Use of pepper spray was “objectively unreasonable”

Plenty of Blame to Go Around
UC Davis pepper spray report faults administrators, police (Inside Higher Ed)

By Allie Grasgreen

     Many parties were at fault for the now-infamous November pepper spray incident at the University of California at Davis, including the chancellor and other administrators who failed to properly evaluate the protest situation or plan for its dispersal, and the police who did not follow protocol and whose use of pepper spray was “objectively unreasonable,” an independent investigative panel has found.

     Communication breakdowns and procedural neglect snowballed into a confusing and poorly planned police operation, the panel's report says, and ultimately led to one officer casually pepper-spraying students at (much too) close range during a nonviolent protest. The students, who sat across a walkway, refused to move as campus police officers attempted to clear out the Occupy encampment.
     “Our overriding conclusion can be stated briefly and explicitly,” the report states in its very first sentence. “The pepper spraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011 should and could have been prevented.”….(continued)

California Dreaming

Writing yesterday in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hilzik dreams big and challenges us to revive the California dream that once was available for many.

Let's bring back the idea of a free UC education

Tuition increases are threatening to place a University of California education out of the reach of working-class and middle-class students.

The son of a railroad worker, Earl Warren came from a family keeping a desperate finger hold on a working-class existence at the turn of the last century. Yet when he left high school in Bakersfield in 1908, there was no question where he was headed: to Berkeley and a free education at the University of California.

There he proved an indifferent student scholastically but an enthusiastic absorber of "the new life, the freedom, the companionship, the romance of the university," Warren recalled years later. "It was like being in wonderland."
...
The roll of Californians who rose from modest circumstances to enrich our lives and our society after receiving a taxpayer-supported education at the University of California — or Cal State or the community college system — is too long to enumerate here. They're scientists who made world-altering discoveries, literary artists, composers and musicians, political leaders of city, state and country.
...
The principle of free tuition for state residents was deeply ingrained in UC from its founding in the 1860s and reaffirmed in the 1960 master plan for public higher education, which acknowledged the university's role as a driver of economic growth. Raising the instructional costs for students, the master plan said, would negate "the whole concept of wide-spread educational opportunity made possible by the state university idea."

So here's a radical proposal: As tuition increases threaten to place a UC education out of the reach of working-class and middle-class students, let's reinvigorate the notion of a free UC education.

To read the article in its entirety, click here.

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