Surprisingly enough (to this formerly trusting alum, that is), the Kroll team did its job. Likewise, the Reynoso committee did its job. Now, it’s our turn — the UC Davis community’s turn. It’s time for us to step up, ignore distractions and diversions, excuses and apologies, scapegoats and fall guys, and draw the only conclusion that can be drawn: UC Davis is, and has been for nearly three years now, suffering from seriously and irresponsibly bad leadership, and it’s high time for that to change.

These are challenging times, no question about it.  But they also present a tremendous opportunity for this great university to further distinguish itself as a principled leader. Yet it’s been abundantly clear for some time now that principles themselves have no place in the value system of this administration. Aside from a plethora of lip service about excellence and community, aside from the willingness and ability to cash obscenely large paychecks, the only thing this administration has proven itself really good at is dividing the campus community at every turn.  Enough already. Well and truly enough already.

Paul Medved
UC Davis Class of ‘78

If only the Chancellor had let the police stage the tent removal operation at 3 a.m. instead of 3 p.m., the result would not have involved pepper spray (nor international publicity, nor the need for a four-month-long study, nor costly legal battles yet uncounted). This is all very likely true. But is that the main problem with which we, the (infamous) campus community, ought to be most concerned?

The background provided in the report makes one thing perfectly clear: The leadership team that was involved in the decision-making about the protest was specifically created because campus protests on this same issue had become frequent and repeated over several years.  The issue was something directly involving campus priorities. But the objectives of the team were to mitigate the impacts of the protests without apparently addressing the cause for the protest, the failure of the university to keep tuition from skyrocketing.

1) The main question not asked by the commission: Did the decision to remove the tents, per se, involve a violation of the free speech rights of the students attempting to protest tuition hikes and the privatization of the UC system?

2) If the rationale for the removal of the tents was in fact the fear that so-called non-affiliates were present, but there was a) a report from a key, appropriate university official that this was not the case and b) there were no further efforts made to ascertain if in fact non-affiliates were really present, then it is entirely reasonable to suggest that this rationale was a pretext for other motivations for the removal of the tents — i.e.,  lowering the visibility (suppression) of the protest.

What needs to be made clear is that the protest message the university wanted suppressed was not that students were outraged about tuition hikes. The students’ message went beyond that. The students setting up the tents were saying – in a very publicly effective way – that the university administration was no longer worthy of its authority, that its repeated failure to keep public higher education affordable was tantamount to betrayal of its mission. This kind of message can be quite damaging to a public institution which claims it has a very high-minded mission. So the tents needed to come down.

How important is it that taking down the tents might have been accomplished without the public relations fiasco that did take place? It is certainly not a trivial issue. But is that the one the public should focus upon?

Of course, if your principal concern is the branding of UC Davis in the eyes of potential donors and wealthy families with children seeking a college education, then this may be the only issue that matters. How, in the future, can the administration more competently protect the image of the university?

And not, how well does this university serve the interests of its students?

Richard Seyman
UC Davis Alumnus

It’s no secret that the future of student newspapers is in flux. With new, easier ways for news to get out, fewer and fewer consumers are reliant on their morning paper. Along the same lines, advertisers are finding cheaper, more cost-efficient manners to promote their product than in a daily newspaper.

With decreasing income, student-run newspapers are finding it harder and harder to keep up the same level of production while not sacrificing their editorial and financial independence. Newspapers, like The Aggie, have been forced to cut production by slashing pay and days of publication.

One of the most visibly impacted college papers has been The Daily Californian from UC Berkeley. That paper is currently running a $200,000 budget deficit. In an attempt to cover this gap without sacrificing their financial and editorial independence, managers at The Daily Cal put a student referendum on the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) ballot, asking for a $2-per-semester student fee paid toward the newspaper.

We applaud The Daily Cal for coming up with a plan like this that doesn’t sacrifice its editorial or financial independence while still raising funds from an outside source. The Daily Cal was asking its primary consumer — the UC Berkeley students — to donate $4 a year, roughly the price of one Starbucks latte, so that students would continue to get the top-level journalism and reporting colleges need.

Unfortunately, ASUC President Vishalli Loomba issued an executive order that was upheld by the ASUC Senate, nullifying the ballot referendum, citing a UC policy that student fees shall not be used for the support of a non-university organization. The executive order is being appealed in the ASUC Judicial Council, but there’s a good chance the executive order will be upheld.

