Chancellor Katehi waits backstage to address students at UC Davis
**UPDATE** Swapped in better quality video of Katehi. Here’s the old version. More video to come.
Uploading video from the UC Davis quad now. Estimates of *5,000* students crammed the Davis quad at noon to hear directly from Chancellor Linda Katehi, who ordered police to clear the Occupy Davis camp on Friday, a decision that led to the pepper spray attacks on students. Katehi has ducked criticism, and even remained in a building for almost four hours on Saturday attempting to interaction with students and activists. Today, after an hour of student speeches, Katehi spoke:
KATEHI: I am here to apologize. I feel horrible for what happened on Friday. If you think you don’t want to be students in a university like we had on Friday, I am just telling you, I don’t want to be the chancellor of the university we had on Friday. [someone yells, "then resign!"] Our university has to be better than it is. And it needs all of the community to come together to do that. We need to work together. And I know you may not believe anything I am telling you today, and you don’t have to, it is my responsibility to earn your trust. I only have to say one thing, there is a plaque out there that speaks 17th of November of 1973 and I was there and I dont want to forget that. So, I hope I will have a better opportunity to work with you, to meet you, to get to know you. And there will be many opportunities to do that. [older man behind me yells at Katehi]
Shortly before Kotehi took the stage, Davis faculty member Nathan Brown called for the chancellor to resign. Brown wrote a highly circulated open letter (read it here) to UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi on Friday, shortly after the pepper spray attack on students, calling on her to step down for ordering the police action. He spoke to the thousands of mostly seated students, imploring them to use mass action as a strategy to drive change in the university administration:
View a speech denouncing Katehi by freshman Ian Lee, one of the victims of the police attack on Friday, here.
Here is the exclusive The Second Alarm footage of Katehi being shamed by hundreds of UC Davis students on Saturday.
It is not enough to go after Lt John Pike. They need to go after his superiors, specifically the UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza.
It is her responsibility to make sure that her officers act professionally.
It is her responsibility to weed out people with mental predispositions to violence.
It is her responsibility to develop policies against overagressive police responses.
What was she thinking? This was a student protest and she brought in outside police with full riot gear? She brought in police with rubber bullets? She brought in police with fire extinguisher size, military grade pepper spray? And then she actually says that she was proud of how HER police behaved? She says they were surrounded at the time, when millions of YouTube viewers can see that is certainly not the case?
This is a total lapse in judgement that is truly an prime example of professional malpractice and she needs to go. If I was a student at UC Davis, I would not feel safe with someone like her in charge. If my child was attending college there, I would be demanding her removal.
She may be out of touch with American culture and the constitution. She references the polytechnic uprising, which ended in bloodshed. I think she may not think of this as much as an issue without any deaths.
And of course she isn’t going to resign. She has a cushy job that she was appointed to.
Izan, her point was that she was a student at Athens Polytechnic during the uprising. She’s saying that she knows what it’s like to be part of a student body that was subject to a terrible authoritarian crackdown. That doesn’t excuse her actions, but at least we shouldn’t willfully misinterpret what she says.
Why don’t you admit the obvious? You go after Katehi who is a female, foreign academic, while you let Berkeley’s Chancellor and UC President off the hook, perhaps because they “understand the constitution better”. Perhaps your progressive facade does not allow you to admit the racism openly and publicly exposed in your comments.
And, FYI, the dictatorship in Greece, against which students like Katehi gave their lives to protest, was actively supported by the US, both Democratic and Republican administrations. So, enough is enough with your republic and your constitution that others do not understand. They understand perfectly well; the pepper-spraying was abiding by the brutal standard of enforcing the rule of the establishment by violence that the US administrations from the federal to the city level have applied within the US and abroad.
What does the 17 November 1973 plaque that Katehi referred to commemorate? I’m not finding anything for that date but Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” speech.
She is referring to the Athens Polytechnic Uprising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Polytechnic_uprising
Thanks!
Was Katehi trying to imply that students should be grateful she didn’t order tanks?
I think the idea is that she was at that event, and knows a thing about protesting for the people.
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She should resign, but more than anything the UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza should resign. At least Katehi has shown some remorse, Spicuzza has defended the action without hesitation.
SUE THEM ALL
FILE CIVIL RIGHT COMPLAINTS AGAINST THESE CRIMINALS
SEND HER BACK TO WHERE SHE CAME FROM SHE DOESNT UNDERSTAND WHAT A REPUBLIC AND A CONSTITUTION IS
Jon, this is racist and obnoxious. The United States is a nation of immigrants and Linda Katehi is as much a citizen as you or I.
WEAR GAS MASKS AND HELMETS TO THE NEXT PROTEST
Give her a chance, she may prove to be a useful friend someday. She made a mistake, and apologized for it. That’s more than many are willing to do right now.
I’d buy that if she’d insisted upon the resignation of Annette Spicuzza , who hasn’t even acted at all remorseful about the incident, and apparently believes it was appropriate. But she hasn’t. I say, they should ALL go. And, frankly, the solution to the proposed obscene tuition hike is to take students out of that school. It’s clearly dangerous.
As a former UC Davis Graduate student and law enforcement officer in California (Parole Agent, Correctional Lieutenant, and Supervising Investigator) I am ashamed of the UCD administration and the officers involved in this unfortunate incident. I have also been a member of Administration in the UC system (Santa Cruz) and know what to expect from the University Police in trying to justify their actions and behavior. All I can say is students need to stand together and force the change in the UCD Administration that is obviously necessary under the leadership of the Chancellor. Also, know not all Administrators support this mind set or method of policing.
11/17/73 refers to the military crackdown on student demonstrations in her native Greece? Interestingly, it’s also the day that Nixon said “I am not a crook”…
Please fact check: there definitely was nowhere near 15,000 people on the quad (go check out Boulder’s 4/20 protests if you want a better estimate of what 10,000-15,000 people on a campus looks like). Maybe around 2,000. I was also there, and the figure cited on the UC Davis website seems reasonable.
http://dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.php?id=13761
wow– talk about missing the point and deliberately trying to derail the conversation over a trivial matter. So what if it were 1500 and not 15000? The point is still the same. It wasn’t TWO. And I’m a little tired of hearing arrogant, self-important villains offer kiss-up rhetoric. She should resign, the campus police chief should resign, Lt. Pike should go to JAIL, and all the other officers present should be fired for dereliction of duty. REGARDLESS of the number of students present at the GA.
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