Sunday, April 20, 2014

Differences in Responses

Danny Wong
ASA 002
Blog Post #4

In the article “A tale of Two Campuses,” the author Alan Markow  wrote about how two Universities responded to the Occupy Movement. The two Markow mentioned were the UC Berkeley and UC Davis campuses. Of the two Universities, Berkeley had its share of activist days where people conducted their protest within the campus. In the film Aoki, there were scenes of protest happening inside the campus and eventually taking over a building. Due to the history and media exposure Berkeley have had in the past dealing with protestors, the University learned how to handle current and future protestors without any kind of violence. According to the article Berkeley was able to come to a resolution to the increase in tuition of the middle class, where the University will implement a maximum out of pocket cost of 15% for middle class families. This is a complete 180 degrees compared to the response to what UC Davis had. In the response from UC Davis, there were no mentions of a resolution that was taking place or any kind of positive remark, only negative ones. The response from Davis only mentioned what the students cost the university to repair the campus and seems to place a lot of emphasis on that. I feel like because UC Davis does not have a history of dealing with protestors therefore it did not know how to respond to the occupy movement. Although not having a history does not justify to ignoring the issue and focusing on blaming the students for the cost of protesting what they believe in.


Question: Do you think if Davis had a richer history of protests, the media response in the article would have been a lot better in terms of commenting on a possible resolution instead of focusing cost of repairs?


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