Katehi defends role in police return to Greek campuses
During a tense two minutes Monday during which she apologized to thousands on the Quad for the recent arrest and pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi struggled against tears when referencing Nov. 17, 1973.
“I was there, and I don’t want to forget that,” she said.
Many in the crowd likely were unsure of the date’s meaning.
Now, though, in an odd twist, the legacy of that day — when Katehi herself was a student activist in her native Greece — has opened a new line of criticism of the embattled chancellor.
In December 2010, Katehi was part of a panel of international experts that recommended Greece end a decades-old asylum law that effectively kept police off its campuses.
She and others felt the law was long abused by thugs. Others say it was later abolished in a crackdown against austerity protesters.
In an interview with The Enterprise in her office on Tuesday, Katehi sought to clarify her past.
She also further explained the discussions that took place before cameras last Friday captured UCD police Lt. John Pike using pepper spray during the clearing of the Occupy UC Davis encampment.
Police action
Katehi has said she takes full responsibility for what happened last week, but during the interview appeared to place blame onto the shoulders of Pike and UCD Police Chief Annette Spicuzza.
They and a third, unnamed officer are on leave, awaiting the results of investigations into what happened.
A campus “emergency team” including about eight or 10 members held “multiple” conference calls the day before police moved in to clear the camp. Katehi said images of UC Berkeley police using batons on protesters just days before came up during discussions.
“We were very specific that it has to be peaceful and not like Berkeley,” she said. “In a peaceful way, (Spicuzza) was only supposed to take the equipment down, not disperse the crowd, not remove the students.
“We also told her specifically she should not do anything if there were too many students or they were too upset or whatever the environment was that would not allow them to (remove the tents). That’s what she got from me.”
UC protocols, revised after the 2007 shooting deaths of 32 people at Virginia Tech University, placed distance between administrators and police in the field, she said. Control there lay with the incident commander: Pike.
It was Spicuzza’s responsibility to decide how to move in, how many officers should be involved and what equipment they be outfitted with, Katehi said.
17 November
Friday’s events took place 38 years and a day after the day Greeks call “17 November,” much as Americans refer to “9-11.”
That’s when a tank crashed through the gates of National Technical University of Athens to put down a student-led uprising. More than two dozen protesters were killed on that day, which ultimately marked the end of the military regime.
Katehi was a 19-year-old student activist at the university, also called Athens Polytechnic. She had dabbled in party politics but found they didn’t encourage free-thinking and debate.
Rioting against the government was hardly radical, anymore, as students stood alongside workers — “I was the mainstream,” she said this week.
“I never considered myself to be an anarchist or a radical element,” she said. “I would say my views are very democratic and progressive. I felt that I was demonstrating not because I believed in anarchy or wanted no government, but because I believed that government was not good for Greece.”
Riots took place all over Athens, but Katehi’s campus marked the epicenter.
“So (the military) committed to break it down,” she said. “We had information that they would send the military, that day. So we had, in the morning, a general assembly that took a long time, because people were very emotional. You knew that if you were to stay, the possibility of dying was very high.”
Hours passed with people arguing. At about 7 p.m., she and her cousin, another student, went home to eat.
When they returned, less than two hours later, they found soldiers had rolled up.
“There were students holding the bars (of the perimeter fence) and screaming. We were outside (of them), screaming,” she said. “Then they brought the tanks, later at night, and they just walked over the students, practically, to enter the building. And then they had snipers, so we ended up running.”
Asylum law
The memory of that day led to the passage of “academic asylum” rules, meant to protect free speech.
John Quiggin, an Australian economist and university professor, appears to have written first about Katehi’s role in Greece on a blog he shares with others called Crooked Timbers.
Others have since seized on Katehi’s role in asylum’s repeal as consistent with any decision to sic police on Davis protesters — and an ironic one given her own history as a student protester.
When the chancellor attended a general assembly on the Quad on Tuesday, the subject came up there, too.
Katehi said it was a well-meaning Greek law that had long been abused, in part because university leaders were unwilling to call in police, as was their right, even in emergencies.
“For some time that worked well, until there were many anarchist groups that would go outside and do bad things and then take over the university because the police could not enter,” she said.
“(The anarchists) burned the universities. They destroyed them. They burned the campus that I was (a student) on. We had a library with books, from the 15th century, and with documents that had been donated, and they burned it down. They destroyed the laboratories. They burned it, one over the other.”
In 2010, one of the many diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks included an assessment of the asylum law by Daniel Speckhard, the former U.S. ambassador to Greece.
In 2009, he wrote that it was “nothing more than a legal cover for hoodlums to wreak destruction with impunity” — including drug trafficking, assault, looting and other crimes — and “threatens the academic and student communities.”
Others held asylum up as a symbol of democracy, however.
In practice, Katehi said flatly, “Asylum is a bad thing.”
Greece’s Socialist prime minister and conservative opposition revoked the law in what one newspaper reported was their first joint action in 35 years.
Some have noted that the panel Katehi met with in 2010, eight months before asylum was revoked, described Greek campuses as “unsafe,” and safety was her rationale for the decision to clear the UCD camp.
The chancellor drew a clear distinction, however.
“The anarchists in Greece, they kill people — they burned a bank (in May 2010) with three people in there. They burned them alive. You’re not talking about anything like this here. Our (protesters) here are very civilized.”
Katehi was quick to say, as well, that the intent of the panel she served on, which met in late 2010, some eight months before the repeal, was to recommend the end of the law and give campuses options for security, including hiring police or having student security guards. It was not necessarily to put police on campuses, she said.
Doubt remains
Rebuilt Monday night, the Occupy UC Davis camp on the Quad saw a Thanksgiving dinner for a smaller number of protesters holding down the fort while others went home to celebrate the holiday.
The protesters have called a systemwide general strike for Monday, when the UC Board of Regents will hold a rescheduled meeting by teleconference. Three or four regents are expected at the Davis campus, one of four sites picked for public testimony.
Katehi has told protesters that their camp can remain open, so long as it’s safe, while the investigation continues and UC rules are evaluated. She’s visited a handful of times, in a sometimes awkward attempt to reach out to students.
Her role in revoking asylum in Greece gave critics one more reason to be skeptical of her efforts to reach out to students.
A blogger for The Nation magazine also saw a red flag in Katehi’s appointment in October 2010 to the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board.
The board is intended to promote discussion between research universities and the FBI, and UCD promoted joint efforts with the agency like a conference on cyberterrorism, according to a UCD news release at the time.
Katehi told The Enterprise that she felt there was much to discuss about the role of police on campus. One option might be to have different kinds of officers, some of whom might act more as a mediators.
“After the Virginia Tech incident, a lot of university police departments were redesigned to help us avoid (a similar) incident, which creates a police (force) which is prepared for that,” she said. “They have very strict regulations; they have the riot (gear); they have the vests in case somebody shoots you, and so forth.
“However, you take that and apply it into something like we had on Friday — it’s not working.”
— Reach Cory Golden at cgolden@davisenterprise.net.
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=109304
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Posted by Cory Golden
on Nov 24 2011.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 03:57:15 PM PDT
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very good story. thank you!
Your story spoke specifically to a subject I wanted to better understand. Only an hour ago I found her address to the students that day. I do not attend Davis, but live in Georgia. Thank you for helping me better understand her background. I feel, if anything, more horrified.