Democracy Now--UC Sit In Leads to Chancellor's Removal

Andreas Wenzel

Soc. 122: Social Movements

Democracy Now

Sit-In at UC Davis Leads to Chancellor's Removal

                Students at UC Davis succeeded in their attempts to have the chancellor of the school removed, as she was placed on administrative leave in late April following questions surrounding conflicts of interest and her abilities to retain her position as chancellor, as well as a protest earlier in the month calling for her resignation. About one-hundred UC Davis students participated in a thirty-six day sit-in at the school, occupying the chancellor's office on the fifth floor of Mrak Hall.

 The protesters point to a number of reasons to remove Chancellor Linda Katehi. It was reported that Katehi spent $175,000 in the attempt to scrub the internet clean of criticisms that surround the school following a 2011 incident in which twenty-one student protesters were sprayed point blank in the face with pepper spray by campus police for protesting tuition hikes along with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Without admitting any guilt, the school settled a million-dollar lawsuit surrounding the incident, paying each student sprayed twenty-thousand dollars, while the officer who did the spraying received a total of thirty-eight-thousand dollars, almost double what the students each received. She was also found to have obvious conflicts of interest when she was hired onto the board of Wiley & Sons textbooks, since the companies goals are higher prices and profits while students aims are quite the opposite. "It's an institution of education, but it's become an institution of money making and lack of accountability," says Parisa Esfahani, one of the students involved with the protest. "It is crucial to note that it was not Janet Napolitano, or the University of California Office of the President, who led us to this moment of justice, but our un-collapsing spirit and belief in political protest," students said in a statement. Framing Theory was the most obvious of the theories present here. The protest and goals were oriented around the effects school policy decisions have on students, and it was students who led the protest into actualizing their goals. Students, as part of the 99%, demanded and succeeded in taking steps to change the way public schools operate, to favor the interests of students rather than that of corporations.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/29/after_36_day_student_occupation_university