President-elect Trump did not spend much time on the question of higher education (unlike Bernie Sanders or even Hillary Clinton) during his campaign.  But some things seem clear.  As articulated by Virginia Foxx, likely to be the new Chair of the House Higher Education and Workforce Committee, there will likely be reduced oversight of for-profit colleges and universities, increased emphasis on college completion, decreased regulatory oversight, and little if any expansion of Federal funding for higher education.   We can also expect the Republicans push to give banks greater control over student loans, and to cut federal support for research.

The most immediate issue concerns the support and protection of students.  President-elect Trump has made no secret of his desire to increase deportations and is likely to attempt to eliminate the "Consideration for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" (DACA) program.  Over 1.5 Million people are presented under the DACA program, not surprisingly with a large percentage in California.  It is essential that Colleges and Universities find ways to honor their commitments to these students and work to enable them to complete their education in peace.  Faculty and students at many institutions are pushing for their colleges and universities to declare themselves sanctuary campuses.  In California CSU Chancellor Timothy White has already declared that CSU will not cooperate with Federal efforts to identify and deport undocumented students (if they occur).  At yesterday's Regents' Meeting President Napolitano indicated that she had appointed a task force to prepare the University to help protect and support undocumented students.  But unlike White she has not committed to non-participation with any Federal immigration crackdown.  This is an issue that the Faculty needs to take up.

We must also recognize that the Trump Administration will likely show little interest in supporting Title IX efforts.  Already we have seen multiple incidents of both racial and sexual harrasment on campuses since the election.  As Hank Reichman has recently observed, it is time to reconsider the debate over so-called "safe spaces."  The concept of safe spaces has been denigrated by many purporting to defend academic freedom over the last few years.  Implicit in these criticisms has been the idea that minority and female students have overstated the extent to which they have not been granted equal access to the civic and intellectual space of colleges and universities.  Critics of safe spaces have too often conjured up fantasies of a Kantian space of equals and ignored the real disparity in the situations that different sorts of students face on campuses.  It is not a denial of individual or free thought to recognize that institutions and faculty have a responsibility to create the conditions that will enable students to grow as scholars.  In that sense, as Brad DeLong has put it "a university is: first of all, a safe space for ideas. second a safe space for scholars."  I would only add that it can only be the first if it is the second and that we must explicitly recognize students as scholars.

The Trump Administration, combined with the ascendancy of Republican power in Congress and the States poses longer term challenges for the very idea of the university.  The Presidency will be held by an authoritarian populist, one house of Congress will be led by an acolyte of Ayn Rand while the other is directed by a walking embodiment of what the eighteenth century would have thought of as "Old Corruption."  Controlling the Presidency and Congress means that the Antonin Scalia's replacement on the Supreme Court will be a representative of the Right.  Given the age of both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer it is possible the Court will move even further to the Right in the near future.  On the level of the states a similar pattern is in place.

Mr. Trump's campaign articulated a vision of a nationalist America focused on whites, in which the market was liberated from the regulation of the state,  and in which women and minorities were deferential and subordinate.  Indeed, Trump's movement combined with Brexit and the rise of authoritarian nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere reveal a deep alienation from the universities and colleges.  It is that vision, combined with his administration's political power that must be addressed.

But I will turn to that in a future post.

I'm sure 2014 in higher ed was different from 2013, but right off I can't think of how.  The nation continued its permanent public university austerity program, encouraged flimsy hopes for ed-tech rescues, conducted long political arguments over possible 2-percent revenue increases, fantasized about self-unbundling into flexi-modularity, and proclaimed indignant doubts about the educational value of going to college at all.  So what was new? Even my biggest stayed the same, which I called the "hardening of the downward definition of public higher education through budgetary means, with no public debate."  

Cheer up, I said to myself--it's the holidays! Santa Barbara's one day of winter rain has already come and gone. Some new things did happen in 2014 higher ed, and some of them were good.

1. The College Liberation Movement.  The splashy version came from some Ivy League humanist dissidents who described elite private universities as sorting machines for those reared to rule our newly post-middle class society.   There was the "excellent sheep" debate, started by William Deresiewicz's July article, "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League" and carried on in his book, Excellent Sheep, sustained by attacks on him by Jim Sleeper among others, and brought in quieter form to the big screen by the film Ivory Tower.   

Dr. Deresiewicz drew a sharp line between what happens at places like Yale, described as training in "the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions," and actually learning how to think.  However one felt about the details, the discussion put the humanistic goal of personal development at the center of the college agenda.  It cut against the naïve vocationalism that has justified corporate reach-ins to core educational functions. It clarified that colleges must do what businesses cannot do, according to their own vision and expertise.

