Open Letter by graduate student Megan Ammirati to Chancellor Katehi about Virginia Tech shooting reference

Via Solidarity!

An Open Letter Addressed to Chancellor Katehi:

I am afraid that I have been forced to write to you after watching the Town Hall forums over this last week. First of all, I would like to thank you and the members of the panels for taking the time to speak to the community.

I was a witness to the now infamous pepper-spraying incident on the Quad and have participated in numerous protests condemning such actions since then. However I have never written to you personally, trusting the words of those more eloquent than myself to express the general dissatisfaction with the actions of the police and administration.

Nonetheless I knew I had to communicate in person when I heard you invoke the Virginia Tech massacre on multiple occasions to defend a need for weaponized police forces on college campuses. When students and faculty are professing concerns and fears of the campus police, I ask you if such a reference is relevant or appropriate.

As a native Virginian, I hold a deep conviction that the events of April 16, 2007 should never become a catchphrase to conjure up fear for a broad variety of campus safety issues. Clearly, the fears I felt in the crowd on the UC Davis Quad last week were entirely different to those of a school shooting and should be respected as such.

Perhaps if I explained my personal connection to the amazing VT community, my aversion to such rhetoric would be more obvious. As a freshman at another public university in Virginia, the day of the massacre itself was marked by a deep fear for my friends on the Virginia Tech campus. Every anniversary, commemorated by current Tech students like my brother, is a somber opportunity to reflect on the sorrow that accompanies mental illness.

Not once on any of those occasions have I been comforted by the thought of more weapons on college campuses regardless of the hands that hold them. In fact, the 32 deaths of students and faculty in 2007 have prompted legislation that limited the use of guns, not broadened their application.

I realize that “Virginia Tech” is now a phrase that is used to describe the realities and challenges of administrating higher education; such notoriety has led to useful reforms such as the WarnMe system that alerts UC Davis students of safety hazards. Nevertheless, I would ask you and the UCD administration not to refer to the tragic events of another community in such an offhand manner. Just as language referencing the terrorist attacks of September 11th should not be used to support the Patriot Act, I urge all of us to avoid utilizing the massacre at Virginia Tech to explain the unfortunate events on our own campus.

Perhaps the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University could instead serve as an economic model for UC Davis; Virginia public schools facing budget cuts have managed to keep tuition within a reasonable price range, which to me, is a far higher priority than weaponizing the police.

Sincerely,
Megan Ammirati
Graduate Student
Department of Comparative Literature
University of California, Davis

OnlineUniversities forgot to mention OccupyUCDavis

 

In an article on another blog, named OnlineUniversities.com, 11 college campuses with major Occupy movements.

These are: Duke, UC Berkeley, Seattle Central Community College, Boston University, Auburn, Brown, University of New Mexico, Oklahoma State, UCLA, Iowa State, and Humboldt State.

Please read and feel free to leave a comment.

Edit: A brief excerpt:

Occupy Wall Street has been going on for months now, and although reactions to the movement are mixed, there are protest locations numbering somewhere near 1,000. Within that number are several college campuses that boast major Occupy movements, whether there’s a presence on campus, or simply very active students involved in their local Occupy chapter. There’s even an Occupy Colleges movement, formed to protest college tuition hikes amid staggering student loan debt. Like Occupy Wall Street, Occupy movements on college campuses have been met with mixed reactions, some finding great support in university administration, and others fighting an uphill battle. Read on, and we’ll take a look at the beliefs, incidents, and status of 11 college Occupy movements going on today.

Short #UCDavis news: pay raise, pepper spray questions, and more

Here you can find several questions Keith Bradnam, a project scientist in Ian Korf’s lab at the Genome Center, regarding the pepper spray incident of November 18. His main questions are:

3. What were the specific instructions to Police Chief Spicuzza regarding the removal of students and/or tents?

6. What specific instructions did Police Chief Spicuzza give to her officers?

7. What specific instructions were given to Lt. Pike – and to the second (as yet unamed) police officer who also used pepper spray?

Here you can find an article in The Atlantic questioning of the investigations into the pepper spray incident are actually independent. This is the last paragraph of the article:

After all, those students who were pepper sprayed in the face were protesting, in large part, the encroaching privatization of the university. Picking a company with Kroll’s corporate entanglements to conduct the investigation is incredibly tactless at best.

