Debate surrounding Professor Joshua Clover’s comments raise questions of academic freedom, constructive discussion

In an opinion article, columnist Nick Irvin of The Aggie called for administrative action against UC Davis English and comparative literature professor Joshua Clover for anti-police comments. California Assemblyman James Gallagher has since started a petition calling for Clover to be fired.

Clover’s comments in question include two tweets from 2014 and an interview with SF Weekly from 2015. In one of the tweets, Clover wrote that he was “thankful that every living cop will one day be dead,” and another that asked, “I mean, it’s easier to shoot cops when their backs are turned, no?” Clover’s Twitter account is now private, preventing certainty of the tweets’ background; however, for reference, the first tweet took place the same week that 12-year-old Tamir E. Rice was fatally shot by police. In the interview, Clover said, “People think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed.” Clover reportedly told Irvin to “direct any further questions to the family of Michael Brown” of the fatal Ferguson shooting.

Irvin framed Clover’s comments in the context of Officer Natalie Corona’s fatal shooting, a connection that moved Gallagher to act when he read the article.

“I was actually at Natalie Corona’s funeral, on the UC Davis campus, and it was a very powerful and heart-wrenching moment there, but all the community was together, right?” Gallagher said. “Then you read about [Clover] within that same campus community saying these incredibly horrendous things — so, as I was reading through [the article], the more righteously angry I was about the whole situation.”

Gallagher represents California’s Third Assembly District, which includes part of Corona’s home county, Colusa County, where her father is a county supervisor. Gallagher is also a UC Davis alumnus, having graduated from the UC Davis School of Law in 2007. He said that in creating the petition, he is acting as a legislator, representative, alumnus and concerned citizen against comments that he believes undermine the university and community.

“Through the petition, I wanted to give other alumni and the greater community a vehicle to express their voice and call for his ouster,” Gallagher said. “It sounds to me like the administration needs some encouragement, so we’re giving it to them.”

Gallagher is circulating the petition through Facebook, where it has so far been shared 688 times. The petition has also been publicized by Talk 650 KSTE radio.

Decisions regarding professor’s employment are ultimately up to UC Board of Regents, with recommendation by the University of California president and following consultation with Chancellor May and the Academic Senate. Before any discipline is imposed, all faculty members are entitled to an Academic Senate panel hearing.

After members of the public like Gallagher expressed their outrage with Clover’s comments and asked why the university has continued to employ Clover, the university released a statement to The Aggie addressing the petition and related questions.

“UC Davis has specific procedures for the review of complaints of faculty misconduct consistent with universitywide policies and bylaws,” the university said in the statement via email.

The university continued by addressing the academic freedom of faculty.

“The public expression of opinions, even those opinions considered controversial or abhorrent, enjoy a high level of protection under the First Amendment, and tenured faculty at the University of California enjoy significant employment protections, particularly around their speech,” the university wrote in the statement. “UC Davis is carefully reviewing this to ensure our response to the matter is consistent with universitywide policy and state and federal constitutional protections.”

Gallagher believes that these protections should not cover Clover’s comments.

“I am a fierce defender of free speech and diversity of thought, but this is very clear,” Gallagher said. “It’s basic First Amendment law that it does not protect against incitements to violence.”

Third-year English and psychology double major Isaac Flores, who took ENL 10C with Clover in the spring of 2018, believes that Clover’s comments are criticisms of policing as a system rather than incitements to violence toward individual police officers.

Flores said he came to this interpretation because during his class, Clover lectured on systems theory and made this distinction between individual participation and societal systems.

“I don’t believe his comments were directed at individual police officers, and I think that there is a lot of nuance that the article that was written on him doesn’t give him credit for,” Flores said. “I think that he has some very nuanced beliefs surrounding policing as an institution in society that were badly mischaracterized.”

The Aggie reached out to Clover for an interview request, to which Clover responded by putting his original comments in the same light.

“On the day that police have as much to fear from literature professors as Black kids do from police, I will definitely have a statement,” Clover said via email. “Until then I have nothing further to add.”

Gallagher, however, believes Clover’s comments should be understood directly.

“His [original] statement is very clear,” Gallagher said. “He said, ‘Police should not be reformed. They should be killed.’ I don’t know how you could read that any other way.”

Gallagher also denied that these comments should fall under the category of academic freedom at all.

