passing one another in the hall. I am acquainted with one faculty member who happens to be a MacArthur Fellow – she’s perfectly nice to me, but I’ve heard stories of how she managed to alienate an entire department with her sharp elbows and sense of entitlement.
I’ve acquainted with one Dean whose everyday life is dedicated to preventing intra-faculty disputes from destroying students’ careers. Just recently he caught one faculty member trying to set up an illegal fundraising mechanism within departmental staff – it wasn’t out of venality, it was out of ignorance about the protocol of fundraising – but even so, let’s not pretend that there isn’t a need for competent administrators.
mamayaga
@Petorado:
This is actually a function of the redrawing of social class lines in this country. The police have always looked like cowardly thugs to non-violent civilians who are poor and/or minority. We’re all part of that throwaway population now, at least those of us who presume to question our overlords.
virginia
mamayaga — Precisely. Brava!
pete
@Roy G.: Fundamentally, I agree with you. He does however have a point in noting that the Seattle experience affected subsequent responses. I see a parallel to the 1990 peace movement, which focused on the prospects of American casualties in Iraq (I did my share of “body-bag” campaigning), and then saw the military focus on high-altitude bombing, which reduced U.S. casualties at the expense of Iraqi civilians. We always have to react to the reaction, which is why I am so cheered by the gauntlet of shame. I am humbled and honored to witness the UC Davis students.
Hillary Rettig
It is astonishing how little of a clue she had. How hard would it have been to actually say something – to engage, even in platitudes? Or not say something: just to have listened. To have sat down with them and said, “Please share your concerns.”
She’s probably paralyzed from the awareness that she’s facing huge lawsuits, and is in for a tough ride. (I was going to say that “her career is ruined” – but probably not – people at that level mostly just fail up.)
Honestly, she’s going to get the lawsuits anyway, and so I think she probably chose the worst possible response. One thing’s for sure: she’s in WAY over her head. (Her glazed look reminds me of Bush reading My Pet Goat.)
Watched the Keith Olberman interview with the magnificent 84 yo Dorli Rainey again yesterday; then the brilliant UC Davis protesters. Thinking about them and the strategic geniuses who started OWS. Can’t help comparing them with people like Katehi and all the ersatz “geniuses” on Wall Street, who may be good with numbers or schmoozing, but who are fundamentally undistinguished human beings, and whose main job qualifications are unbridled greed and selfishness. As I teach in my classes, it’s way easier to succeed – in the narrowest sense – if you’re willing to screw others.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
Yevgraf, you sound like a sanctimonious concern troll.
What, exactly, have you and the DNC members whose asscracks you’re licking accomplished?
(Beyond proving exactly how worthless you all are since January, 2009.)
~
Nutella
@Petorado:
Many of us are shocked at Pike’s actions because we see him as a rogue cop getting away with illegal action but what he was doing was apparently standard operating procedure. Attacking nonviolent people with weapons is what they are trained to do.
That’s from ex-cop Peter Moskos and others including the UCD polic chief* have said the same. It’s a standard “compliance technique” — they have been trained to use tear gas and tasers to force people to comply with their orders.
In other words, their training tells them that attacking nonviolent people is perfectly OK. What they should do with nonviolent civil disobedience like this is separate and arrest one protester after another. That’s a whole lot harder to do without beating them down first with batons or tear gas so they’ve got official sanction to do it the easy way.
The police are trained to break the law and citizens are required under threat of attack to follow police orders even if the orders themselves are illegal.
Nice system we’ve got.
(*) She said officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them. They used a sweeping motion on the group, per procedure, to avoid injury, she said.
The students were informed repeatedly ahead of time that if they didn’t move, force would be used, she said.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/19/4066159/10-occupy-protesters-arrested.html#ixzz1eGp6cZOD
bourbaki
@xian:
Nah he’s too busy photoshopping a picture of Glenn Greenwald’s head onto one of the students bodies for the purposes of…uh…tumescence.
Don’t judge him man…
Maude
@Nutella:
2 police officers were placed on admin leave. It’s on one of the CA tv stations. My connections is too slow to watch.