The Daily Cal is fully independent from UC Berkeley, as it pays rent for its on-campus facilities and doesn’t receive any funding whatsoever from administration. The application of this UC policy to this referendum, however, is questionable. Calling The Daily Cal a “non-university organization” is a stretch, seeing as the paper has offices on the UC Berkeley campus and has had a long and storied history covering the school for over 140 years.

Regardless, The Daily Cal will now have to think of another way to cover its current budget deficit without sacrificing its editorial and financial independence. And they will, whether it involves exploring new income sources or more cuts.

College newspapers pride themselves on their autonomy and ability to report on their respective administrations and student governments without the fear of being censored. It is our responsibility to provide our consumers — students, faculty and community members — with unbiased news and information about the decision makers on campus. An informed campus is a better campus.

We at The Aggie are not in pristine shape budget-wise but we’re not deep in the red, either. But regardless of what our bottom line says, we will stay financially and editorially independent so we can continue to put out the best paper possible.

The quarter-long project of the Winter Quarter Chicano/a Studies 171: Mural Workshop class was canceled. Set to be painted on the North Wall of the Student Community Center (SCC), this mural was created by the nine-student class led by Assistant Professor Maceo Montoya.

Generalized figures were used to represent a diverse population of 32,000 UC Davis students and the goals of the SCC and its organizations. Created to deal with issues relevant to a variety of affiliations, this class took on a large responsibility. It’s nearly impossible to represent every single individual on our campus in a single mural.

While essentially working with the SCC to produce pre-approved designs, this class also reached out to interview students and staff from organizations at the SCC to converse about experiences and themes pertinent to the development of the mural. While they realized that it’s impossible to embody the spectrum of the UC Davis student body, the students focused on creating universal images meant to reflect a spirit of openness, acceptance and appreciation.

Which is why we, along with the creators of the project, are extremely confused as to why there was backlash and anger expressed at the presentation of the mural design for public comment. Small, specific changes were mutually agreed upon, but major ones were proposed as well.

Requests for better representation of body types, sexualities, hair types and cultures were made to the class months after original discussion took place. Students and staff made accusations that not all races were embodied in this three-panel mural, a set amount of space that doesn’t necessarily allow for a perfect population representation in the first place.

SCC administrators didn’t defend an academic class after previously approving and praising the work before the unveiling. Instead, the students received an e-mail asking them to remove or change three-fourths of the mural, leading the class to cancel the project.

Those not involved with the original discussion and growth with the project should not have dominated the discussion. Focus was skewed and aimed at all the wrong aspects of this contribution to the campus. It’s insulting that carefully thought-out student work is being censored for not accommodating impossible expectations, and the ridiculous request should be retracted.

Disappointing as it is that a UC Davis organization is restricting art and backing out on original support for a student project, instead of asking disheartened students to redo their work, why not give them more space to accommodate all requests? And while it’s understandable that all projects require drafts, discussion and collaboration, pressuring students to change their designs after months of decided and highly contemplated concepts is misleading, frustrating and disconcerting.

On Mar. 29, a general strike, or “Huelga General,” struck Spain with a historic and sobering dose of citywide solidarity. With 75 percent of flights grounded, a stopped public transportation system and police teams mobilizing in the city’s major plazas, Barcelona appeared to be preparing itself for a Zombie outbreak or coup d’etat.

After following 2011’s Occupy Movement, and as a student from Davis in the recent aftermath of the pepper spray incident, I like to think that I’ve seen a lot regarding student protests and strikes, but the Spanish students’ protest of Mar. 29 really opened my eyes to the possibilities and inevitable hypocrisies of large-scale student protests, with the riot-like student assembly that ensued, here in Barcelona.

Students at my host campus, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, blockaded entrances to the school in addition to vandalizing the majority of windows, walls and pretty much anything they could find. A physical assault on a faculty member was also reported in the days proceeding the general strike.

My host university here in Barcelona has a reputation for being “more politically active” than its sister universities in the city. This reputation most likely stems from its highly ranked social science departments, but upon returning to my campus after the protest, labeling the university “politically active” seems like the naive equivalent of labeling a Michael Bay movie as an Academy Award nominee.