Last Monday the UC Regents board had a meeting across four campuses the day after Thanksgiving weekend after their initial meeting scheduled for November 16 was cancelled over fear of protesters. This meeting was also cut short because of protesters (news article here and here). Directly following this shortened meeting, the UC regents reconvened to discuss the pay raise for 12 of their top administrators and lawyers. Two UC Davis people were awarded lavish pay raises. Vincent Johnson, the Chief Operating Officer of the UC Davis Medical Center received a 23% pay raise (in other words he can add $103,500 to his pay check next year) and Steven Drown, a top lawyer for UC Davis received a 21.9% pay raise (in other words he can add $44,995 to his pay check next year). Keep in mind that the student protesters who interrupted the UC Regents board meeting were in part protesting the proposed 81% tuition fee hike that awaits them.

For all good measure, here you can find the SacBee’s list of State Workers salaries.

As a reminder for the graduate and professional students of UC Davis – tomorrow there is a Town Hall meeting with Chancellor Katehi and other specially for you.

 

Here you can find an article in The Bay Citizen looking into Bill Bratton’s advice history. Apparently, he urged Brown University to arm their campus police officers.

GSA Officially Censures Chancellor Katehi

At the Nov. 30th meeting of the GSA many proposals concerning the events of Nov. 18th were discussed and voted upon. Outright calling for the Chancellor’s immediate resignation was voted down by roughly 70 to 30 votes, however the general assembly did vote to officially censure Chancellor Katehi. Several other proposals were approved with the general goals of incorporating graduate students into police oversight committees, and calling on the legislature to undo or mitigate the negative effects of Prop 13 on educational funding.

More updates to follow, you can always check the GSA website for more information. Don’t forget to attend the Graduate Student Townhall meeting with Chancellor Katehi at 6 PM in 66 Roessler Hall. This is your chance as a graduate student to be heard!

BMCDB GSA Rep, Gordon Walker

 

REMINDER: tomorrow Town Hall meeting for grad students. 6-7:30pm in Roessler 66

In addition to last weeks Town Hall meeting which focussed on undergraduate students and tomorrow Town Hall meeting for Faculty and Staff, this Thursday the graduate and professional students will have their own Town Hall meeting with Chancellor Katehi. This is all a response by UC Davis administration to communicate with the campus community after the pepper spray event of November 18.

Location: Roessler Hall 66

When: Thursday, December 1st

Time: 18h00-19h30 (6pm to 7h30pm)

Every graduate and professional student in encouraged to come to this Town Hall meeting to ask Chancellor Katehi and other administrators about problems faced by us in a respectful and communicative environment.

Obama’s Student Loan Forgiveness plan

President Obama has introduced a plan that would have a great impact on students with loans, but this has barely been discussed in the media, in great contrast to his health plan or job creation plan. This student loan would result in partial forgiveness of your student loan. Not a small deal, as some students rack up $100,000s in debt just to obtain a degree.

This can be read on the http://www.obamastudentloanforgiveness.com/ website.

…

Under the terms of this program, anyone who makes his monthly payments for twenty years after leaving college is eligible to have his/her remaining balance forgiven. At least, this applies to anyone with Federal Direct loans, Stafford loans, and Perkins loans. Those who take out their loans from private lenders such as Sallie Mae are still responsible for repaying their loans in total.

Individuals who spend ten years in public service positions become eligible to have their loans forgiven at that point rather than having to wait the full twenty years. This means that their debt is forgiven in half the time and their debt reduced significantly sooner.

It is also a part of the plan that monthly payments be capped at a level of 10 percent of the money that left over when all taxes are paid and basic necessities taken care of. This cap has been at 15 percent, which takes a lot more money out of the pockets of citizens and out of the economy.

There are also programs in place that allow teachers to work for just five years in elementary or high schools that have been designated as low income schools by the Dept. Of Education. This applies to FFEL loans and to Direct loans.

Military personnel are also able to achieve forgiveness for their student loans if they have a degree. This program works for members of all five branches of service, including the Coast Guard and Reserves.

A final option is to apply for income based repayment terms. While it is probably best to sign up for this early in the life of the loan, older loans may still qualify for this lower payment plan. Of course, the clock starts all over when one signs up for this option. That means that someone who has worked in public service for eight years and signs up for income based repayment must work another ten years in public service instead of the two he/she would have had left.

Student loans are a fact of life for the vast majority of college graduates. This is especially true of those who go beyond a bachelor’s degree and take graduate level classes. Sadly, the much higher pay they were promised if they pursued their education to its fullest has not materialized. The economic recession has made this fact even worse for most.

The Obama student loan forgiveness program is intended to help ensure that individuals do not wind up broke because they chose to continue their education. While nobody will see his/her loan just disappear overnight, payments have been lowered and the time shortened that one must pay before the remaining balance is forgiven. Public service workers and teachers are eligible for forgiveness at much faster rates due to the nature of their jobs.