2 down.
TooManyJens
@Yevgraf: You mean to tell us that the 1% wants people to notice police brutality, and to demand to be treated as citizens rather than as enemies? Unlikely.
MikeBoyScout
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/ktxl-uc-davis-officers-suspended-after-fridays-pepper-spray-incident-20111120,0,176432.story
shano
Chuck Wexler, head of group that coordinated police crackdown on #Occupy serves on Dept of Homeland Security council http://is.gd/FByuu2
.
Omnes Omnibus
@shano: What group coordinated the police crackdown? It was my understanding that any coordination was unofficial and done by mayors and police departments in the various cities.
Ruckus
@Carl Nyberg:
In the military you get hours of training on how and what orders to obey. You get training on how the system works and your rights within the system. You learn the rules that you have to play by. And you learn what to do when someone else disobeys those rules. IOW when given an illegal order what to do about it.
Police don’t seem to have that last step. There are no illegal orders. As others have pointed out when you have complete indemnity (or believe you do) there are no wrong actions. There are control methods you are trained for. There are weapons you are trained for. When to use them, when not to use them, not so much trained for.
A point I see in our modern society is that some entity rates what is good or bad and all responsibility for actions/results is removed onto the authority, which actually has no direct responsibility. Banks/investment houses have ratings agencies. Police have policies/indemnity. Colleges are rated and live and die based on those. Etc. Etc.
Now to make that work we have double or mumble (or to be clearer-Bullshit) speak from those in charge. (Hell there are PR firms who specialize in damage control. How to spin the unspinable so the responsibility is lessened/removed.) Why does this all sound familiar? (Hint-George knew what he was talking about)
Another Bob
Chancellor Katehi = Nurse Ratched
scav
What’s fascinating is I found the news about the admin leave up at the Guard but not at the NYT, ChiTrib, one of the Seattle papers and found a link to a KTLA story at the LATimes — but look at the list of smaller papers that already have it upthread. Veddy veddy interesting.
xian
@Petorado: that’s a really good point. if you dress for a riot, what do you expect will happen?
Darnell From LA
So…
Not being allowed to live in a public park = Police State
Good to know. Is it any wonder so many African-Americans are dubious of OWS and their complaints of police brutality?
Oh, and even though I am not black I can tell you that many African-Americans in Los Angeles WOULD LOVE to UPGRADE TO pepper-spraying from the customary slamming of their head onto a car hood. (NOTE: AA’s in LA get this treatment often WITHOUT refusing a police order to move)
This is a pattern: Minorities held in solitary confinement for generations, white people (like me) go on with our lives. Bradly Manning in solitary confinement? “TORTURE! ZOMFG! Obama MUST act!”
Minorities beat to a pulp by police EVERY DAY in this country for generations? “Oh, yes, tragic.” White kids get pepper-sprayed? “Police State! ZOMFG! It’s like Tiananmen Square! Obama MUST act!”
Most of my friends and neighbors are African-American, and as a white man I can tell you they think the OWS protestations about “police brutality” are both hilarious and slightly offensive, all at the same time.
You see, if a thousand black men (some wearing masks) refused to leave MacArthur Park at 11pm they would be shot at, with bullets. From guns. Bullets. Dead, wounded, etc.
TL;DR – White people of OWS, stop making ALL white people look bad.
Darnell From LA
@Joel: It’s shit like this, OWS.
Civil Rights Movement – Little girls blown to bits in bombed churches, lynching a constant threat, murder of activists, homes of activists burnt to the ground in the middle of the night.
Tiananmen Square – According to NATO and Soviet intelligence, between 7,000 – 10,000 protesters slaughtered AFTER being pushed from the protest area.
Now, how are the above = being pepper sprayed??
Remember when a GOP Rep. famously (and hilariously) likened the GOP minority in the House to the Iranian resistance? Yeah, likening OWS to the Civil Rights Movement and Tiananmen is just as moronic.
shano
One of the founders of Occupy Wall Street:
VLAD TEICHBERG: Well, my specific job was I was a derivatives trader. I was basically working for large banks, betting basically their money on these derivatives products. And my job was sort understanding how these products worked, really [inaudible] to the level of models, that used to price them, but also figuring out what models didn’t work and so on.
