#katehi

I find it unethical and unconscionable for an institution of higher learning to frivolously waste tuition money like this; paid out to a private firm no less! This is just another way universities funnel public funds straight into the pockets of the pockets of the already preposterously rich.

I find it equally disgraceful for a center of higher learning to attempt to limit public discourse.

175000$ to private consultants to attempt to scrub the internet of references to the UC Davis pepper-spray incident, money that could have gone to broadening horizons

Whose idea was this? Where the consultants nice and cozy with the chancelsor or something, or were they just really really convincing. Did the students have a say? The faculty or staff?

In the wake of campus police pepper spraying seated students on November 18, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi has stated, in various forums, to faculty and students, that she tried to meet with the students who were sprayed but was rebuffed. This came as a surprise to Jerika Heinze, who says she has been contacting the Chancellor's office nearly every day asking for a meeting, and it is the Chancellor who has rejected her entreaties, not the other way around.

Jerika is a compelling young woman. She is an honors student in Cultural Anthropology. She got straight A's this fall even while sleeping in a tent on the quad, participating in demonstrations, and dealing with the effects of pepper spray. She has no parental support and became a ward of the state in her late teens. Very, very few such people make it to college. Even fewer graduate. Almost none end up straight A honors students. Speaking with her, one gets the clear impression that she has made it as far as she has by developing a skill set that includes an uncanny knack for being simultaneously respectful of, yet never intimidated by, her elders.

Jerika was not one of the students who got a triple dose of pepper spray right in the face, but she was close enough to feel its effects. At the time she was being treated for a lung infection by the campus clinic, where she had been given an inhaler and a slew of medications. The pepper spray exacerbated her condition. She did some research and learned that pre-existing respiratory conditions like hers are a frequent cause of pepper spray fatalities. She decided to do what she has done all her life in such situations: seek a face to face dialog with the person in charge. So on November 23 she sent an email to Chancellor Katehi:

I know you do not know me personally... I would like to come talk to you one on one without media.. I will offer you the utmost respect and hope to truly understand what you are going to do to make this right..

When she received no reply she began calling the Chancellor's office. Over and over. Nearly every day. Finally, Jerika reports that the receptionist told her, "I have passed along all of your messages, there is really nothing more I can do."

So when Jerika heard that the Chancellor was set to testify at a hearing a the state Capitol on December 14, she headed off for Sacramento and confronted the Chancellor in the corridor as she was leaving the hearing. This is where the story veers into the bizarre.

"I've been contacting you every single day, calling your office, sending you emails, and your assistants said they passed the messages along," Jerika told the Chancellor. "You've never responded to me."

"Well, I've asked them to set an appointment with you," Katehi replied.

"No, you haven't," Heinze insisted. "You absolutely have not."

A man in the Chancellor's entourage quickly buttonholed Jerika off to the side and told her that her meeting with the Chancellor had been set for the following Monday. "How could you possibly know that?" Jerika replied. "You don't even know my name."

When the news of the encounter appeared later that day on the web page of the Sacramento newspaper, Jerika got another lesson in the price of speaking truth to power. The comments section below the article quickly filled with truly ugly, vicious remarks about her and threats against her. The editors disabled the comment feature "due to abusive behavior by some commenters." Soon after, Jerika's personal email account began filling up with threats and derogatory statements.

With the story of the hallway confrontation all over the local news, Jerika received a sudden slew of phone calls and emails from people around the Chancellor asking for an immediate meeting, and they insisting Jerika had only contacted the Chancellor's office twice. When Jerika replied that she had documentation of all her calls, she received an email from Karl M. Engelbach, the Chancellor's Chieff of Staff, stating that he would:

be conducting a review with staff in the Chancellor and the Provost's Offices to determine what transpired with the other calls you placed to our offices. To assist me in that review, I would welcome any additional information you may have about the dates and times of your calls or any other information that you believe will assist in this review. 

Thus to the five investigations of the pepper spray incident already underway, a sixth investigation was launched to determine what happens to communications from students once they arrive at the Chancellor's office. It is my understanding that five people work in this office. Hopefully it will not require too much tax payer money to get to the bottom of this.

Jerika immediately helped them out with the following email:

The  phone records on my own phone and on the phone I use at home (my roommate's cell) contain all of the days I called. In December alone I called:             Dec 2 @ 10:08             Dec 5 @ 11:30             Dec 6@ 4:17             Dec 7 @  2:42             Dec 7 @ 3:40             Dec 9 @ 8:54             Dec 12 @ 12:47           Dec 14 @ 9:09  <---- that is when Allison recognized me from my many calls, said there was nothing more she could do for me and that she has passed the messages along and that she didn't know why no one had called me back.

Yesterday, Jerika finally got her meeting with the Chancellor, including the Chancellor, Vice Chancellor Fred Wood, Jerika, and myself (attending at Jerika's request). The administrators listened respectfully as Jerika explained what it was like to have no family, work two jobs, get straight A's, and worry that rising tuition costs would force her to drop out and spend years paying back loans on a degree she never received. She asked questions about university funding which the administrators did their best to answer.

