Photo by Alex Chis

Photograph by Alex Chis

The proclamation yesterday by University of California President Mark Yudof that he wants to devise "a system-wide response" to the Occupy Wall Street protests underscores their potential to take root on college campuses, and the challenges they would present to college administrators if they spread across the state.

Yudof's response has implications for how similar protests will be handled at California'south other major academy systems, the 22-campus California Country Academy system and the 112-campus community higher organisation.

The larger upshot is that all three of California's public college education systems present fertile ground for more protests along the lines of those that have drawn national attending at UC Berkeley and UC Davis.

The protests are likely to be driven past a potent combination of anger at fee increases that many students experience directly, the heavy burden of student loans many accept accumulated, along with the dour employment mural they face when they graduate.

In many instances, students are probable to receive a adept bargain of support from kinesthesia members who themselves have experienced the impact of budget cuts and, in the case of those with tenure, tin speak out on behalf of educatee grievances without fear of losing their jobs.

Adding to the mix is the Legislative Analyst'due south Office report issued last calendar week outlining the state's mounting budget deficit, which makes it highly likely there will be even more reductions in the budgets of all three systems of higher education in the months alee.

Those looming cutbacks have the potential to farther fuel campus anger at precisely the time that the Occupy Wall Street motility is spreading to locations across the state and country.

Even at this early stage, college campuses have become key flashpoints of protest.

While the use of pepper spray at point-blank range at UC Davis has drawn the most attention—and condemnation—pepper spray was likewise used in a protest at the CSU Board of Trustees meeting in Long Embankment concluding calendar week. Demonstrators, who were far more than aggressive than those at Davis, were protesting fee hikes and shattered a glass door leading to the meeting room.

A logistical problem is that most universities and college campuses cannot be sealed off, and keeping out roving Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and their portable tents will be especially challenging.

Traditionally, California's community colleges have been the sites of the least amount of activism, because many students attend part-fourth dimension, are older, are working, and have families they must pay attending to. But this time the response may be more fervent because of the frustrations they experience in response to cancelled or oversubscribed classes, along with college fees.

Yudof's strong argument with its non and so subconscious unhappiness with how protests have been handled on some UC campuses reflects the tensions between the ideal of assuasive "gratuitous voice communication" in the context of peaceful protest and the real prospect of semi-permanent encampments emerging on their campuses.

Whether he and other university leaders will exist able to accomplish a residual between the two will be a matter of intense interest at not only UC campuses, but also at CSU campuses and the community colleges too.

In his statement, Yudof went out of his mode to say his intention was not to "micromanage" campus police forces or campus chancellors. "They are the leaders of our campuses and have my full trust and confidence," he said.

At the same time, he said, the "University of California…is a single academy with 10 campuses, and the incidents in recent days cry out for a system-wide response…I intend to do everything in my power as president of this university to protect the rights of our students, faculty, and staff to engage in non-violent protestation."

Developing a unified response to campus protests will exist far more challenging at CSU, with almost two dozen campuses, and the community colleges, with over one hundred. That volition exist specially the case at community colleges considering each has its ain locally elected board of trustees, in improver to a statewide Board of Governors. In dissimilarity, UC and CSU each has a single governing board appointed by the governor.

These events are playing out against the historical properties of the events of 1964 of which Yudof is no dubiety well aware. I of Yudof'south predecessors, and so UC President Clark Kerr, barred on-campus recruiting and solicitation of funds for off-campus groups on the Berkeley campus. These actions triggered the Free Voice communication Move, which in turn helped conductor in the transformative student protestation movement of the 1960s. The events that roiled the Berkeley campus for years somewhen led to Kerr's firing in 1967 past the Lath of Regents, at the urging of so-governor Ronald Reagan.

Yudof's affirmation yesterday of "free speech" every bit being in the "DNA of the university" was a direct reference to the legacy of those turbulent days.

What sets this era of protest apart is that those in charge of higher education in California are themselves violent critics of the budget cuts which students are at present protesting. Kerr, the architect of the three tiered public college pedagogy system in California, presided over a menses of massive investment and growth in higher education. By dissimilarity, today's university leaders are trying to manage a precipitous disinvestment in public education at all levels in the state.

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