I have my quarrels with this Ivy humanism, starting with my dislike for the overdrawn contrast between liberal and practical arts.  I think that the systematic inculcation of deep skills are next on the to-do list of public universities.  But higher ed leaders have so completely lost confidence in the special powers of higher learning that they needed every kind of explanation of why teaching is not a business.  

2. A New Deal for Faculty Governance.  When the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced that she was pocket vetoing the appointment of Steven Salaita to a professorship that had been approved by every campus agency, she awakened the closest thing to a national faculty outcry that the country had seen in years.  Prof. Salaita remains in limbo, and governance procedures have not been fixed.  But I don't know a single faculty member who isn't now aware of the fall of the faculty, having in 2014 seen faculty be overridden in a main area of authority.   The premature MOOC contracting of  2013 showed admin to be as ready to redesign the curriculum as it is to make all financial decisions on its own. Many faculty who weren't worried about MOOC-mediated governance got worried about the suspension of hiring protocols by senior managers under donor pressure.  

Other kinds of encroachments also got faculty attention.  The newly-hatched Board of Trustees for the University of Oregon planned to write the faculty senate out of the university's new constitution, with the effect of "relegat[ing] university stakeholders to supplicants." Faculty generated an imposing counterattack.  We learned all over again that faculty bodies, once awakened, have more than enough brains at their disposal to stop any train that "has already left the station."

3. Fixing Women's Student Experience.   Even the federal government got involved with the question of what campuses are or aren't doing about sexual assault.  It was impossible to ignore the issue of inadequate protection for victims while pondering  Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz's "carry that weight" thesis project, in which she has carried a mattress with her everywhere on campus until her alleged assailant is no longer at Columbia. (Thank you Gawker for telling us that the alleged assailant is a feminist.)  The Chronicle of Higher Education had a huge spread about "alcohol's hold on campus" ( as in "A River of Booze"), and what it lacked in news value (did you know that some college students drink too much??) it made up in expressing general worry that academics are getting lost in a labyrinth of peripheral activities. Concern about the welfare of women was strong enough to prompt coverage of a study showing that college women are raped less often than non-college women of the same age, which helped embed the campus problem in a wider national context.  Rolling Stone's partial retraction of its "bombshell article" about a alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia frat house did not produce a chorus of triumphant claims that sexual assault is a phony problem.  This year, colleges en masse started to confront women's continuing--if not escalating--physical and psychological insecurity, and the national coverage was a major reason.

4. Contingent Faculty Come in from the Cold.  In early 2013 I wasn't picturing the adjunct faculty group New Faculty Majority appearing before Congress to describe academia's faculty labor problems, but it happened in November of that year, and the momentum carried into 2014.  We're finally seeing proposed legislation requiring colleges to report on their use of part time and non-tenure track instructors.  Adjunct faculty also won an case about their free speech rights and had their status considered in a student debt forgiveness proposal.  They have in general, because of the work of Prof. Maisto and many others, become a major presence in discussions of the future of higher ed.  

Writing in this space, Jennifer Ruth raised the issue of tenure-track faculty complicity in creating a disposable workforce, and named some necessary costs of reversing the trend.  2014 brought unprecedented public awareness of the overuse of contingent faculty and of the shame of their exploitation.  This has already meant increased interest in tenure-track -- non-tenure track (NTT) alliances.  This would improve NTT conditions and reduce the divisions within the faculty that have empowered administrations at faculty expense. Awareness of these possibilities is deeper than it was just a year ago.

 5. The Rise of Educational Quality.  In 2014, student debt hit the wall. The usual justifications of this destructive kludge of a funding strategy are yielding diminishing returns with students along with everyone else.  Adding to the pressure, "the debt is too damn high" was joined by another theme, "debt for what"? Students at the UC Regents meeting in November were eloquent on the subject of the shrinking educational benefits of attending UC that they traced directly to  budgetary "efficiencies" like giant lectures, mechanized grading, and near-zero rates of individual attention.  "We want classes.  We want professors," UC's student regent felt the need to explain to Governor Jerry Brown.   State funding will stay flat without a big push, and detailing the sources and costs of quality education could give state governments their first concrete--and politically charged--reason to reverse years of funding cuts.

I never tire of pointing out that the only reason for the existence of public universities is mass quality--mass access to top quality teaching and cutting-edge research--that puts regular folks on the level where they can genuinely match elites. It's not too soon for faculty to join students in putting the quality back in mass quality, while creating news kinds of quality to reflect on current conditions.  The success students had this year in holding off major politicians like Jerry Brown--and in getting cited in revenue arguments by governing boards--signaled to at least some faculty that it's time to step up. 