“This isn’t about academic freedom, and I think the university even knows that because his statements were not made in his coursework or in anything related to his academic pursuits,” Gallagher said. “It’s about incitements to violence, [and] breaking the ideals of the campus community — and they should fire him.”

Flores thinks that for this very reason — that Clover’s statements were not made in his coursework — Clover should be protected, and he emphasized the fact that he had never heard Clover explicitly talk about his own political beliefs, much less recruit students to commit violence against police.

“I have just a general principle that people should be able to have their own political and personal beliefs separate from their professions,” Flores said. “If there was a conservative professor who had some beliefs that I didn’t agree with, or had some criticisms of ‘social justice warriors’ that I didn’t agree with, I would also call for a similar level of precaution before we just said, ‘Oh fire him because he doesn’t think the way that we do.’”

Both Flores and Gallagher shared concerns about how to have constructive conversations about policing. In Gallagher’s view, Clover is contributing to divisiveness through his violent comments instead of contributing to constructive dialogue.

“We need to get away from this really divisive and hateful rhetoric back and forth,” Gallagher said. “To me, that’s what real free speech is all about, and this professor’s statements just continue a downward spiral of our dialogue. What we really need to do is have constructive discussions about community policing, and protecting our law enforcement and having some reverence and respect for those who are protecting us on a daily basis.”

For Flores, Gallagher’s goal of removing Clover from the university represents unwillingness to engage in discussion about policing.

“I would challenge [Gallagher] to think about how his actions are contributing to a constructive conversation, because if you disagree with somebody or you find something that they say reprehensible, then you’ll want to create a dialogue with that person,” Flores said. “You won’t simply seek to have them sort of institutionally silenced and removed.”

The university was unable to further comment on the status of complaints against Clover or on current actions being taken regarding the issue, having cited confidentiality. In January, however, Provost Ralph J. Hexter released a statement to The Aggie regarding Clover’s statements.

“The UC Davis administration condemns the statement of Professor Clover to which you refer,” Hexter wrote. “It does not reflect our institutional values, and we find it unconscionable that anyone would condone much less appear to advocate murder. A young police officer was killed serving the city of Davis. We mourn her loss and express our gratitude to all who risk their lives protecting us. We support law enforcement, and the UC Davis Police Department and Chief Joe Farrow have been and remain critical partners to our community.”

Written by: Anne Fey — city@theaggie.org

Issues with previous emergency notification channels during manhunt highlight need for better warning system in Davis

Police are urging Davis residents to enroll with YoloAlert, an emergency notification network, after issues with other notification systems came to light following the shooting of Officer Natalie Corona.

On the evening of Jan. 10, a manhunt was underway for the man who shot Corona. With a presumably armed cop-killer at large somewhere in the city, police wanted Davis residents to remain indoors as much as possible. Warnings were posted on Twitter and Facebook, along with an ABC10 video interview with the latest updates available at the time. In the video, Lt. Paul Doroshov of the Davis Police Department advised residents to stay where they were until the killer had been found.

“If you live here, please stay in your house,” Doroshov told residents via ABC10. “Shelter in place. Don’t come out if you don’t need to. If you don’t live here, and you’re thinking of coming to central Davis right now, please don’t. It’s very dynamic — we have a lot [of] law enforcement here, and we still have somebody that’s out there that’s dangerous.”

But only those who had social media accounts had any chance of coming across these posts. Separately, the UC Davis emergency system WarnMe had also sent out an emergency notification about the shooting but failed to notify the majority of students and staff in its network.

Warnings also went out across the YoloAlert network, the city’s emergency notification network on the Everbridge platform. Texts warning residents to stay indoors went out to Davis residents using phones within AT&T and Verizon’s networks, as well those who had already opted into the system.

Doroshov said that the challenge of notifying Davis residents during the manhunt prompted the Davis police to attempt to raise awareness of the YoloAlert network. The problem with Facebook and Twitter, according to Doroshov, is that important messages are unlikely to reach the majority of community members.

“The only problem with social media is that you have to be actively on it and looking for that [information], whereas with this system, we can notify people via text on [their] phone, even if they’re not prepared to hear something’s going on,” Doroshov said.

The Davis Police Department announced the launch of the program in 2014 in a bulletin on the City of Davis website, noting that both unlisted and listed numbers in the AT&T and Verizon networks would be automatically added to the database. It encouraged users with other service providers to register their information with the new network.  In addition to situations like the Corona shooting, YoloAlert also provides important information about road closures, weather warnings and missing person reports.

