Week 4

Vince Olanda

Week 4

ASA 002

Section 1

912845780

In this week’s reading, “A Tale of Two Campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to Occupy Movements,” written by Alan Markow, it reveals the some of the darker stories of University of California, Davis and University of California, Berkeley. This entails the various retaliations that each respective university made in response to each protest. In an effort to maintain the University of California’s reputation, however, each respective university attempted to cover each scandal with different methods.

As a student from Davis, I’ll focus on University of California, Davis. In response to their respective protests, they pepper sprayed participants, clearly violating personal rights. What’s worse is that they didn’t even admit to their wrongdoing to be accountable, but they instead attempted to pay their way out of it with monetary influence. As a student it makes me angry that the very university we pc ay our expensive tuition to annually would resort to such a harsh punishment to a group of students that were simply expressing their freedom of speech and assembly.

Although the students were in fact causing a lot of trouble for the university, the way the university handled the situation was so wrong. Feelings about that incident are better today, but we can’t let it be forgotten.

This article brought me back to when I was researching more about the incident when I had heard about it from an upperclassman last year. I came across this picture and it made me really feel sad about how the students were treated.

Questions:
How do we better the response to protests when they do come along again? How would the University handle things differently?

References:
UC Davis defends paying to remove pepper-spray references from Internet. (n.d.). Retrieved April 23, 2017, from http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-davis-pepper-spray-internet-20160415-story.html
Markow, A. (2011, December 22). A Tale of Two Campuses: Berkeley and Davis respond to Occupy movements. Retrieved from https://ivn.us/2011/12/19/a-tale-of-two-campuses-berkeley-and-davis-respond-to-occupy-movements/