6.  Relinking Student Protests and Social Movements.  The biggest recent domestic news has been the protests of the non-indictment of police officers who had killed unarmed Black men, particularly in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner in New York City.  The "Hands Up Don't Shoot" and "I Can't Breathe" protests overlapped with various campus struggles about funding, tuition, debt, diversity, free speech, campus policing, the morale of students of color, and other issues.  These intersecting protests linked the public university to the postwar period of its major development, when society could imagine colleges as offering knowledge for the satisfaction of broad social needs.  In contrast to the narrower mission of serving technology industries, which now seems to many, as the middle classes stagnate, to be just one more way to enrich the rich, the classic social movements increased both the social influence of the university and the quality of its knowledge.  1950s and 1960s voters rewarded universities for this pertinence before conservative elites punished them for it.  The university's golden age and the civil rights movement had different origins but symbiotic aspirations.  This year, parallels among student and non-student movements pointed towards a better common destiny.  

One thing about 2014 was the same as previous years.  I loved the basics of the job-- the research, the teaching, and the learning with colleagues and students. My UCSB students were wonderful. They came through bouts of overpolicing, a mass murder, and ever-mounting levels of background stress; they wrote great crime stories in the detective fiction lecture I just finished, and had all sorts of ideas for educational upgrades that will continue next year.  

In the meantime, many thanks from us for reading Remaking the University this year, and warm wishes for the rest of the holidays. 

by Wendy Brown, Political Science, UC Berkeley

3rd of 5 talks from The Operation of the Machine panel, UC Berkeley October 1, introduced by Prof. Colleen Lye

I want to make two brief points this afternoon, one about freedom and one about speech. 

If forced to compress into a few sentences the contours of student freedom and its limits in public universities 50 years ago and now, those sentences might go this way:

Then:  Because developing the next generation of Californians as educated individuals, citizens and contributing members of society was widely valued as a public good, the university offered a free, high quality education to qualifying (mostly white) middle class and working class students.  Faculty (also mostly white and male) had significant power over large domains of university policy-- they determined what was to be learned and how, what counted as an educated person worthy of a degree, and much more.  But the university administration not only prohibited student political expression, it codified a panoply of restrictions as it sought to be a zone clear of politics, unmarried sex, illegal substances and, implicitly, non-whites.  Thus “the gears of the machine”—from racial exclusion to speech restrictions—were tangible controls that cast students as rightless children being prepared for educated participation in society, economy and politics.

That was Then.  And Now?  UC doors are open to anyone with the wherewithal, parental pressure or supplemental support structures to deliver the test scores, grades, and profile to compete for admission (or who have singular athletic ability, or are well-off non-residents). No longer a public good or publicly supported, UC is construed as a place to invest in oneself as human capital, and according to a set of calculations about what will appreciate or diminish this capital.  Courses are increasingly on offer like Walmart goods, and respond heavily to consumer demand.  And faculty power has receded to a few small corners of the plantation—students feel it most in the form of access to classes and grades.  In the domain of student political, social and sexual expression, just about anything is permitted.  

However, the burden is on each of you to invest your time and effort strategically, not only to gain high return on your expensive investment but to develop the little speck of human capital that is you and that is yours alone to develop.  

This burden is so great and so impossible to put down for anything —an alluring music class or other exciting course outside your major, let alone a political cause, or dwelling for uncounted hours with an idea, a question, a compelling bit of text. Thus, if there are few repressive rules or overt restrictions on what you can do or say, the conversion of the university from a public good to a private investment made by you and your family radically changes the coordinates of unfreedom faced by students today.  How much can you afford to think, learn, want or do that does not comport with enhancing your future value to employers, grad or professional schools?  What freedom to speak, protest or organize against injustice can you exercise that would not be suicidal for the human capital you are enjoined to develop here, into which you have invested family life savings or taken on debt, and which has become the supervening if not sole purpose of a university education? 
Thus, today, the gears of the machine don’t clang and grind out there:  they are are soft, quiet, and deep inside us.  And throwing our bodies on them in resistance requires a complex contortion and commitment.

Ok, that was freedom.  Now speech, where I will also mark just one of many major differences between then and now, or between what we might call the repressive liberal era and the putatively emancipated neoliberal era.  This one pertains to the ways that the neoliberal assault on public things—a public sphere, public goods, public life--has led both university administrators and would-be activists into a certain confusion about free speech as a distinctly political right, one born from political struggle and secured historically for political life.  We have seen a bit of this confusion in recent months when “civility” or “respectful listening” have been mistakenly declared an inherent entailment of free speech or academic freedom. Certainly civility and respectful listening may be expected at a dinner table, a university classroom or a department meeting—it would be good if they prevailed more routinely.  But they have nothing to do with the exercise of free speech in public, where (barring threats, harassment, or dangerous incitements), anyone may say anything…and no one must listen or listen well. 

A far more treacherous instance of contemporary confusion about our political rights comes from the Supreme Court in recent years.  From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, the Court majority has been busily granting political freedoms—of speech, of religious belief-- to corporations who may now use their enormous wealth and power to overwhelm the last standing icon of democracy, elections, and withhold medical insurance for Constitutionally guaranteed reproductive rights.