For me, the philosophical transformation was the—basically the whole globalization philosophy that was being pushed in the early mid-’90s, that would ultimately be—ultimate equalizer of the world turned out to be faulty because of the effective multinationals. Towards the late ’90s, I mean, I think a lot of people came to the same conclusion: globalization was actually doing more harm than good, and there was more inequality in the world. And by late—by late ’90s, it was very, very clear that that was the case. And that’s pretty much when I started shifting out of being a supporter of this Ayn Rand approach to looking at the world.
Watch the rest of the interview here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/18/the_revolution_will_be_live_streamed
shano
Darnel, do you think the police had the right to destroy all the personal property of these people?
They destroyed 5,000 books (some think the police pissed on them, because the ones left shows signs of that) they bashed computers with hammers, they destroyed musical instruments and drums, they destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, wireless tower, new tents, medical supplies.
The estimate is at least $250,000 worth of personal effects.
shano
Oh yea, and they trashed complete sets of industrial stainless steel kitchen equipment, that stuff is expensive…
shano
Oh yea, and they trashed complete sets of industrial stainless steel kitchen equipment, that stuff is expensive…And regular bicycles, plus the bicycle generators – ten of those…et al
Joel
@Darnell From LA: Fallows was evoking imagery that non-violent resistance reminded him of. It’s powerful imagery. Of course, you can just keep fucking that chicken, if it interests you.
Svensker
@Petorado:
There was one cop there who was bare-headed, who was making eye contact with the kids, using gentle hand motions, talking and smiling to the crowd. Whether his humanity made him not wear the headgear, or whether the lack of headgear enhanced his humanity, it was interesting to watch.
zunguzungu
@Roy G.:
Short answer as to why campus cops make more than professors: they have a union.
Darnell From LA
@shano: Again, here is the disconnect. You know what poor minorities trying to live in public parks across the country call having their shit destroyed by the Cops?
Thursday. (or in some cities, EVERY DAY)
If you turn a public park into a encampment, complete with kitchen equipment and generators, and THEN refuse to leave…as in EVER…uh, what do you think the end game may be?
Like I said, this is why black Americans, by in large, are so dubious of OWS. i.e. if thousands of black and/or brown people ‘occupied’ a public park, they would not be “shocked” that the police didn’t carefully handle their GENERATORS and 5,000 BOOK MAKESHIFT LIBRARY.
Instead of listening to the thoughts of minorities regarding all of this, OWS seems determined to act as though police brutality just now became a problem in the US. That is offensive.
CASE IN POINT:
Just a few months back a black, 18 year old honor student was brutally beaten by 3 UNDERCOVER COPS, while walking to his Grandmother’s house. (NOT pepper sprayed, but beaten. Look at the photo)
http://www.wpxi.com/news/22311848/detail.html
Do you remember white liberals rising up in outrage and demanding the Federal government become involved?
How about the protests? Or the 24/7, round the clock banging of the drum on liberal blogs and MSNBC?
Right, you don’t because none of that happened. And for every white kid of OWS pepper sprayed today there are 100 non-white kids getting beaten, with fists, nightsticks, boots and worse in communities all over America. Communities that have been dealing with a recession before there was a recession for the rest of us white folks.
TL;DR – Let’s try to avoid being out of touch, entitled white people, shall we? Acknowledge that what we are seeing at OWS has been a fact of life for minorities for generations, and maybe that will be a start.
Darnell From LA
@Joel: Are you that myopic or uninformed? Or do I need to present the countless blog posts and diaries across the liberal blogosphere likening OWS (not the imagery mind you, but the movement itself) to the Civil Rights Movement and Tiananmen Square?
Do I need to post the OWS poster created using the image of the “Tank Man of Tiananmen Square?” (Tank Man was summarily executed, btw)
If you can’t use the Google, let me know.
FACT: OWS is likening itself to protest movements, here and abroad, where murder, torture and slaughter were daily occurrences.