“Alerts and notifications that residents might receive through this system include time-sensitive messages about flooding, levee failures, severe weather, disaster events, unexpected road closures, missing persons and evacuations of buildings and neighborhoods in specific geographic locations,” the post read.

As the name suggests, the YoloAlert network includes residents from all of Yolo County, not just the city of Davis. Similar systems are set up nearby in Sacramento and Placer counties.   Doroshov said the police want as many Yolo County citizens as possible to register in order to create a more robust emergency alert network.

“We’re trying to significantly raise membership if we can,” Doroshov said. “It’s the system that’s uniformly used throughout our county and multiple other neighboring counties, so it’s one that’s good to have.”

To add contact information with YoloAlert network, visit yolo-alert.org and register for an account. Information about other social media notification systems used by the Davis PD can be found on the City of Davis website.

Written by: Tim Lalonde — city@theaggie.org

53 to 47 percent margin indicates bikeshare preferred over rideshare

A study done by Uber indicated that its bikeshare service JUMP has become more popular than its ridesharing counterpart in the Sacramento area. JUMP bikes are more popular than the ride-service by a 53 to 47 percent margin. Sacramento and the surrounding area are the only location out of 16 studied in which this is the case.

While the study was conducted in October of 2018, the numbers were released this February. Uber acquired the JUMP bikeshare service in April of 2018. Last May, the bikeshare service launched in Davis, with 60 bikes currently sprinkled throughout both the city and the UC campus. By the end of last summer, there were around 900 bikes in the Sacramento area. Despite the high number of bikes, not even Uber predicted that the bikeshare service would soon reach this level of popularity.

“We were honestly surprised,” said Alex Hagelin, head of Uber’s JUMP bike program in Sacramento to the The Sacramento Bee. “Uber has been around for years, and in just five months, our bikes were generating more trips. This is the first time we have seen this in any of our cities to date.”

According to Ramon Zavala, the transportation demand manager for UC Davis Transportation Services, there aren’t enough JUMP bikes at UC Davis or the city of Davis to keep up with the demand in Davis.

“We currently don’t have enough JUMP bikes in Davis [and] at UC Davis to meet all the demand and demand will certainly increase as more people feel like they can rely on finding a JUMP bike nearby when one is needed,” Zavala said via email.

Zavala also acknowledged, however, that since he’s not a student, his needs for a JUMP bike might not reflect everyone else’s needs.

“Demand is relative and hard to measure,” Zavala said. “When I take Unitrans in to campus instead of riding my bike, I rely on JUMP to get around campus. 50 percent of the time, I can find a JUMP bike near me or along my errand route that doesn’t require me to go out of my way. But my daily travel needs don’t reflect a student’s needs or every other employee’s needs.”

According to Zavala, there are a few reasons why one would use a JUMP bike over ordering an Uber. For trips of smaller distances or errands, a JUMP bike would be more efficient than an Uber.

“If you’re traveling less than 3 miles […] a JUMP bike just makes sense,” Zavala said. “One can easily go 3 miles in 15 minutes on a JUMP bike, use only a quarter of one’s daily allotted JUMP time, and not break a sweat (a benefit of the electric pedal assist system). Those three miles will cost you $7-$15 (depending on congestion) via a ride-hailing system.”

A JUMP bike costs $2 for the first 30 minutes and $0.07 for every 15 minutes thereafter. This cheaper price might be another reason why students would choose a JUMP bike rather than a rideshare service.

“If I miss the bus, and if I need to get to a place quickly on time, I think the JUMP bike is the best way to go, just because it’s cheaper than Uber,” said Yash Dani, a second-year computer science major at UC Davis. “If you need to go somewhere farther — like from my apartment to maybe downtown or somewhere that has some distance with no easy bus access — then JUMP bikes would be what I would use.”

Additionally, Dani said that the bike culture of Davis adds to the convenience of using JUMP bikes.

“Biking is definitely the fastest way around Davis, except the winter,” Dani said. “ [The bikes] work really well specifically for Davis since Davis is already known as a bike school. It’s well established for biking, there’s a lot of bike paths. You can get place to place through bike in a relatively safe manner.”

According to Zavala, the convenience of using a JUMP bike might make it easier for newcomers to the bike scene.

