The video is here, and a letter to the Chancellor from a UC Davis faculty member is here. (The first paragraph of the letter is dispensable, but the rest is quite sound.) I only hope that the parents of some of the students terrorized needlessly by the police are lawyers or have access to lawyers.
(Thanks to the many different readers who sent me these links.)
UPDATE: UC Davis philosophers have sent the following apt letter to the Chancellor:
Dear Chancellor Katehi,
We are saddened and disappointed by the way that the University decided to handle the removal of the students' encampment on the Quad on Friday afternoon.
Until now we used to take pride in the way UC Davis was able to handle the students' protesting against the tuition hikes in what seemed to us an enlightened and non-confrontational manner, especially compared to other occurrences at Berkeley and elsewhere.
We do not question the University's right to remove the students' encampment (although there are reasons to question the wisdom of such a move). But we do object to the way UCPD decided to resort to what are unquestionably violent methods in order to deal with a peaceful, non-violent protest. Pepper-spraying students who were sitting on the ground and posed no direct or indirect threat to the police officers strikes us as a vastly overblown reaction.
Surely skilled and highly trained police officers could have come up with a better way to remove the students' encampment in the face of non-violent, passive student opposition?
It seems to us that the general principle the University should abide by is that violence is never an appropriate response to peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience. We hope you will agree with this assessment, and call on you as the highest officer of the University to see to it that such principle informs the actions of University officials at all times.
Respectfully,
Aldo Antonelli, Lesley Byrns, David Copp, Gerald Dworkin, Joel Friedman, Cody Gilmore, James Griesemer, Elaine Landry, Robert May, Roberta Millstein, Bernard Molyneux, Marina Oshana, Adam Sennet, Jan Szaif, Paul Teller, Michael Wedin
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