Life of Wry

A huge crowd–estimated at about 7,000–showed up at the Occupy UC Davis rally this afternoon.. check this out!

Worth clicking on, otherwise it just looks like a swarm of bees.  As I understand it, the photo was taken by the UC Davis Geography Graduate Group using a helium-filled weather balloon (or some such).

Many are calling this the pepper spray rally, inspired by the events of last Friday (I’ve written about this plenty already).  The first hour was all about recognizing the students who had been unjustifiably sprayed.  Each had a few minutes to tell his or her story.  They were extraordinary and moving.  Here’s a shot of one of those students.  This one repeated numerous times, we are just kids!

During the hour in which these young men and women shared their experiences, we learned that Chancellor Katehi was in the crowd.  It wasn’t obvious, she hadn’t been acknowledged, but a friend pointed her out to me and it turned out, she was just about six feet away.

She was listening to their stories, and the angry chanting that went on between speakers calling for her resignation.  At one point, one of the organizers indicated that she was present on the quad and would be addressing the crowd. This announcement was followed by boos and, again, angry calls for her resignation. She approached the stage and the woman who was acting as emcee told her–very rudely I thought–that she’d have to wait her turn to speak. Another three or four people spoke and then the chancellor was given her moment.

She spoke for about two minutes, starting with an apology. She agreed with students who’d said this was not the kind of university they wanted to attend by saying it was not the kind of university she wanted to be chancellor of.  She said, in fact, UC Davis has many things it needs to improve upon, things she needs to improve upon, and that she wants to talk to students and listen to their ideas.  She talked about a plaque (somewhere on the quad) that commemorates the 1973 uprising in Greece, that she was there and it was awful.  She was visibly and audibly shaken.  She seemed genuinely pained by everything that had gone on in recent days and genuinely committed to change.  Her entire presentation is already up on YouTube (but brace yourself, the comments are brutal, some justified I’m sure, but some just downright cruel, especially those having to do with her speech, accent and command of english).

A friend this evening said she had the expression of someone who’d been villainized but who also realized she deserved it.  A lot of pain there.

I didn’t really hear boos when she finished, but the chants for her resignation resumed, if slightly (very slightly) less charged.

Part of me is ready to accept that she is a compassionate human being whose judgment misfired under challenging circumstances.  I totally don’t know anything about her performance these first two years on the job, other than some favorable anecdotal accounts from people I don’t know personally.  I’m inclined to think she’s a cog in a much larger wheel, a wheel that is part of the modern university educational system which has become totally corporatized, impersonal, and apparently, militarized. UC Davis is certainly not unique in this. And…. of course I have no idea what I’m talking about, but part of me thinks that anyone who is a chancellor in the University of California system is under the thumb of the president and regents and is simply carrying out its policies, strategic directives and practices. Her replacement will be no different. I’m under the impression, based on things I’ve read lately, that chancellors are more CEO-like and that university leaders are an administrative branch far removed from the academic and student side of the house.  Students are data points, education has been commodified, and.. here I go again talking about stuff I know nothing about.

I could be dead wrong about her and the latitude she may or may not have.

But I do understand that the buck stops with her, everything that is wrong with UC Davis is ultimately her responsibility, and there is legitimacy behind symbolic gestures.  So maybe she has to go.  She’s become an easy person to point fingers at.  And while we can’t easily fix the real problem, which is, you know, the corporatizing of education, we can drive her out and that feels like something, a little victory for a lot of people who feel hugely, frustratingly disempowered.

(I should say they can do all that; I have nothing at all to do with the university these days.)

Which brings me to Occupy UC Davis and why I was even there.  I mean, I don’t have a dog in the tuition fight, or a stake in the university’s leadership choices (except that Peter will one day be on his way to college and we’re going to care a lot about its costs then, and tuition in California has been rising insanely and by the time Peter’s college-bound we’ll be able to support him for maybe a quarter, but will run out of money long before his fourth, or fifth, year), but I wanted to be there today because I’m deeply, deeply inspired by the occupy movement (so called… are we ever going to get a better name for this thing?).

And it turns out, I guess, that each gathering of protesters has a different angle on the same problem.  Wall Street’s focusing on the banks; globally, different countries are concerned with oppressive regimes; in Oakland, they headed to the port; and here it’s about tuition.  Systemically, it’s all about issues of power imbalance and an inequitable distribution of resources. For me, it boils down to things like the Citizen’s United decision, the ability of corporations to buy candidates and dictate the outcome of elections, the ability of corporations to own and control the media.  Pretty much, it’s the power that corporations have to dominate every aspect of our lives for their profit at our expense.

That.

It just pisses me off.

But I digress.

Here are a couple more shots of the rally today.  Some of the passion in the crowd:

And some great signage:

Mostly, it was good to hang out with the kids, who are, for the most part, smart, articulate, committed and very likely on to something here…