This confusion, from high places, of whom and what our political rights are for, and what they do and don’t entail, would take hours to analyze properly.  But I want to consider one especially troubling version of it on college campuses today, one that we can do something about.  This is the effort to regulate public speech to protect certain vulnerable groups from offense, hatred, being retraumatized.  

This protection racket begin, alas, a couple of decades ago with well-intentioned feminist and anti-racist efforts to outlaw hateful or offensive speech and images.  But this tool, which aimed to shield the historically hated or subordinated from being hit again in the present, has not remained in the hands of the Left.  Indeed, while it’s animating the contemporary “trigger warning” madness (a discussion for another day) it has also become one of the more potent instruments of illiberal American ultra-Zionism today.  It is what dignifies the fallacious argument that publicly criticizing Israel on campus creates an unsafe or offensive climate for Jewish students.  

So what begin as a concern with subordinating or hateful speech has been appropriated to silence protest against power.  Of course any political argument can be flipped—Californians know this best from the legislation that ended affirmative action, which, you’ll recall, was called The Civil Rights Initiative.  But there’s something more troubling here, which is the confusion of the public sphere with therapeutic spaces or homes.  The domain of free public speech is not one of emotional safety or reassurance, and what you might hear in Sproul Plaza or up at this podium might be disturbing, uncomfortable, enraging, even offensive.  

Public speech is one of the most powerful weapons ordinary human beings have, and even the most civilly uttered sentences can disturb or terrify.  Certainly the speeches of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., or Malcolm X made neither white people nor many blacks feel safe.  Certainly the revolutionary slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity” did not reassure either the French aristocracy or its minions in mid-18th century Paris.  Do you think Wall St Bankers felt safe when they walked past thousands of Occupy protestors decrying the obscene wealth, destruction of democracy, and carnage of public goods for which they were being held responsible?  Do you think closeted homosexuals felt safe when the Stonewall rebellion broke out? Do you think men who have pushed, drunk or drugged women into unwanted sex feel safe as women on campuses everywhere are finally speaking out against the commonplace of sexual assault?  Or that civil servants, police and other hired guns of regimes across the Middle East felt safe when citizens amassed in public squares to denounce them during the Arab spring?  Emotional safety is not what the public sphere and political speech promise.  It’s for cultivating at home if you are lucky enough to have one.  It is what you seek among friends and intimates where you expect your vulnerability to be taken into account. 

A university education, too, ought to call you to think, question, doubt.   It ought to incite you to question everything you assume, think you know or care about, not because those assumptions or cares will be jettisoned.  Rather, because, as those wild-eyed radicals Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill insisted, there is no possibility of knowing what’s right, justified, valuable or true unless you question deeply and relentlessly…unless you’re willing to consider whether your attachment to an idea or principle is really just a teddy bear you cling to, a comforting familiar.  The public sphere and a university classroom are not for hanging onto your teddy bears.  Your bears have their place, back in your room where you’re safe and restored.   But when we demand—from the Right OR the Left-- that universities be cleansed of what is disturbing, upsetting, enraging, “offensive” or triggering, we are complicit both with the neoliberal destruction of university as a place of being undone, transformed, awakened (rather than a place to get job training) AND with neoliberalism’s destruction of public spaces and the distinctive meaning of political rights, (rights that some in this room fought to bring onto campus 50 years ago).  

Let’s demand something far more important, which is to be provoked and challenged, every day and down to our very toes in what remains of this extraordinary institution.  Let’s have the courage to stand for that, and to be willing to withstand it.  

Each segment of the UCSB-Isla Vista community grieved the dead and wounded in its own way. My experience is that everyone was grieving.  Essentially every single person with whom I spoke was traumatized.  Some knew the victims better than everyone else, and experienced an especially horrible personal loss. But I don't know anyone who didn't feel that they had been threatened by, and in some way barely survived, an assault on the entire community to which they variously belong.

The students organized memorials on their own.  They built shrines at the shooting sites that got continuous traffic, held a candlelight vigil in Storke Plaza for several thousand on Saturday, May 24th. All week, candlelight vigils for the victims appeared everywhere: at other UC campuses  (UCB, UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSC UCSD), and at universities from Corvallis Oregon to Granada Spain. UCSB students also organized a paddle-out  from the beach below Isla Vista on Wednesday the 28th (fb event page; photo above: Christin Florenzie).  For the occasion, the Santa Barbara Channel withheld both cloud and wind, allowing the glassy sea to suggest the reality of human benevolence and peace, in which passing on could seem, at least for a while, not like loss but like a special power.

