Students want action from regents on tuition, use of force
Protesters on Monday drowned out the UC Board of Regents, demanding that corporations and California’s wealthiest residents pay more to fund higher education.
The protesters, most of them students, trained the spotlight placed on them after police used force recently to clear Occupy Wall Street-style encampments at UC Davis and UC Berkeley back onto record-high tuition hikes, administrative salaries and the regents themselves.
Eran Zelnick, a UCD graduate student, called the university “a hostile environment led by trigger-happy regents, in that you raise tuition at every opportunity you can, and policed by trigger-happy cops, who do not miss an opportunity to show their brutal side.”
For their teleconference, the regents were divided among four locations: UCD, UC Merced, UCLA and UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. A meeting set for earlier in November was canceled due to security concerns.
During a 90-minute public comment period, a few audience members at the ARC Ballroom at UCD held signs reading “Katehi resign.” UCD Chancellor Linda Katehi seemed to see them, but showed no emotion.
“When the chancellor’s salary is above $400,000, and professors have to buy paper — that is a system that is not working,” said Puneet Kamal, a UCD undergraduate. “When a majority of the students are thinking of dropping out because they can’t afford a public education, that is a system that is not working.
“And when the UC Davis chancellor doesn’t know the practices of her own police force, that means she’s not doing her job.”
Later, starting with a call of “Mic check!” protesters at Davis and Mission Bay loudly chanted out their complaints, causing administrators and regents to leave the rooms temporarily.
Also on Monday:
* The regents unanimously approved a $2.7 billion state budget request, a $400 million increase but still about $500 million less than UC received four years ago. UC President Mark Yudof said that would be enough to avoid another tuition increase.
* Yudof named former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso to head up a task force into pepper-spraying at UCD (see story on Page A-10);
* Protesters took over Dutton Hall;
* Occupy UC Davis held about 20 teach-ins on the Quad;
* The regents approved an increase in UC and employee contribution rates, to 6.5 percent, for the UC Retirement Plan, effective July 2013. UC will contribute 12 percent; and
* Occupy UCD led a systemwide general strike, though it was not immediately clear what impact it had. There were 2,530 classes scheduled for Monday on the Davis campus. “We think most of them took place,” UCD spokesperson Claudia Morain said.
Students urged the regents to sign a pledge authored by ReFund California, a group of labor organizations, pushing for the closure of a Proposition 13 property tax loophole for corporations and increasing income taxes on the rich.
They also called for more student input, including greater representation on the Board of Regents, and greater transparency in budgeting.
Merced student Chelsea Carey said that by repeatedly approving fee hikes, regents were “enslaving the students of UC to debt.”
The regents will be judged on their actions, not on their talk of standing alongside students in Sacramento, speakers said.
“Students have nonviolently called on you all to sign a pledge to make banks and millionaires pay for education, instead of making students and workers pay too much, as we already have,” said Charlie Eaton, financial secretary for UAW Local No. 2865, a union that represents UCD teaching assistants, tutors and readers.
“You’ve responded by having us beaten, by having us pepper-sprayed, by having us arrested,” he continued. “At the end of the day, you can call an investigation, you can appoint your personal consultants to lead that investigation of yourself, but the buck stops with you.”
Eaton and others also accused regents of having conflicts of interest because of their personal wealth and business dealings.
Monica Lozano is a director for Bank of America, for example, Russell Gould a former senior vice president of Wachovia Bank and Richard Blum the chairman of CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest commercial real estate company.
Said Farshid Haque, a UCD graduate student, “Instead of just asking the state for more nonexistent money, money that would otherwise be invested in K-12 education or our public transit system, why do you not use your position as state appointees to push for higher taxes on the 1 percent — that’s yourself and, of course, the community that you are coming from, that happens to be both Republicans and Democrats.”
Because of police actions, UCD grad student Elias Marvinney warned the regents, “The world is watching, and more so than ever before.”
On Nov. 18, nine UCD students and one alumnus were arrested on misdemeanor charges and about a dozen more protesters who were seated, arms locked, were pepper-sprayed by police. On Nov. 9, police at the Berkeley protest jabbed protesters with batons.
Both instances were caught on video. The UCD pepper-spraying video went viral with about 1.4 million views on YouTube.
Sherry Lansing, who chairs the Board of Regents, called what she saw “deeply disturbing,” and said the board supported the rights of students to protest peacefully. Investigations into what happened and a review of police protocols for dealing with nonviolent protests are getting under way.
“We cannot change the past, but we can change the way we act in the future,” she said.
For now, Sophia Cameron, a UCD undergrad who was sprayed, said putting two police officers and Chief Annette Spicuzza on administrative leave isn’t action enough.
“The UCPD are a threat to students, as you are a threat in calling upon them to subdue us,” Cameron said.
Said Nikko Reynoso, a second-year undergrad at UCD, “We do not feel safe here on this campus.”
No appointed regents appeared inside the ARC Ballroom.
Assembly Speaker John Pérez, an ex-officio member of the board, student regent Alfredo Mireles Jr. and student regent designate Jonathan Stein represented the board.
Asked by reporters if Katehi should resign as UCD’s chancellor, Pérez said that is a question for the entire board.
“I have been very disappointed with (her) reactions to the (police) action,” Pérez said, “but I’m not sure that they rise to the level of those that would require us to dismiss her.”
Mireles said that the regents tried to balance their desire to allow UCD students to be heard with honoring Katehi’s promise to students to minimize the police presence on campus.
“Typically at regents meetings, if anyone has been to one in the past, they’re filled with dozens and dozens and dozens of police officers,” Mireles said. “Considering everything that happened, we thought that was a bad idea.”
Adam Thongsavat, president of the Associated Students of UCD, invited the regents, governor and legislators to visit UCD and speak with students.
“We are not the ones to fear,” Thongsavat said.
Lansing said she would visit all 10 campuses to meet with students and invited other regents to join her. After the meeting, regents and administrators reportedly met with protesters at UCLA, as did Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom at Mission Bay.
— Enterprise staff writer Lauren Keene and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Reach Cory Golden at cgolden@davisenterprise.net. Follow him at http://twitter.com/cory_golden
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=110471
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Posted by Cory Golden
on Nov 28 2011.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 03:57:15 PM PDT
Filed under Crime, Fire + Courts, Featured Stories, State government, Taxes, UC Davis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
You forgot to mention, after the regents claimed to be on the students’ side and claimed to agree with their concerns, they voted to raise several admin salaries by as much as 22%.