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AAUP Condemns Actions of Police at California Campuses

November 21, 2011, 11:21 am

The national council of the American Association of University Professors has issued a statement condemning the violent tactics that the police recently used in dealing with demonstrations on the University of California’s Berkeley and Davis campuses. The AAUP statement expresses solidarity with those “unjustly attacked and arrested” on Friday at Davis, where police doused students with pepper spray, and at Berkeley, where the police on November 9 jabbed students with batons and threw a faculty member to the ground by her hair.  The statement argues, “All universities must make space for political dissent,” and students and faculty members must be free “to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience without fear of bodily harm arising from a violent administration response.” Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California system, on Sunday announced plans to respond to the incidents by undertaking a systemwide policy review and meeting campus chancellors to discuss “how to ensure proportional law-enforcement response to nonviolent protest.”

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  • Guest

    This is ridiculous. It makes no sense to say that students and faculty members must be free to “engage in nonviolent civil disobedience” without any fear of hurtful repercussions for breaking the law. If we followed this logic to its conclusion, then protesters would run the whole world because they would have the freedom to shut down anything until they got their demands. That’s actually neither civil nor nonviolent.

  • yellow1

    No, ridiculous is your oversimplification of things happening close enough for you to know better. You have convictions you like to express in postings online and here, so how do you not understand that others would make their expressions public (in actual public places)? The activities where the demonstrations occurred continued too, FYI, just as Wall Street has continued trading for weeks now while being occupied. These protests from UC Davis actually appear to be the embodiment of civil and nonviolent (except for some of the police).

  • jffoster

    “Space for political dissent”, Yes indeed.  But when the “dissenters” occupy space needed for the normal operations of the institutions so as to impede those operations, including people getting to work and students getting to class, absolutely not.

  • jimholstunnotanalias

    Gee, Professor R.O.P. Lopez, what a hateful and sloppy thing to say. The motion doesn’t call for the freedom to engage in civil disobedience “without any fear of hurtful repercussions for breaking the law.” It calls for freedom to engage in civil disobedience “without fear of bodily harm arising from a violent administration response.” Maybe you should read your own blog (on “critical reading skills”) more frequently?

    Jim Holstun
    SUNY Buffalo

  • hmcmorrow

    Sometimes the rules are made with the intent of shutting down dissent. It is up to us as a supposedly free society to call it out without fear of bodily harm.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Lawrence-Rockwood/100000429832675 Lawrence Rockwood

    I would take big money on the AAUP not honoring the UC Occupy strike. What picket line have they ever honored other than their own?  This is just another chance for the rapacious exploiters of adjuncts to play radical (on paper). AAUP, the ACADEMIC 1%.

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