The student events had two main features: they were self-organized, and they were beautiful.  I heard many stories from students about the wrangling within the organizing: some Associated Students leaders did not want an open mike at the vigil, for example, while most other students did.   It took a while for the latter to prevail, but it finally didn't matter, and in fact was part of the process that created huge, inclusive events for remembering and grieving.

These events were also striking for their aesthetics.  Here's a Santa Barbara Independent image of the Storke Plaza vigil (borrowed from their good, comprehensive coverage):

Or another of a procession:

Even the daylit version showed the beauty of the assembly (photo: Lorenzo Basilio)

At the time of the murders, I had been teaching the concept of cultural agency via Doris Sommer and a great LA novel by Paul Beatty called White Boy Shuffle.  The vigils and the paddle-out used self-organization to generate uncanny beauty.  They were expressions of common grief and of our collective creative powers.  Beauty is our experience rendered for us, in which we recover the power of our emotions.  Beauty is a reminder, when created collectively in recovering from an annihilation, of the greatness of which we are always capable. The affected students gave the world an aesthetic education.  Both individual and group improvisation change the ground rules and produce transformation, starting with reconstituting the community through these events.

When my Noir California lecture resumed on Thursday, and following our own short memorial for our lost student Chris Martinez, I said that what struck me most this past week was the outpouring of their intelligence. The work they let themselves do for regular classes is one thing, and the thought and feeling they bring to bear in an emergency transcends this.  The crisis unveiled deeper powers, and with our students this came, for me, from the ripping away of their anonymity.  Under this pressure of emotion that directly tied them (and us) to a common event, they deinstitutionalized themselves, and helped the same happen to many of the rest of us.

You lost your anonymity, I said to my class.  You lost your anonymity towards yourself, meaning that your routine goals and functions no longer acted as a veil that hid other powers.  I played a clip of the great True Detective sequence in which Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, says, "and you are reborn, but into the same life that you've always been born into."  Senseless death tells us that this is true, that there is only one unchanging life we always wake up in, and yet your responses this week, I said, your remembrances and your organizing in all their brilliance, told us that this is false.

"We are reborn," by acting on what has happened, into a different life.  This has been happening this week even as the grief goes on.

Several of us on the faculty asked the administration to include people who knew the dead in the formal university memorial in Harder Stadium.  My own belief is that, in a memorial, the names of the dead must be spoken by those who knew them when they were alive. This did not happen at the official memorial service on Tuesday the 27th, which was in effect a kind of state funeral. Nonetheless, it succeeded through its own force majeure, as it gathered over 20,000 people who took every seat and then filled half the field.

The names of the victims, as known on campus, are George Chen, Katie Cooper, James Hong, Chris Martinez, David Wang, and Veronika Weiss.  They were given to UC President Janet Napolitano to read, with the addition of thumbnail sketches of people who were of course all strangers to her.  The official formality was interrupted by Chris Martinez's father, Richard Martinez, who read beautiful statements from the parents of David Wang and James Hong--there was again that power of connection that was so evident in the student-organized events.  He also led a mini-rally for #NotOneMore, which seemed both appropriate and transgressive (this was debated even among the large majority of students who strongly support his gun control program), and also a relief in its transgressiveness, in that the spontaneous chant from the stands that followed Mr. Martinez's recitations embodied the energy of carrying on.

Like other bereaved departments, the English Department had its own memorial, in which faculty, staff, grad student instructors and undergrads were able to talk to each other and share memories.  A number of Chris Martinez's close friends came to ours and one read a list of his favorite songs and books, his preference for good food over good clothes, his amazing ability to read every single one of the texts for every class, and quite a bit more.  (We are collecting statements on the Noir California course site and I hope this will be among them.)

On top of the value of gathering, where we rediscover our ability really to be together, I also heard superb statements about the value of literature and of the humanities.  One came from Natalie Holstead, on the right in the photo below, who quite remarkably described how literature links public thought to the experience of one's own emotions.  She was crying as she spoke, or speaking through the feeling, which is a heroic power on which we were all getting a course from Richard Martinez.

Then it was over, at least for a few minutes.

Everyone in Santa Barbara and Isla Vista was following and and engaging in their own versions of the national arguments about the offensive media invasion of I.V., gun violence, the media's glorification of gun violence, the mental health system, all the varieties of misogyny, and the failure of men to take responsibility for other men's bad behavior.  But no one wanted to discuss the killer, see his face, hear his name, or talk about his life and motives. Many people read the manifesto in private, and the discussions will come. But it's still too soon for that.  Right now we're still focused on the incalculable loss, on the assault on the social fabric, and on our own abilities to overcome these things--eventually.

I spent the weekend following the unfolding detail about the rampage in Isla Vista, while also trying to find out if one of the victims was a student in my current lecture course.  We are all heartbroken here at UCSB about the whole thing.  This was compounded in my case by the miserable discovery, which took a day-long effort to match somewhat different media and registrar names, that a victim was indeed a student in my lecture course and honors section--Chris Martinez, whose father, Richard Martinez, has become the most visible of the parents. I've posted a first notice to my Noir California students on the course webpage, and will have more to say here about causes, responses, and preventions in the next few days.


