UC Santa Cruz students demand an immediate end to the UC’s unconstitutional and coercive judicial proceedings directed at those who were present at or involved in the occupation of Kerr Hall during a three day political uproar against UC Regents’ 32% tuition hike in November 2009.
UC Santa Cruz students demand an immediate end to the UC’s unconstitutional and coercive judicial proceedings directed at those who were present at or involved in the occupation of Kerr Hall during a three day political uproar against UC Regents’ 32% tuition hike in November 2009. Since the three-day occupation at which hundreds of students were present, along with faculty and family observers, UC admins have conducted a cynical political campaign against 36 students to silence them, charge them “restitution” fees in the amount of $34,000, and shut them out of a campus-wide dialogue concerning debilitating cuts to public education.
Both state of California and UC admins greatly fear a growing and powerful student movement that threatens their capacity to privatize higher education and avoid addressing the failure of priorities at the UC, such as spending millions on redundant administrative jobs while laying off teachers. At stake in the student politics this year are the shared principles that guide the university’s commitment to an accessible and outstanding education. UC executives’ breathless disregard for student involvement in helping to define these principles is exposed in their use of a university “Handbook” to react to peaceful collective student behavior of a political nature: the “Handbook” may provide a workable mechanism for adjudicating non-political, individual violations that disturb the day-to-day functioning of the university, but it is wholly inadequate to comprehend the nature, intent, and ultimate justification for collective political actions to defend public education, sometimes even against leaders who seem to have abandoned their responsibility to do so. Instead of having the political courage to grant students the space necessary to disrupt what cannot be denied is a much larger, social ill in California concerning the state’s failure to support public education, Chancellor Blumenthal, EVC Kliger, and Vice Chancellor Felicia McGinty have shrunk to the status of institutional bureaucrats more concerned with law and order by (1) threatening students with police intimidation and force during the Kerr Hall occupation, (2) executing since then a shamefully uncivil judicial campaign that has a chilling effect on student dissent.
Furthermore, the UC has had the gall to pass off their judicial process as fair while barely attempting to conceal the fact that it casually dismisses basic concepts of constitutionality, including due process, protection against self-incrimination, free speech and assembly. Indeed, in a letter dated April 14 addressed to Chancellor Blumenthal, over 100 UCSC faculty demanded that “no students be separated from their student status or be charged with restitution for participation in the events in and around Kerr Hall, or for other political actions past and future…We call for a suspension of the student disciplinary procedure in these and future cases involving political dissent until the problems have been addressed.” A full rebuttal of both the University’s list of damages at Kerr Hall and its kangaroo court follows below.
Mass rally: 12:00 p.m., April 16, UCSC Quarry Plaza
A rebuttal of the University’s tactics and allegations
On November 19th-22nd, 2009, hundreds of UCSC students, faculty, workers, and other concerned affiliates, participated in an occupation of Kerr Hall, the main UCSC administration building, in protest of the UC Regent’s decision to