Upon leaving the train and walking into my campus’s main entrance, the main student entrance and plaza appeared somewhat like the aftermath of a war zone. Table barricades were half beaten down, walls were covered in blood-red Catalan graffiti, windows were smashed in and the on-campus bank was nearly completely destroyed. It was almost like a horrible, twisted episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” with chairs thrown into windows instead of a freshly landscaped garden.

Students assembled to protest a variety of things, but mainly focused on the alleged “privatization” of their campus, budget cuts and tuition hikes that result from the widespread economic recession, similar to the UC-wide protests in the fall, made infamous by the notorious “pepper spray incident.”

While I can admire the unrivaled passion and all-encompassing solidarity that the Catalan students have gathered together, I can’t help but be slightly disgusted at the hypocrisy of it all — the looting, the vandalizing and destroying of the physical campus (not to mention assaulting a faculty member). This vandalism closes the gates of healthy communication and instead makes the students look like toddlers throwing tantrums, not to mention that the students are destroying what they are fighting for — their university. While insurance might cover some of the damages, the university will ultimately have to pay for the damages caused by the students, and since the university already struggles with a limited budget, they will most likely make the students pay for the damages.

So, despite “good” intentions, the students will inevitably hurt themselves and their campus. We can personally relate to their cause, as students at a supposedly public university with tuition rivaling private universities, but I can’t help but wonder which type of student protest will prove to be more effective: those of peace and strict nonviolence at my home university in California, or those of budding violence, vandalism and passionate anarchism here at my host university in Barcelona?

Gandhi once said that “violent means will give violent freedom,” but with the lack of change and continued decisions that seem to neglect student voices, maybe violence will help raise the volume of the student’s agenda.

BRYAN STEELE
Junior, international relations and anthropology major

On Nov. 21, Linda Katehi stood before up to five thousand students and personally apologized for the events three days earlier. She struggled to hold back tears as she referenced memories from her own past, of the struggle in her home country of Greece during the ‘70s, of the morning when the military junta in power sent tanks to crush dissidents protesting the regime. It was a moving moment, a tribute to her personal past of activism and a gesture of common cause with the Occupy movement.

Yet, Katehi completely reversed course the next evening during a town hall meeting. In the span of 24 hours, she went from a heartfelt apology to flat-out denial of responsibility for the greatest failure in protecting students in university history. “My instructions were for no arrests and no police force. I explicitly directed the chief of police that violence should be avoided at all costs,” she said unequivocally.

With the release of the Reynoso report last week, the facts are finally coming out. In short, they are damning. None are accused more in the report than Katehi, and no narrative is more explicitly rejected than her claim that the police acted outside of her directive. Instead, it was her faulty logic and failure to effectively communicate that would lead to the searing images and injured students from that fateful day.

The night before students were pepper sprayed, Katehi’s leadership team met through conference call to discuss what should be done about the newly erected encampment in the Quad. Initially, the police were to remove the tents at 3 a.m. Friday. However, according to Chief Spicuzza, there were not enough officers to do this. She requested that the operation be pushed back 24 hours to Saturday morning. This was unacceptable to Katehi.

In a show of reasoning so absurd that, in a less violent outcome, would be hilarious, Katehi stated that the tents simply had to be removed before Friday night. Why? She was worried about the use of alcohol and drugs, “and everything.” She believed that there were significant numbers of “non-affiliates” in the encampment and feared that this would result in the Quad becoming “a place for fun.”

I’m having difficulty even writing about this use of logic, because, quite simply, there is no logic! The notion that there were a large number of non-affiliates is completely debunked by the Reynoso report. Moreover, during the late-night conference call, her Assistant Vice Chancellor, Griselda Castro, had argued that this claim was patently wrong. The report stated that Castro spoke about this for 40 minutes. The response was “dead silence.” Yet Katehi was convinced otherwise and did not change course. In doing so, she put the police in a position that was almost guaranteed to end uglily.

Beyond her faulty logic, Katehi also failed to offer needed leadership about what the police could or could not do. Here, her claim that she instructed the police not to use violent force is exposed to be completely false. In fact, the only directive given to the police about use of force was from a conference call earlier in the day when Vice Chancellor Ralph Hexter stated, “We don’t want it to be like Berkeley,” and Katehi merely agreed.

