“Breaking the Cycle of Violence” at the University of California
Yesterday Catherine Cole, a Berkeley theater professor, published an essay on the current “cycle of violence” at UC Berkeley that I consider an important and valuable contribution to current discussion.
In it, Cole properly declares that the perpetrators (and she uses that word) of the first acts of violence in connection with the current wave of student activism at Berkeley were not students, but police — “heavily armed police who assaulted unarmed bystanders located in a zone of free speech.” That violence, she notes, was the direct result of the Berkeley administration’s dereliction in “fulfilling its foundational duty of ensuring a safe campus,” a dereliction of duty whose consequences the administration “must accept full responsibility for.”
Instead of doing so, Cole writes, the administration has continued to resort to violence on campus, most recently eighteen days ago when “the Berkeley Administration” — not the UCPD, the administration, who directed the police’s actions — “lit in to unarmed student protestors … whacking them full force with truncheons, cracking