Monday May 26th: Selected Links 1 (h/t Bishnu); 2 (May 27th); 3 (May 28th)

Memorial at 4 pm, Harder Stadium

The Crimes

Isla Vista Incident Map (Google)

Disturbing Details Released in Isla Vista Massacre (Tyler Hayden, SB Independent)

Isla Vista Shooting: Echoes of David Attias (Nick Welsh, SB Independent)

The Problem with Changes in Media Coverage of Mass Shootings (Jess McKillop, UCSB)

The Victims:

Rodger's Housemates (Daily Nexus)

All Six Victims Named (UK Daily Mail)

Chris Martinez Remembered (KSBY)

Veronika Weiss Remembered by her Father (Los Angeles Times)

Katie Cooper and Others  (New York Times)

Sketches of the Six (Huffington Post)

Faculty, Staff, Student, Isla Vista Responses

#YesAllWomen 

#NotOneMore

For Us All: A Love Letter to Our Students (English Prof. Aranye Fradenburg, Daily Nexus 5/27)

Campus Killings Set Off Anguished Conversation about Treatment of Women (NY Times 5/26

Mental Health System

In Isla Vista, red flags came too late (Los Angeles Times)

Why mass killers need to explain their plan (USA Today)

California Killer's Parents Frantically Searched for Son During Shooting (CNN; NY Times version)

Guns

Richard Martinez Statement on Death of Son (CNN-YouTube)

Richard Martinez Further Statement on Gun Violence (ABC May 27th)

Distraught Father Blames Politicians and NRA (guns mixed with memorial coverage) (UK Daily Mail)

Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right (Adam Gopnik)

Elliot Rodger's Guns Were Purchased Legally (Truth About Guns)

Misogyny

I.V. Killings and Misogynist Extremism (Laurie Penny, New Statesman)

Elliot Rodger and Men Who Hate Women (The Belle Jar)

The Most Powerful #YesAllWomen Links (Time)

The Media Scapegoating of Rodger's High School Crush (Slate May 27th)

Elliot Rodger

YouTube Channel

Why Do Girls Hate Me So Much? 

Rodger Apparently Beat Up in I.V. in July 2013 & Other Coverage (KSBY)

Friend: Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodger wanted to ‘dominate the world'  [Actually about being bullied] (NY Daily News)

Memorials

• May 28th Memorial Paddle Out
• Memorial at Harder Stadium

The Crimes

• Isla Vista Incident Map (Google)
• Disturbing Details Released in Isla Vista Massacre (Tyler Hayden, SB Independent)
• Isla Vista Shooting: Echoes of David Attias (Nick Welsh, SB Independent)
• The Problem with Changes in Media Coverage of Mass Shootings (Jess McKillop, UCSB)

The Victims

• Parents of Elliot Rodger’s 3 Stabbing Victims Express Frustration Amid a Search for Answers (WaPo 6/23/14)
• UCSB Friends Were Victims of Circumstance (LAT 6/20/14)
• Rodger's Housemates (Daily Nexus)
• All Six Victims Named (UK Daily Mail)
• Chris Martinez Remembered (KSBY)
• Veronika Weiss Remembered by her Father (Los Angeles Times)
• Katie Cooper and Others  (New York Times)
• Sketches of the Six (Huffington Post)
• UCSB Students Confront the Isla Vista Murders (Christopher Newfield)
• Remembering David, George, James (Cloudminder 5/26/14)
• Loved (Cloudminder 5/29)

Faculty, Staff, Student, Isla Vista Responses

• Candlelight vigil, Memorial Walk to Mark Anniversary of Isla Vista Ahootings (LAT 5/23/15)
• #YesAllWomen 
• #NotOneMore
• For Us All: A Love Letter to Our Students (English Prof. Aranye Fradenburg, Daily Nexus 5/27)
• Campus Killings Set Off Anguished Conversation about Treatment of Women (NY Times 5/26)
• On The Isla Vista Murders (Christopher Newfield, UCSB 5)
• UC Santa Barbara Tragedy Receives Support Across UC System (Daily Cal 5/28)

Mental Health System

• In Isla Vista, red flags came too late (Los Angeles Times)
• Why mass killers need to explain their plan (USA Today)
• California Killer's Parents Frantically Searched for Son During Shooting (CNN; NY Times version)

Guns

• Richard Martinez Statement on Death of Son (CNN-YouTube)
• Richard Martinez Further Statement on Gun Violence (ABC May 27th)
• Distraught Father Blames Politicians and NRA (guns mixed with memorial coverage) (UK Daily Mail)
• Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right (Adam Gopnik)
• Elliot Rodger's Guns Were Purchased Legally (Truth About Guns)

