By Richard Seyman

The truest indicator of the character of a society is how it treats its poorest, least powerful members. Judged by this standard, the character of UC Davis campus community remains in doubt 4 1/2 months after the notorious Nov. 18 assault on student protesters.

UC Davis students and alumni occupied the Quad in November because they believed it was the only way to create enough “volume” of protest to actually be heard. Their message was clear and familiar: Students have been bearing the brunt of the university’s financial shortfalls — repeatedly, year after year.

From 1980 to 2012, despite deeper and deeper reductions in state funding, faculty salaries kept pace with inflation. At the same time, tuition rose from $400 a year to more than $12,000.

The brunt has been placed upon students solely because they are the poorest, least powerful members of the university community. The time has come for UC faculty to step forward and step out of their comfort zone.

One way faculty members could do that would be to vote in favor of a proposed Senate “memorial to the regents.” (A link to the memorial is attached at the end of this column.) The passage of this resolution, though nonbinding, would constitute a major increase in political engagement by the university on behalf of its own students.

In the aftermath of the pepper-spray incident, several score of faculty members did speak up. And a few even came forward to briefly participate in protests along with their students.

But a major public institution such as the University of California cannot exonerate itself by a mere outpouring of emotional rhetoric of “shock-and-aw(ful)” remorse.

It must be judged by the real (politically and financially effective) institutional actions it takes to make restitution for the wrongs committed and to ensure better outcomes in the future.

So far — more than four months after the notorious event — this community has utterly failed to take any effective steps in that direction.

And, in fact, by a recent vote of the UCD Academic Senate, it has shown that it considers continued focus on the issue (of reprimanding the chancellor over the suppression of student protest) to be — as one faculty member voting in support of the chancellor put it — “a distraction.”

It is one thing for the media and the public to demonstrate a relatively short attention span. It is quite another for a community of scholars and researchers to do so.

Furthermore, the faculty’s credibility deficit is based not only upon the repeated delays of the university’s investigation (although sufficient delay is often sufficient discouragement to cripple the momentum of a protest movement). While the report of former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso’s task force may include some significant information, that investigation is, for the most part, a red herring.

The chancellor and her fellow administrators have known since day one the answers to the most crucial questions: What truly were their real reasons for sending the police to remove the tents. And what exactly was the full text of the discussions held by the chancellor in conference with the other 13 administrators.

The tents have now remained on the Quad for 4 1/2 months. If the mere presence of tents (for two nights in a row) constituted a real safety hazard and a true emergency, how then does the university justify allowing the tents to remain over all these months?

The decision to remove the tents and to send the police to accomplish that removal was neither hasty nor casual. It was very deliberate. What other potential health and safety risks would require a similar consultation of top student affairs officers and top public communications officers? What was it about “camping equipment” that would require that kind of intense, high-level brainstorming?

The flimsiness of the “safety” rationale for the tent removal was obvious all along. It was a naïve “cover” rationale for the real reason the tents had to go, which was concern that an “official tolerance” of an Occupy-Wall-Street-like encampment on the campus might well be seen as “weakness” or “tacit approval” in the eyes of powerful interests both outside and inside the university community.

The evidence has always been that it was the “loudness of the message,” created by so many students engaging in an effective act of civil disobedience (i.e. encampment), one that likely was to catch the public eye that created the emergency and the need for a high-level decision.

The faculty should not need a verdict from the judicial system in order to decide its own view of this issue of freedom of speech within the university community.

Simply claiming, as President Mark Yudof has done, that “freedom speech and the right to protest are in the DNA of the university” does not make it so. The credibility of university faculty must be based not upon action, not puffery. Do students matter at all? Does free speech matter at all?

There are two steps the leaders of the UC Davis Academic Senate could take to help restore the faculty’s damaged credibility with the students of this campus:

* Publicly recommend that Senate members vote in favor of the proposed memorial to the regents. See it a http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/MemorialPacket4Divisions_000.pdf

* Reconsider the need to censure the chancellor because a mere apology is a shamefully inadequate remedy for an intentional act of suppression of student free speech.

— Richard Seyman, a UC Davis alumnus, is a retired staff member at UCD.

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