The best way to get this program in the public debate, is to talk about and read about and write about it. Let your friends and family this is a plan worth supporting, independent of your political position.

Here is an article on politico.com. Here is a link to the Department of Education website.

New insights on the Cambrian Explosion

Boom! From PhysOrg.com by Bob Yirka:

Fossil of Marrella splendens Image: Wikipedia

For hundreds of years, researchers from many branches of science have sought to explain the veritable explosion in diversity in animal organisms that started approximately 541 million years ago here on planet Earth. Known as the Cambrian period, it was the time, according to fossil evidence, when life evolved from simple one celled organisms, to creatures that had multiple cells with varied functions. Now, new evidence by a team of biologists, paleobiologists and ecologists suggests that the sudden explosion of new life forms may not have been so sudden after all. In their paper published in Science, the teams says that it appears likely that most of the new life forms that show up in fossil finds, were well on their way to development before the Cambrian period and that many of them, by their behaviors, may have helped pave the way for others.

To better understand what was happening before and during the Cambrian period, the team took a two-pronged approach: one side studied, compiled and updated the fossil evidence, while the other focused on the molecular makeup of various organisms to uncover their gene history to create a more precise family tree. By combining the evidence from both sides, the team was able to put together a picture of what they believe went on.

From their work it appears that the basic genetic components for the organisms that seemingly sprang into existence during the Cambrian period were in place long before the fossil records show. In fact, there appeared to be evidence of a slow march of development for 200 million years before the sudden diversity became evident, which indicates that many such organisms were slowly evolving and only showed when conditions became ripe.

The team suggests that for many of those 200 million years, Earth went through some very cold periods where the entire planet was likely frozen, stagnating development. Then, there came a time of warming, partly brought about, they theorize, by the development of organisms that were capable of changing the environment by pulling carbon from seawater and releasing more oxygen when they died and also by those that burrowed into the seafloor aerating it, providing a new type of environment for new types of organisms.

Read the complete article here. Read the original manuscript via Science by Douglas H. Erwin as lead author from the National Museum of Natural History.

First successful artificial windpipe from stem cells

A week late, but For all the stem cell researchers out there, we now have a windpipe made from stem cells.

 

From MedlinePlus by Mary Elizabeth Dallas:

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 23 (HealthDay News) — A 36-year-old husband and father of two children with an inoperable tumor in his trachea (windpipe) has received the world’s first artificial trachea made with stem cells.

A report published online Nov. 23 in The Lancet described the transplant surgery, which was performed in June at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

Without the transplant, the authors of the report explained, the man from Reykjavik, Iceland would have died. A golf ball-sized tumor on his trachea had begun to restrict his breathing. In a 12-hour procedure, doctors completely removed the affected area of his trachea and replaced it with an artificial one.

The artificial trachea was custom-made using three-dimensional imaging. First, a glass model was built to help shape an artificial scaffold. Stem cells were then inserted into the scaffold to create a functioning airway, the authors explained in a journal news release.

The scientists said their technique is an improvement over other methods because they used the patient’s own cells to create the airway so there is no risk of rejection and the patient does not have to take immunosuppressive drugs.

In addition, they noted, because the trachea was custom-made it would be an ideal fit for the patient’s body size and shape, and would eliminate the need to remain on a waiting list for a human donor.

“The patient has been doing great for the last four months and has been able to live a normal life. After arriving in Iceland at the start of July, he was one month in hospital and another month in a rehabilitation center,” a co-author of the study and the physician who referred the patient for the procedure, Tomas Gudbjartsson, of Landspitali University Hospital and University of Iceland, Reykjavik, said in the news release.

Read the complete news article here. Read the proof of concept manuscript via The Lancet.

AggiePride: UC Davis makes it on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:403130

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Edit: Brief Huffington Post commentary can be foundhere.

Brief comment on the video from The Rolling Stone can be found here.

We’re just waiting for a South Park episode to come out now.

UC Davis Academic Senate response to Pepper Spray Incident

UCDAVIS: ACADEMIC SENATE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

November 28, 2011

Dear Colleagues:

Many of you have asked me to issue a preliminary assessment of the events occurring on November 18, 2011, and to describe the actions taken to date by me and Executive Council. I know I have asked extraordinary patience of you while I undertake the job that I was appointed to do as your Chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate. As a scientist it is not in my nature to get ahead of the data; as a faculty member I put the students first. When I saw the first video of the brutality on the quad I felt as if I had been stabbed in the heart, a feeling I know the majority of you share.

