Healing & Improved Response Resolution

This is the only resolution that directly addresses the plight of our students and lays the groundwork for open dialogue across differences:

• It calls upon the Chancellor to drop or minimize all disciplinary actions and criminal charges against the protestors, and to engage in discussions with them. This is simple - if you want to reduce the heat, lower your fists and start talking. These young students were subjected to a very traumatic experience: armed police, guns pointing at them, pepper-spray, handcuffs, holding cells. Initially, they were ejected from student housing and banned from campus. They could still be expelled, prevented from graduating, and even sentenced to years in prison. While unlikely, this latter possibility is extremely stressful. We hope that regardless of your position on the encampment, you will agree that they have already suffered enough. Leniency and dialog would be a strong first step in restoring the Chancellor’s connection with the students which we believe he cherishes. 

• This resolution also proposes an Improved Response to Future Civil Disobedience. It calls upon the Chancellor to create with the Academic Senate: a classification of civil disobedience actions and the appropriate threshold of police action; mechanisms for communication with protestors, and between protesters and counter- protesters; and a permanent administration-faculty-student committee coordinating the campus response.

These actions are based on the UC Civil Disobedience Initiative. In 2011, protests at multiple campuses were met with sometimes violent police actions, leading UC Pres Yudof to commission the Robinson-Edley Report. The Regents instructed the Chancellors to implement its 49 recommendations, which they did in 2014. UCSD certified the formation of an Emergency Management Team that would provide leadership during Civil Disobedience, develop principles to match acts of Civil Disobedience with appropriate responses, and attempt to communicate with leaders of the event. Our resolution commits the Faculty to work with the Chancellor to complete the implementation of these goals. 

Of course, none of these goals are simple or easy, which is why we should work on them now, before they are needed again. The table below is from a recent paper that reviews the literature on classifying Civil Disobedience actions, and how that informs the choice to use Police to end them. Our resolution does not impose this particular classification and threshold, but it provides a model of what we need to adopt.

Imagine that these structures and procedures had been in place before the encampment, promoting more successful dialog and negotiations. Imagine that representatives of the administration, faculty and students had already agreed upon what level of civil disobedience might justify a police action, and had monitored together whether that level had been met. It is entirely possible that the police action could have been avoided entirely, or, eventually a consensus could have been achieved for its necessity. In either case we would not have this contentious vote, the graduate student strike, or other symptoms of our fracturing community.