Nowhere does the lack of leadership become more evident than at this moment. Silence is not leadership. Neither is affirming vague notions of policy in the context of an emergency situation. And leadership certainly is not shifting blame onto others — in this case, the police who, Katehi claimed, acted outside of her “explicit” orders. The fact that, after such a stark failure, she could just days later state that she had clearly stated what the police could and could not do, is almost unfathomable.

The chancellor’s heart may be in the right place, but her judgment is not. Her gesture of apology a few days after the incident may have been heartfelt, but her statement that she delineated the boundaries of police action is simply untrue. And while her desire to protect students from non-affiliates might have been commendable, the fact remains that, in the end, her actions led to far worse harm than the dangers any outsiders posed — outsiders that turned out to be a marginal presence at best.

Personally, I think it’s time for accountability. I’ll leave the rest up to you.

Send your thoughts about the Reynoso report, the Banker’s Dozen and events in general to jdnelson@ucdavis.edu.

This wouldn’t be an Aggie column without at least one article on sex, so here it is! Those of you who know me personally probably saw this coming. Those of you who know me very personally have already seen … actually, I’m not going to finish that joke.

Before their first years as teaching assistants (TAs), all graduate students attend an orientation covering the basics of teaching, grading and the myriad forms of plagiarism one can expect (we know what you did last midterm …). Of all the rules and regulations drilled into us (heh, drilled), one stood out in my mind: Under no circumstances is a teaching assistant to date or be in a relationship with a student in their class! Ever!

It makes sense: Having your lover in your class is a conflict of interest, compromising your impartiality (heh, compromising). If the relationship occurred before the class starts, you must either break it up or find someone else to teach for you. If the relationship occurs during the class, however, you’re in hot, sexy water.

Why date a graduate student? We’re intellectuals, above the drinking age and don’t live in dorms, so that’s a start. We also tend to be older, providing the whole cougar/male-equivalent-of-cougar set of benefits. Then there’s basic physical attractiveness. If you think the late teens are great, wait ‘til the mid-twenties! Most of all, the “forbidden fruit” aspect of teacher-student relationships makes them mysterious and alluring: like sex with vampires. Pale, poorly-written vampires.

Lusty lapses do occur. I had a friend in undergrad who hooked up with his intermediate Mandarin TA. You bet I respected that! He managed to get an older and more experienced woman to risk her career just to sleep with him. That’s rolling a twenty for charisma right there! The relationship did not last, making the rest of the year quite awkward, but he got an A.

Ultimately, nothing can stop true love. I’ve met at least two married couples, all professors in their fields, who first met as student and TA! They simply had the wisdom to keep their urges in check until after the class was over. Remember, the prohibition is solely on teacher-student relationships. Otherwise, we’re all adults. Once the class ends, anything goes. Let the games begin! That’s a good metaphor for dating, right?

I’ve talked to some of my peers about this (what else would we talk about? Research? Pfff!), and the responses are expectedly diverse. Some indeed mentioned having a phenomenally sexy student in their class and the frustration of having to wait until the end of the quarter to do anything about it (and could you imagine having to wait a whole semester?). Some got flattering comments about their looks on their TA evaluations. Others seemed quite oblivious to the whole matter. One of my grad student buddies TA-ed a big introductory bio class recently and I met some of his students. This column in mind, I asked if any of their classmates had unrequited crushes on their TA. Turns out, most of them. Male and female. Were his lectures that good?

I’ve gotta admit, I was a bit disappointed that nobody ever came up to me with a completely inappropriate but flattering request while I was a TA. Not that I have that high an opinion of myself (though my lectures are that good); I just thought that kind of behavior was normal, like in the scene in Indiana Jones where a student has “Love You” written on her eyelids and slowly blinks at Harrison Ford. I even planned out my response:

It’s the Friday before the Monday final exam, and a student comes into my office wearing the completely wrong outfit for an entomology practical. I say I’m here to fix the cable … wait, wrong fantasy. I remind her how she needs to do well on this final to pass the class. She leans on my desk and says she’ll do anything to ace this exam. I ask her, “Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Great! Go home and study!”

MATAN SHELOMI’s married … to Science! You can try your luck anyway at mshelomi@ucdavis.edu.