ASUCD elects six new senators

On Nov. 13 at 12 p.m., ASUCD elections chair Daisy He revealed the results for the fall quarter election at the Mee Room in the Memorial Union.

In order of votes received, the six new elected senators are Mikaela Tenner, Georgia Savage, Joshua Dalavai, Parteek Singh, Puneet Dhindsa and Adilla Jamaludin.

Of the newly elected senators, Savage, Singh and Jamaludin are on the recently formed BASED slate while Tenner, Dalavai and Dhindsa ran as independents.

The incoming senators will replace outgoing senators Reem Fatayerji, Alex Lee, Casey Nguyen, Roman Rivilis, Brendan Chang and Andrea Velazquez.

The Aggie Card design that received the most votes was Option 1 (pictured below), which featured a UC Davis mustang in front of a gradient with the university’s colors.

In regards to his new position, Dalavai expressed his excitement to begin pursuing his platforms.

“I’m just really happy that I was able to get elected. I’m very excited,” Dalavai said. “There’s a lot of stuff that I want to get on the ground.”

For Singh, the positive election result is a welcomed relief for his stressful week.

“I didn’t sleep last night because I had a midterm this morning and I couldn’t study. I was extremely stressed,” Singh said. “I kind of feel relieved. Happy, relieved.”

Jamaludin, who initially placed seventh because of a technical difficulty, was in pure shock when she found out she nabbed the final sixth spot on the senate table.

“[I feel] very shocked. I mean, that was a quick turn. I was waiting for the screen to change again,” Jamaludin said. “I expected it to be very, very close so when I saw that I was expecting either way to happen. It’s still pretty crazy.”

The six new senators will be sworn in on the Dec. 3 ASUCD senate meeting. Complete results can be found online.

Written by: Jason Pham – campus@theaggie.org

Regents seek to expand UC enrollment by 10,000 students by 2018

On Nov. 19, the UC Board of Regents will vote on a plan to expand in-state undergraduate enrollment across all nine UC campuses by 10,000 students by the 2018-2019 school year. The plan also seeks to increase non-resident tuition by eight percent with the goal of collecting $68.7 million in new revenue.

The enrollment expansion is in response to a proposed budget from the state, which will allocate $25 million to the UC if the system increases in-state enrollment by 5,000 students by fall 2016.

Additionally, the system is also proposing secondary increases of 2,500 in-state students for both fall 2017 and fall 2018.

If the plan passes, the UC will see a 20 percent increase in enrollment over the next three years. According to the plan, the proposal is an effort to increase access to the system’s educational programs and rebuild academic excellence.

“The University of California is meeting the challenge of educating as many students as it possibly can to meet, and solve, the challenges of the future,” said UC President Janet Napolitano, in a public statement. “We are committed to sustaining increased access to our campuses and the world-class education they offer.”

In regards to the increase in non-resident tuition, the proposed tuition hike is meant to provide the UC with additional revenue to support the incoming students and combat the recent slashes in budget from the state.

The UC regents will convene from Nov. 18 to Nov. 20 at the UC San Francisco Mission Bay Conference Center to discuss and vote on the plan.

A full agenda of the meetings as well as a live-stream of the open sessions can be found online.

Written by: Jason Pham – campus@theaggie.org

Protesters demand university divest from private prisons, campus police disarm military-grade weapons

On Nov. 3, students gathered to partake in the Divest, Disarm: Davis for Black Lives protest. Organized by students under Davis Stands With Ferguson, the protest began at noon outside the Memorial Union. The protesters stopped by the university’s police department before ending outside the ASUCD Coffee House at 1:30 p.m.

The protest centered on two demands. First, it demanded that the university divest from companies which invest in the private prison system. Second, it demanded that university police stop using military-grade weapons.

The protest was primarily composed of student supporters. One of the supporters was Dorian Kariuki, a first-year biomedical engineering major who felt that the university was not legitimately addressing the concerns of students of color.

“The one incident that really sparked me to come [to this protest] is the incident of the post-graduate student that was kicked out of the library,” Kariuki said. “It’s the fact that we’ve had incidents similar […] and it’s been ignored [by the university].”