“Almost every bicyclist at UC Davis has purchased a new or used bike and most of those bicyclists had no clue what they were doing the first time.” Zavala said. “[…] You don’t have to worry about that with a JUMP bike. You sign up, pay your $30, adjust the seat height, wear a helmet, and ride. When you’re done, you lock it to a bike rack and walk away.”

Written by: Hannan Waliullah — city@theaggie.org

Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine offers free tuition for first five classes

Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, which will begin accepting applications in June 2019, will waive tuition for its first five classes of medical students.

Mark Schuster, the founding dean and CEO of the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, elaborated on how the idea came to be for Kaiser Permanente, a hospital chain, to start a medical school in Pasadena.

“This idea for Kaiser Permanente to start a medical school began well before I arrived,” Schuster said via email. “Kaiser Permanente commits itself to supporting the health of its members and communities and to advancing health and well-being in general. Establishing a medical school is a natural extension of those efforts. Many people visit Kaiser Permanente to learn about integrated care, team-based care, person-centered care, to name a few. The Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine will be able to teach medical students from the beginning about such approaches to medicine.”

Alex Ho, a fourth-year biological sciences major, plans to apply to medical school in 2021 and will be considering Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine.

“I think it’s a great opportunity because it’s an already established healthcare system and they have built up a lot of opportunities for residency and shadowing for medical education,” Ho said.

Fourth-year microbiology major Daphne Tran, also plans to apply to medical school. Tran hopes that Kaiser Permanente’s newly established school will reach out to students from different backgrounds who wish to become doctors.

“I hope that they [Kaiser Permanente] will establish more of a community from a lot of different backgrounds because I know that the pre-med community is not only diverse in age but with race, ethnicity and schools,” Tran said. “I feel like a lot of people who deserve to go to medical school are slotted out, and I feel that Kaiser Permanente is such a new school that they would recognize the needs of the pre-med community.”

Schuster noted that while medical schools share many similarities, Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine has its unique qualities.

“While every medical school is distinct, with its own particular emphases, we all share similar educational goals: to train students to serve patients and communities and advance medicine,” Schuster said. “That said, we are distinct in that we have the opportunity to build our school from the ground up. And we’ve been very lucky in that other medical schools have been incredibly supportive in providing valuable advice as we develop our school.”

Since Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine will be offering free tuition for the first five classes, Tran recognized the additional opportunity undergraduate students now have to pursue medicine.

“I think that Kaiser has recognized this problem of people wanting to go to medical school and not being able to afford it,” Tran said. “Undergraduates put themselves through all this hard work, and [with] its costs scaring them off and with this growing need in the pre-med community, Kaiser has recognized this, and I think that is pretty good that they would do something like that.”

Schuster emphasized that students will have less of a burden to choose medicine as a potential choice for their futures if they wish to pursue the career.

“It is our hope that by providing full tuition and insurance scholarships for the first five classes, our students will be free to pursue their passions in selecting their career path without the high levels of debt that so many medical school graduates have,” Schuster said. “We have seen many students change their career goals as they face the prospect of paying back hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. If our students want to go into primary care or another field that does not pay as highly as some fields in medicine—or if they want to work in an underserved area where their incomes might be lower—we want them to be able to pursue their dreams and not be deterred by substantial student loan debt.”

Kaiser Permanente’s program will be centered on both clinical training and scholarship, allowing students to pursue their interests whether it be through laboratory experiments or clinical research.

“We will integrate basic science, clinical science, and health systems science into our small-group, case-based curriculum,” Schuster said. “The integration of the sciences into patient cases means that students will learn to apply their biomedical knowledge while considering the broader context of patients’ lives and the systems in which care is delivered.”

Through a specialized curriculum, Schuster hopes that students will be able to work with a specific focus on collaboration.

“And the small-group format means that instead of going to lectures, students will learn in a collaborative manner, mirroring the team-based clinical care settings where they will be training,” Schuster said. “Students will spend a half-day per week with a specific physician and care team in primary care during their first two years, with the addition of half days in each of pediatrics, obstetrics-gynecology, psychiatry, and surgery during their second year. We are paying particular attention to student wellness, and to equity and inclusion. We will help our students become lifelong learners so that they can continue to learn and adapt to new information and technologies years after they’ve completed medical school.”

Written by: Stella Tran — city@theaggie.org