To the chancellor
Dear Chancellor,
Your handling of the recent campus protest amounts to a catastrophic educational failure, making you unfit to continue as chancellor. While your intentions and your decisions may have seemed in your own mind to be sound and appropriate to the situation, they were in fact extremely mistaken and inappropriate.
You may have not known nor anticipated that the on-the-ground decisions made by your law enforcement staff would end up being what they were. But exercising judgment about such complex, challenging social realities is what, one would assume, you are paid your 1-percent-level salary to perform.
In the judgment of the majority of us living on a 99-percent-level income, you simply failed to perform up the expectations of your position and have dishonored our community.
Overall, the malfunction of the campus management in this situation reflects nothing less than the systemic loss of values, priorities and perspective due to years and decades of relentless pursuit of
financial resources from the ever-escalating terror of the global marketplace.
There has been all along an entirely different approach that the university might — and should — have taken to respond to the political and economic retrenchment of the forces of greed. It could have confronted them long ago and waged a moral and informational institutional campaign against them. Instead, it has attempted to placate them and even to curry favor among them, with little or no regard for the global consequences of such a politic strategy.
At some point, regardless of financial demands upon our institution, the university has to be willing to choose its foundational values above those of its own economic welfare or it can no longer be said to be a university run in the public interest.
The actions that you authorized on Friday and that you subsequently tried to justify with pathetically lame rationalizations remain inexcusable.
Nothing less than your resignation can restore the credibility and honor of our university.
Richard Seyman
Davis
retired UC Davis staff
and 1983 UCD graduate in American Studies
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=106884
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Posted by Letters to the Editor
on Nov 19 2011.
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I wonder if rants like this were sent in when protestors injured Oakland police…
Dear sweet WTF,
Quick question: Do you recognize a difference between use of force against unarmed and peaceful protesters in contrast to its use against armed forces? Yes or No? And if yes, would you consider that that difference might be a good answer to why perhaps there were fewer “rants” in response to the Oakland anarchist attacks on police (anarchists being a very small element of the Occupy movement overall & one other Occupiers were quick to suppress)?
Thanks Richard. Your letter goes straight to the heart of the matter. The University, like a frog in slowly boiling water, has acclimated itself to the corruption of the “ever-escalating terror of the global marketplace.” It gives me hope to hear words like yours that confront and expose the situation so succinctly.
For the first time in my life, I am ASHAMED to be a UCD graduate. I agree with those who call for the resignation of the Ms. Katehi and the officers involved in this incident. In addition, strong corrective action for Mr. Pike seems necessary and justified.
N. Riley, Class of ’78
The responsibility lands solely on those at the top. The Police officers are caught in the middle. The fact is the order should have never been given to clear the students. To compound the incident, it’s not like the Occupy protests and the outrage against the police response are new. The UCD officials have had the privilege of watching these types of protests and their outcome unfold for months, yet they still follow the same pathetic path as the others who have attracted such scrutiny. And of all places, UCD. expected to be one of the more civilized and tolerant communities, how disappointing and shameful.
High ranking officials, stop using Police officers as your scapegoat, they follow orders and you are the ones giving the orders.
The Chancellor MUST go!