However, there were a few students present who disagreed about the overall ideas of the protest and its movement, including third-year political science major and transfer student Konnor Ternus. While he did not allow The Aggie to directly quote him, Ternus, who was moved by the recent campus shooting at Umpqua Community College, believes that arming police is necessary in providing a quick response in the case of an emergency.

The protest and all its differing perspectives are part of an ongoing nationwide discussion on mass incarceration and police-community relations. For fourth-year environmental science major Kyla Burke and Ph.D sociology candidate Brandon Buchanan, head organizers of the Divest Disarm protest, the protest is a continuation of the work previously made by Davis Stands with Ferguson.

However, according to Burke, the Divest Disarm protest is unlike previous protests organized by the group because it is specifically geared toward the racial problems that Davis Stands with Ferguson believes systematically exist in Davis and in the UC system.  

“This is a continuation of the Black Lives Matter movement on campus,” Burke said. ”This year we’ve kind of shifted our focus more on campus and how those issues, structures and systems [in the Black Lives Matter movement] affect our campus.”

The university itself has faced a number of allegations decrying excessive police force in the past. Just recently, on Aug. 26, an African American alumnus was forcibly detained by UC Davis police at the 24-hour study room. On Nov. 18, 2011, 10 UC Davis students were pepper sprayed by former university officer Lieutenant John Pike while peacefully protesting in the Quad. The incident gained international attention.

According to Davis Stands with Ferguson, this is all part of the university’s history of using campus police to silence students who disagree with the administration. In a blog post entitled “Davis Stands with Ferguson: Two Steps Towards Dismantling State Violence,” the group explains the role they believe university police have played in greater depth.

“The history of policing is a history of racial terror; one which grows directly out of runaway slave patrols and the black codes,” the post said. “Building on this history, campus police were specifically introduced into the university system in the 1960s and ‘70s to quell student protest.”

The protesters attribute the suppression of student voices and the university’s continued financial support of prisons as perpetrators of a cycle of violence and systematic oppression, both locally and nationwide.

The protesters believe that, in order to stop this cycle, the university must first look at its investments. The UC system as a whole invests in companies which both directly and indirectly support major for-profit businesses, such as the Corrections Corporations of America (CCA) and GEO Group. These are businesses that solely profit through the growth and expansion of private prisons and detention centers.

Only recently did universities begin to divest from such companies. On Jun. 23, 2014, Columbia University became one of the first American universities to divest from funding private prisons. From March 2013 to March 2014, several UC campuses passed similar resolutions through their student government to divest their associations from companies which support the private prison business.

Proponents of the Divest Disarm protest are looking toward ASUCD to pass a similar resolution through senate. Currently, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC Los Angeles, UC Irvine and UC San Diego have all passed senate resolutions divesting their associations from businesses that indirectly or directly support for-profit groups like CCA or the GEO Group.

On top of passing a divestment bill, there have been ongoing discussions concerning how ASUCD can better improve the overall relations between students and officers.

Last year, ASUCD helped organize a series of open community forums where students were able to voice their concerns directly to police.

For ASUCD senate candidate Josh Dalavai, while the discussions are a good starting point, they should not be seen as a final solution towards the issue of police-community relations.

“The forums aren’t the be-all and end-all solution because it’s not on students to have to justify themselves to a department that should serve them regardless,” Dalavai said. ”They are a great step for establishing communication.”

The administration continues to support the work done by the UC Davis Police Department. In a written statement by Andy Fell, a media representative for the police department, he states the ongoing commitment police have to serve the students.

“Chief Carmichael and UC Davis Police are committed to serving all members of the community equally without bias,” Fell said in the statement.

Fell also stressed the existence of the Police Advisory Board (PAB), a committee separate from the police department which seeks to provide more accountability for students regarding police misconduct.

“We have an independent Police Advisory Board to investigate complaints we think [are] unique for a campus police department,” Fell said.

While Buchanan and Burke appreciate the existence of PAB, they see the board as an after-the-fact response. They believe there should be more preventative measures in place to stop police misconduct from occurring. For Buchanan, the weight of this protest still holds regardless of PAB’s existence.

“Instead of waiting for a cop to shoot someone or threaten someone with a weapon, we’re saying that they should be disarmed,” Buchanan said. “So instead of it being after the fact when it gets brought up to the Police [Advisory] Board, we’re saying it should never have to happen in the first place.”