An Open Letter to UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy White
On Thursday, January 19 I spent a good part of the afternoon as a member of the
crowd protesting outside the UC Regents meeting. I stood with students I'd
taught, students I knew from their work with campus organizations, and students
I've seen at other demonstrations. I stood with faculty, staff, Occupy
activists from the region, and students from other campuses.
I stood right behind a barricade formed from placards
painted after the cover of books used in our classrooms. This book-barricade
was both a visual intervention (asserting knowledge as our choice of defense)
and something that helped us to maintain our shape as a crowd.
In the two hours I was behind that barricade, we didn't move
forward or back. We just stood there, chanting, talking, expressing our anger.
The crowd got bigger and louder, but its peaceful character didn't change. The
crowd successfully used Occupy Movement practices to control itself.
Nevertheless, toward the end of the Regent's meeting, a UCPD officer declared
through a bullhorn that our gathering was "an unlawful assembly."
The crowd chanted, "Tell us why! Tell us why! Tell us
why!" It was an honest request.
No one on the other side made even the slightest gesture to
respond to our question. And no administrator made even the slightest gesture
towards negotiating with us. To do so would have been to admit that the UC
Regents were trapped inside the building. To do so would have been to admit
that the University of California Regents had grossly underestimated UC
Riverside when it chose the campus for its meeting.
Our campus is "docile" by some standards. We don't
have Berkeley or UCLA's history of activism. A lot of our students commute,
which means that our campus environment is less condensed, less volatile.
UC Riverside is an open campus - perhaps the most open in
the University of California system. Parking is relatively cheap and easy. Our
students are so diverse it's hard to imagine what person would think,
"this campus doesn't represent me." If Berkeley and UCLA are often
the sites of large protests it is partly because those campuses represent the
system - participating in an action there has a unique symbolic function as
those campuses are "flagship" campuses.
Our campus represents something else. Our campus is rich
with transfers from the community college system, rich with returning students,
veterans, parents, kids who are the first in their families to graduate from
college. Dreamers.
In the University of California system, our campus has one
of the most organic relationships with its region. This makes for good press,
but it also means that of the UC campuses we are the most reliant on state
funds. We are the most vulnerable, our life as a public university feels quite
precarious.
On some level, the people planning this meeting banked on
that precarity. They banked on the notion that our students are too busy
working to pay their tuition (and/or their parents' mortgages) to get involved
with a protest.
The people coordinating the Regents meeting seemed to have
been surprised by the size of the crowd, and by its persistence. The UCPD and
the administration's confusion struck a lot of us as dangerous.
When the UCPD declared our demonstration an "unlawful
assembly" it implicitly announced its intention to use force to break up
the crowd without seeking another way to address the situation: negotiation of
an exit for the Regents. With a negotiated exit the Regents risked not violence,
but the embarrassment of being shunned.
The only instruction given to us was to not advance. In two
hours, there'd been no motion from the crowd indicating that we would do so.
There was discussion about moving forward and also if we should back up, since
many of us were crowded on stairs and if the UCPD advanced on us there, we'd
likely be hurt. But we did neither. We held our ground. The barricade formed at
the front helped us to do that.
Word got out that the Regents were trying to leave via the
back of the building (protesters were also there, but in smaller numbers). The
crowd at the front broke up as we tried to reform at the building's service
entrance.
When we got to the back of the student center, those forming
the book barricade tried to take their protective stance at the front of the
crowd. Someone took one of the metal barricades and pulled them towards the
protesters, as we'd been doing all afternoon at various points around the
building. No one had previously interfered with this.
The UCPD found their chance, though - as the crowd regrouped
at the back of the Hub, they used force to prevent the formation of another
blockade. Later, they would describe the attempt to form a barricade as
violent. When the protesters went to move barricades (again, as they'd been
doing all day with no interference), it was not an act of violence. There was
nothing threatening about it - the threat was that the activists were going to
successfully block the street. At this point, people were shoved to the ground,
dragged across the pavement and plastic pellets were shot at the crowd. I saw
wounds left by these pellets on students I've seen in my own classrooms. There
is ample video out there showing this.
The UCPD threw people to the ground, the UCPD shot their new
pellet guns into the crowd, the UCPD used force on us. BY this point, I should add, people had been protesting for hours - at any point the UCPD or the campus administration might have sought another path by engaging the protesters in dialogue. Honestly, I think that the people running security at the Regents meeting got romanced by the thrill of a military-style escape plan.
The next day: UC administrators organized an Orwellian
campaign to represent the violence of that incident as caused not by the UCPD
but by the protesters. Even more bizarre was the eagerness for the
administration to blame not students, but the public - as if the two should be
distinguished from each other. In weekly letter to the campus community the
Chancellor White claimed that "the disturbance of a few individuals"
ruined the demonstration, and that they did not represent the "non-violent
students and community members engaged in peaceful protest and exercising their
right to free speech." But the people beaten and shot at by the UCPD are
our students; they are our colleagues. And they are our neighbors. We were all
in it together. They are the public, and the public is us.
Tell us why, Chancellor White. Why you stopped seeing yourself in
us.