Misogyny

• I.V. Killings and Misogynist Extremism (Laurie Penny, New Statesman)
• Elliot Rodger and Men Who Hate Women (The Belle Jar)
• The Most Powerful #YesAllWomen Links (Time)
• The Media Scapegoating of Rodger's High School Crush (Slate May 27th)

Elliot Rodger

• YouTube Channel
• Why Do Girls Hate Me So Much? 
• Rodger Apparently Beat Up in I.V. in July 2013 & Other Coverage (KSBY)
• Friend: Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodger wanted to ‘dominate the world'  [Actually about being bullied] (NY Daily News)
• Elliot Rodger is our Problem (Salon 5/31)
• Elliot O. Rodger’s Killings in California Followed Years of Withdrawal (NYT 6/1)
• Santa Barbara Killer's Chilling Plot: A Timeline

Since loud media doubts about the university's value have been the backdrop of my entire academic career, I wasn't shocked to look at the back page of my New York Times Sunday Review and see two headlines: "Professors are Prejudiced, Too," and "Rape and the College Brand." 

The findings of the first piece should have been obvious--but weren't-- through all the years of right-wing claims that universities and their affirmative action programs were biased against white people. The study found the opposite.

Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities.

And there's this:

We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities.  In a perverse twist of academic fate, our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.

Nothing perverse here:  members of wealthier and pro-corporate disciplines would logically show systematic bias in favor of their core constituency, which is also society's dominant group.  This has been endlessly pointed out by people who've followed the findings of the past seventy years of race and gender studies in the humanities and social sciences--and in recent official reports, like that on "Acts of Bias and Discrimination Involving Faculty" at UCLA.  But it's always nice to have confirmation from within a community of traditional prejudice-deniers.

The finding is worth repeating: Academics, the most educated people in society, turn out not to be gender- or color-blind after all. They discriminate in their everyday professional life, and don't need to be dog-whistled to do it.

The authors say they don't think faculty "intentionally discriminate," which actually makes the problem worse. It suggests that academia, particularly at its most influential end, is riddled with unconscious bias over which faculty members therefore have little control.

Why does this bias persist, sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education?  A major reason is that few of us white folk make a conscious effort to root it out.  I don't mean we fail to become color blind, because we can't be. We instantly notice color and gender as quickly as we notice, height, weight, approximate age, or accent. We also instantly impose our interpretative paradigms to generate familiar meanings from those phenotypes--class or community of origin, likely friend or possible foe, etc  But though we can't be color blind, we can change our interpretative frames. Why don't faculty work harder on making these frames visible and criticizable and changeable? Why don't we at least work harder than the wider society does, especially around a residual, biased expectation that white males will show higher academic quality?

Of course many of us do, but there are also entrenched reasons why most of us on university faculties do not.  One is that at least some faculty gravitate as much towards high social status as towards high academic achievement, so their their bias towards white males is statistically coherent.  A deeper reason is that many if not most of us on university faculties are talent aristocrats.  We aren't that interested applying race or gender egalitarianism in an inevitably color-conscious world because we aren't egalitarian about ability, reward, or opportunity in the first place.   We could reduce unconscious bias against women and students of color were we to believe broadly in a "democracy of intelligence." But we can't because we don't--we are as status conscious as any other segment of American society, and perhaps increasingly insecure about status rather than militantly opposed to ending status inequality's shredding of aggregate educational opportunity and achievement.  If we aren't opposed to those kinds of inequality of outcome, we can't uproot class, race, and gender status as their inputs.

The second article is about the national coverage of many universities' mishandling of sexual assault.  Ross Douthat, one of the Times's conservative columnists, describes the university as corrupt, by which he interestingly means replacing the educational mission with a corporate one.

Corruption is a strong word, but not, I think, unmerited. Over the last few generations, America’s most prominent universities — both public and private — have pursued a strategy of corporate expansion, furious status competition, and moral and pedagogical retreat. But the moral retreat has in certain ways been disguised: elite schools have abandoned any explicit role in policing the choices and shaping the character of their students, but they have masked that abdication in the nostrums of contemporary P.C. piety— promising diversity, tolerance, safe spaces, etc., with what can feel like a preacher’s sincerity and self-righteousness. 

This has allowed them, notionally, to be many things to many people: students are promised adult liberty and a community that will protect them if anything goes wrong; parents get a fuzzy rather than a corporate vibe from deans, R.A.’s and other authority figures; admissions departments get to pitch a fun, even bacchanalian lifestyle while faculty-lounge liberals get to feel as if they’re part of a worthy ideological project. 