The Chancellor wondered exactly what number in the vast university Jerika had been calling and why the messages had not made their way to her. Jerika replied that the number was listed as that of the Chancellor's office on the Chancellor's web page,. She said she spoken over and over with a woman named Allison. The Chancellor claimed that no Allison worked in her office.

But when the discussion turned to the events of November 18, the Chancellor noticeably tensed. In her respectful yet determined manner, Jerika started down a list of prepared questions. Had the Chancellor seen the video of police violence on the Berkeley campus the week before the events at Davis? Had the Chancellor known the police would be armed with rifles? What would the Chancellor have done if Jerika or another students had been killed? These were difficult questions for someone at the vortex of five investigations, and Jerika was unrelenting. Finally the Chancellor stood and announced, "This has become an interrogation. This meeting is over."

Jerika was offered that she could come back to continue the meeting some other time, but the Chancellor refused to commit to a day and time, and Jerika left unconvinced.

Moments later, a genuinely befuddled Jerika found herself outside on the sidewalk, trying to fathom how an undergraduate living on $100 a month after making tuition and rent had seemingly intimidated the Chancellor of a major university with a base pay of $400,000.

The next morning I called the number that appears so often in the 'previous calls' list on Jerika's cellphone. A woman named Allison answered, "Chancellor's office..."

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ostertag/uc-davis-pepper-spray_b_1161409.html

Lt. Pike blasted seated students with his military-industrial-strength pepper spray cannon as I looked on from a truckstop near Las Vegas. Hundreds or thousands of miles from the action once again, I flipped through my Tweet stream feeling disgusted but useless.

The next day in Denver I read Nathan Brown's letter to his boss, Chancellor Linda Katehi. In bold and simple terms, with a cadence that made my little arm hairs stand at attention, Professor Brown laid it all on the line. He said, to paraphrase, "You have committed an unforgivable breach and you must leave." Nothing I had seen, read, or heard since first becoming aware of Occupy Wall Street spoke to me like Nathan Brown's one demand.

By the time I reached Amarillo, everybody was airing the video. I watched it on an entertainment 'news' show at a diner. This was the one, I thought. Never mind that the Cal beat down - the same incident that prompted UC Davis students to occupy - took a backseat to the Penn State mini-riot. Police brutality was finally being served up for the masses. Katehi would be fired in short order and we would put the ruling class on notice: Sic your goons on us and we will remove you from power!

The next week was interesting. I watched Katehi flounder on my smart phone, one Tweet at a time. First she wanted to move on. Then she passed the buck. Her assistant made her do it. The police disobeyed her. The students needed saving from themselves. Yadda yadda yadda. It didn't matter what she said because I knew she'd soon be gone. The Occupy movement staked out a space for mass dissent and was poised to defend that space in real terms. From here on out it would be our way or the highway.

I was somewhere between Texas and Georgia as important people launched definitive investigations, between Chicago and Cheyenne as those investigations were exposed for frauds, and now, in Boise via Portland, I see that investigators are being paid handsomely (a reported $300 per hour) for their trouble. This cuts to the heart of the problem. The UC system is infested with highly paid executives who are completely unresponsive to their clients. I'm in the camp that thinks the entire US is infested with their parasitic ilk. I'm encamped with the people who don't think we should pay our punishers these premiums. This includes the bloated police forces with their armories that might include tanks and will soon enough deploy drones for hunting readers of verboten tomes. This especially includes our highly esteemed (i.e., compensated) leaders who "represent" us by sending us increasingly burdensome bills.

We are our executives' hostages. They do whatever they want and hand us the tab.

Nathan Brown's demand is the Davis Strategy: target the perpetrators and show them, cause-and-effect-wise, that we will remove them for their trespasses. I guess I understand why some feel the investigations must take their course. At what expense, though? Plenty of evidence suggests that the investigators have conflicting ties to UC administration. How long will their investigations last? The UC Davis community cannot hang around for months while the administration rope-a-dopes them into a drowsy stupor. There is an ever-diminishing window of opportunity. How much longer before petitions and open letters go rancid and begin to reek of despair?

I'm not saying that everybody in the Occupy movement should focus their energy on UC Davis. I am saying that everybody who wants to lend their energy to this effort should be invited to do so immediately. I would like to see a worldwide invitation for people to focus their creative energy on generating ideas for removing Katehi, Spicuzza, and Pike. This energy must be overwhelming, like a laser beam or a gamma knife, to make good on the Davis Strategy.

Really cool things are already happening. I'm geeked about the conversion of Dutton Hall to the Paulo Freire Open University. This and the march on the UC Regents have inspired me. The letters I have read from UC Davis faculty and the idea that 110,000 people have added their names to a petition that demands Katehi step down give me hope. But I fear that she won't step down unless we amplify the message by a few orders of magnitude. I also fear that I will not be invited to contribute. On three separate occasions, I have Tweeted a request for ideas to get involved. Not one Tweep made a peep.

I'm ready to be used. Deploy me already! If nobody in the #OccupyUCDavis or #OccupyDavis communities can think of a way, then the request must be bounced off the globe. Who in the world can suggest ways for me and anybody else who is ready to help pry Katehi from her throne?