The following letter was signed by a group of UC Davis faculty and staff and sent to Chancellor Linda Katehi:

We are saddened and disappointed by the way that the university decided to handle the removal of the students’ encampment on the Quad on Friday afternoon.

Until now, we used to take pride in the way UC Davis was able to handle the students’ protesting against the tuition hikes in what seemed to us an enlightened and nonconfrontational manner, especially compared to other occurrences at Berkeley and elsewhere.

We do not question the university’s right to remove the students’ encampment (although there are reasons to question the wisdom of such a move). But we do object to the way UCDPD decided to resort to what are unquestionably violent methods in order to deal with a peaceful, nonviolent protest.

Pepper-spraying students who were sitting on the ground and posed no direct or indirect threat to the police officers strikes us as a vastly overblown reaction.

Surely, skilled and highly trained police officers could have come up with a better way to remove the students’ encampment in the face of nonviolent, passive student opposition?

It seems to us that the general principle the university should abide by is that violence is never an appropriate response to peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience. We hope you will agree with this assessment, and call on you as the highest officer of the university to see to it that such principle informs the actions of university officials at all times.

Aldo Antonelli, Lesley Byrnes, David Copp, Gerald Dworkin, Joel Friedman, Elaine Landry, Robert May, Roberta Millstein, Marina Oshana, Adam Sennet, Micheal Wedin

Davis

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