Either defend that or disavow it. Or just “fuck that chicken”, as you put it, with an eloquence that was impressive as it was intimidating.
Citizen_X
@Darnell From LA: If you have a point beyond “Shut up,” please make it.
xian
@Citizen_X: i think his point is “something else worse is happening so this bad thing isn’t so bad.”
Another Bob
@Darnell From LA:
Darnell, your cheap melodrama doesn’t change the fact that what the cops did was clearly wrong, clearly a violation of the protesters’ rights of free speech, and as a result two of them have been placed on administrative leave. The president of the UC system, Mark Yudof, said he was “appalled” by the incident. Even the plutocrats recognize that this was way over the line. Thanks all the same for your efforts, but they’ll let you know when is the appropriate time to lick their boots — just not right now.
AA+ Bonds
Correct. Erskine Bowles.
AA+ Bonds
@Darnell From LA:
Didn’t you have to admit to everyone that you were actually white last time you got caught in your failed, Koch-funded trolls?
John, y’all gonna ban this race baiting sock puppet chump Darnell from LA, or what?
AA+ Bonds
Darnell from LA, a fake ass poster who likes to post lies against black support for OWS to please the Kochs
AA+ Bonds
I’ll be straight up, Darnell from LA, lying about being black like you did in that previous thread reveals you to be a fucking crazy racist
AA+ Bonds
I can’t repeat this enough: ban the fuck out of Darnell from LA for his repeated racism
jimbo123
Am I the only one to notice how the ending of that video was like…freakin’ BILLY JACK? This is some powerful shit, much like the original confrontation where the cops were surrounded and “allowed” to leave. Tactically brilliant street theater. We need more of this, a whole lot more.
numbskull
@g:
Oh dearie me, who is pretending that?
COMPETENT administrators, in moderation, are always welcome.
daveX99
@scav:
The Natalie Wood/UC Pepper Spray ratio is interesting, but remember: The number of folk in the US & Canada who turn first to the BBC for their news is gonna be very small. I’m sure it’s a nice service, but those are not 2 comparable samples (UK v. N.America).
Dan
The biggest joke about that is that you can clearly see from the video that Lt. Pike started out inside the circle and then proceeded to step over the students unimpeded before he maced the seated belligerents.
xian
@AA+ Bonds: what’s the racism? doesn’t Darnell claim to be a white person living in a black neighborhood? I think the guy’s a fool and a poltroon, but I didn’t catch any overt racism.
shano
Darnell said the relations the public has with the police had been improving.
I asked where, maybe in white suburbia, but no where else. the police have acted with impunity since the global War on Drugs ™ started.
This war, and the War on Terror that fuels it, has created a ‘us vs them’ mindset in both police departments and in the public.
Face it, when a parent can lose custody of a child for smoking a joint, the penalties outweigh the crime in any number of ways.
Raging Thunderbolt
@Three-nineteen: so inappropriate things are never wrong, criminal, or disgusting? that sure clears it up.
bob h
a pretty good salary,
In fact, these people are likely to be in the top 1% and certainly the top 2%, the salaries and benefits are so exorbitant. At a time when students are piling up so much debt, I just don’t know how the University Presidents who demand $600k plus can look at themselves in the mirror.
Matthew
Uh, my father – who came from a lower middle class background, and the first one in the family to go to college – worked himself up the academic ladder, rising slowly through the years and colleges from poly-sci prof to dept. head to academic dean to provost to eventually a university president position, and I can assure you, he is not one of the 1% (that would be nice!) nor would he ever approve of this sort of action against students. He remained committed to higher education his whole professional life and stood as an example of a liberal leader in a conservative world (college administrations and boards). While I can see where you’re coming from here, I just have to point out that some can indeed look at themselves in the mirror.
Paul in KY
That was a ‘Circle of Death’ or I’ve never seen one.
Those poor police officers.
Catsy
@Darnell From LA:
Hint: this idiotic straw man argument is where anyone who’s actually been paying attention to the Occupy protests decided nothing else you had to say was of any value.
Assuming they hadn’t already come to that conclusion from, well, everything else you’ve posted.