Joseph Wu

Section A01

Reflection 4

A Tale of Two Campuses

            I was still in high school when I heard about the students being pepper sprayed during the Occupy movement. The first reaction I had was: What’s UC Davis? At that time college applications were the last thing on my mind, and the colleges I knew about were the ones in Southern California, Berkeley, and Stanford.  After thinking that, I didn’t give the incident another thought until I saw internet memes and Facebook posts about it everywhere, so I started doing some research about it. Until I read “A Tale of Two Campuses” I was unaware that Berkeley had their own movement and that their chancellor had a rational response to the situation. It’s really disappointing to see such polar reactions to these protests from the two campuses.

             Even now we've seen how student protesters are threatened, such as “if you strike you will not work in the program again.” I filmed and took pictures of the strike for AggieTv, and while I was there, I was scared that police brutality would be an issue again, so I was wearing concealed body armor underneath my shirt.

            We shouldn’t have to be scared of being silenced forcefully in a country where the right to free speech is guaranteed to us by the constitution. On top of that, the university should be listening to the opinions of the students. We are the ones paying them a huge amount of money every year. If so, why wouldn't they listen?