My first communication to the Chancellor on Friday, November 18th was to make sure the charges against the students would be dropped and all medical bills would be covered; she had already made the decision to do so. My second immediate demand was that those directly involved be placed on leave. I learned that although she had requested this be done she has more limited authority than I thought over our police force. Finally, I asked that the police presence on or around the quad be diminished and if necessary I would have faculty patrol the quad to ensure the safety of our students. The members of Executive Council were prepared to be there themselves and to contact their committee members and faculties to back up this position. I had immediate responses from graduate and professional school students to also patrol the quad. The Chancellor assured me that this would not be necessary. Executive Council members periodically went by the encampment once it was reestablished to check on the wellbeing of the students. Executive Council met with the students of the Occupy movement on Wednesday, November 23rd to ask if they felt safe and if there was anything we could do to make them feel safer. They said they felt safe as long as the police were kept away.

Many of you have sent me emails about the man in the grey suit filming the crowd on November 18th with concerns about the intent of that filming. I have asked the Chancellor and she has told me that she does not know who that individual is nor why he was filming the crowd and appeared to be with the police. I will continue to press on this issue.

Second, during the tragedy on the quad we were holding an Executive Council meeting with the Chancellor. I had not been in the loop on decisions that were being made so I had as an agenda item a discussion of her intentions with respect to the Occupy movement and student demonstrations. We learned that she had already called for the tents to be removed and that this was happening as we were being told of her decision. There was no consultation with the Senate regarding this decision. She assured us at that time that although the police had been told to remove the tents as is apparently a UC policy, she had clearly instructed them to do it peacefully and without force unless physically threatened or attacked. Further the reasons for the order to remove the tents were health and safety related, due to poor sanitation practices. As a microbiologist, who teaches sanitation, I know this is indeed a problem. We registered our opposition to the use of excessive force probably just as it was happening. During the meeting, the Chancellor was seated next to me and I know she did not receive any communication from the field. She did get called to the hallway and came back and her report of what had happened was identical to the statement that she subsequently made to the press and that you all have heard and that
turned out to be egregiously incorrect as evidenced by the videos released by the press. When I asked the Chancellor about this the next day, she said she had repeated what she had been told by her staff concerning the events of the quad, and it was not until later that she saw the videos released by the press herself. Some Executive Council members thought the clearing of the Occupy movement was timed deliberately during our meeting to prevent any meaningful consultation; others viewed it as simply unfortunate timing. As a consequence, the tenor of my conversations with the Chancellor has been quite different from that of the main campus and I will give a full report at the Representative Assembly
meeting.

Third, I started investigating the culture and origin of our repressive policies. I received immediate assistance from the systemwide office of the Academic Senate in sourcing these policies. Bob Anderson called for an emergency teleconference meeting of Academic Council in which I participated. I believe our polices are historic, many a legacy of the incident involving the active shooter at Virginia Tech., and the sharp criticism in the press of campus police being “mall cops” at that time. I know changes were mandated by both state and local governments after that event. I personally do not think one should send inexperienced and untrained individuals against an active shooter. However, I also do not think one
should send a SWAT team to issue citations for minor violations.

Executive Council has taken three actions: First, to issue our statement that many have thought was weak but that reflected a commitment to get the facts first. We called for an independent investigation into the events on the quad and I advised the Chancellor to abandon her plans for formation of a taskforce as it would likely not appear credible. Further, if an administrative task force was necessary I believed it should be formed by someone else. We continually emphasized the need for independence of the task force. The result of this request was the decision by the Office of the President to conduct the administrative inquiry. Second, we have formed our own Special Committee to examine the events leading up to the actions taken on the quad and also to review our policies, procedures, culture and climate to make strong recommendations for change. I have read the Brazil report issued by the Police Review Board of UCB in 2010 after an incident in 2009 and agree with most of their recommendations that obviously have not been adopted (http://administration.berkeley.edu/prb/6-14-10_prb-report.pdf). Our Special Committee may have different or additional recommendations of its own. I will do everything that I can to make sure our report is not ignored. Provost/Executive Vice President Pitts has assured me personally that policies will change. Third, I called for a special meeting of the Representative Assembly. I report directly to the Representative Assembly and will have more to say on Friday when we meet. Representative Assembly meetings are public and open to all faculty. The Chancellor will be there. We will hold the meeting in the Mondavi Center to allow for full attendance by the faculty. Executive Council intends to introduce a resolution at that meeting commending our students. I hope to have the text of that resolution finalized and out to all departments and their Representative Assembly members prior to the meeting on Friday.

I am continuing to look into the events of November 18th, and will issue periodic updates to the faculty. I have found many things that I would like to propose that we change, but ask for your continued patience as I am still uncovering new information.
Sincerely,

Linda F. Bisson, Chair
Davis Division of the Academic Senate
Professor: Viticulture and Enology