UC Irvine Must Change for the Better
The Chancellor's Disqualifying Errors Have Crossed a New Threshold of Unacceptability
I am very disappointed in our University leadership’s actions yesterday. There was no justifiable reason presented to arrest peaceful protesters and violently dismantle their encampment. Despite the Chancellor's claim that he followed the policies of the Robinson-Edley Report, which require “[exhausting] all possible alternatives before resorting to police intervention,” all possible alternatives were not exhausted.
Reports from local news agencies stated that the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall (PSLH) was empty before the police moved into the Plaza. Ensuring PSLH was secure and usable for instruction could have been handled by the numerous security personnel present at UCI, potentially with police support if they met resistance. Instead, the response was disproportionate and unjust.
The Chancellor should have been removed earlier for several reasons: naming the School of Medicine after homeopaths in 2017, claiming “truth doesn't exist” at the April 25, 2018, forum with former School of Law Dean Richardson, appearing on a panel with Deepak Chopra on January 9, 2020, discussing “the case against reality,” and confessing ignorance in February of this year of the decades-long severe under-staffing for undergraduate instruction in Physical Sciences at a forum with the School of Physical Sciences faculty. Chancellor Gillman has to go now. He has made too many spectacular mistakes. The latest, using violent force on peaceful protestors, is beyond unacceptable.
Update with respect to the Chancellor and Provost response on May 24 to Faculty Senate Questions:
The response to Faculty Senate questions by Chancellor Howard Gillman and Provost Hal Stern further demonstrates that campus and police actions were overwhelmingly disproportionate and improper. Their response states that, near the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall, one individual physically prevented the movement of an officer, and another individual “charged at” an officer with a pallet (pages 12-13 in numbering and pages 19-20 in the response pdf file). These actions, in the view of campus leadership, justified the mutual aid call and declaration of an unlawful assembly of the entire encampment, resulting in hundreds of police assembling, using batons on protestors, tackling them, and arresting them. The report clearly states that it’s only in these “subsequent confrontations” when police batonned and tackled protesters to be when officers were injured.
The use of an overwhelmingly disproportionate, violent response by police on hundreds of peaceful protesters due to the stated actions of two individuals is completely inappropriate and unacceptable. The fact that our campus leadership feels that this explanation is appropriate to justify the overwhelmingly disproportionate and violent police action indicates that both the Chancellor and Provost are unfit to serve our campus population.
In addition, the report by the Chancellor and Provost implies that the nature of the demands of the protestors justified the police response. I can think of nothing more egregious of an implication in a free and democratic society.