This was going well until Mr. Douthat distracted himself by trotting in political correctness.  In fact, there is no contradiction between liberty and community. Universities synthesize these, which is one reason that conservatives have a hard time understanding what they do.  The synthesis does not mean "policing the choices," since the development process requires that students learn how to make their own choices--in part by freely making them.  It does mean "shaping the character," but dialogically not unilaterally, and again through practice, both in and out of class.  Universities are engaged in  human development, which is not an "ideological project" as such, though it does involve studying and bringing ideologies to consciousness, which we never manage to do completely, including human development through higher education as we now practice it. Neither faculty nor administrators can directly control the educational process, since it is also always student self-education.

Then Mr. Douthat gets back on track.

But the modern university’s primary loyalty is not really to liberalism or political correctness or any kind of ideological design: It’s to the school’s brand, status and bottom line. And when something goes badly wrong, or predators run loose — as tends to happen in a world where teens and early-twentysomethings are barely supervised and held to no standard higher than consent — the mask of kindness and community slips, and the face revealed beneath is often bloodless, corporate and intent on self-protection.

This is true--the pursuit of multiple revenue streams has cost the university its unique educational profile, and neither the public nor its students assume it will chose principle--or care of its own people and mission--over its image with outside funders and politicians, which it translates as potential revenues to come.

Mr. Douthat is right that the university has a problem with its social mission.  But then so does the faculty.  I went to a couple of meetings this week about stepping up faculty governance, one about the reform of the academic senate and another about faculty unionization.  Given recent UC experience, it's pretty clear that faculty unions would give faculty members more say over issues like health benefit cuts, pension changes, educational funding, and policy questions where, as Bob Samuels pointed out, "faculty don't even have a seat at the table."

That is a major problem.  But I'm making a different point here.  More faculty governance won't be better faculty governance unless we faculty decide we really want low-cost, high quality higher ed for an ever-growing percentage of the country's population.  Do we really want mass quality?  Do we really want research and teaching to be publicly funded because they are so deliberately democratic?  If we don't really want that public mission, and if we would rather focus on improving our own status in a hierarchical educational order, then we might as well stick with our current administrations.

Was Deltopia a riot that required a massive police response?  The KEYT news photo on the left (7th in the slideshow) shows the largest crowd near the police that I can find.  I'll discuss what they are actually doing a bit later.

In Part 1, I analyzed the rhetorical escalation of Deltopia 2014 into a riot. I described two different narratives about the event (my titles): (1) "Police Shut-Down of UCSB Deltopia Party Sparks Some Resistance"; and (2) "UCSB Deltopia Party Becomes Riot: Student Attacks on Police Continue for Hours").  I argued that the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department had worked overtime to replace (1) with (2), the riot narrative, and that the media cooperated fully in making the riot the accepted story of what happened.

I also noted that this narrative has been operationalized as a formal request from the LEEDIR police information repository for civilian videos and photos during the "civil unrest" at Deltopia.  This request means, in effect, that the Sheriff's Department has designated Deltopia as a "large emergency event" like the Boston Marathon bombing for which LEEDIR was created.  As far as I can tell, anyone who attended Deltopia can wind up in this electronic data base, and have visual or audio recordings of them stored, scanned, analyzed, and put to use in ways that have not been explained.

What was it about Deltopia itself that could justify this extraordinary step? 

I was particularly interested in Sheriff Department Public Information Officer Kelly Hoover's Airtalk claim that "probably every sheriff's deputy I talked to that was out there was hit with something," which suggested many or even scores of police injuries. The Department information page identified six police injuries, while noting that "26 people were transported to area hospitals." This week, I asked various journalists whether they had updated information about the police injuries. Giuseppe Ricapito, author of The Bottom Line's front page articles, replied as follows:

I called SB Sheriff PIO Kelly Hoover to clarify some information regarding violence during the civil unrest. The only direct violence between a [civilian] and officer was the "powder keg" for the whole civil unrest, when (17 year old) Desmond Edwards struck the officer in the head with his backpack filled with alcohol containers. She did tell me however that another altercation had occurred earlier in the day, and the officer involved was injured and requires surgery on his arm.

Even this moment of violence--the Edwards "powder keg"--may have been exaggerated, as the Independent reports (h/t Jay) that the famous "backpack contained only one half-full Bacardi bottle, not multiple bottles like reports have stated," such that the officer's injuries may have come from falling as he grabbed for Mr. Edwards.   Mr. Edwards has pled non-guilty, and more about this unclear incident will emerge from the report.

Whatever happened there, it now seems that injuries to officers were very limited, which is of course good news, and this blog joins other outlets in wishing them a speedy recovery.  I also want to note, for the record, my awareness that policing Isla Vista during "party lockdown" is a difficult if not miserable job:  see 3:30-4:00 in this Deltopia video for an example of the unpleasant work involved in containing a certain kind of male party idiot. Many students I spoke with expressed general appreciation for the members of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol; all expressed hostility toward the party idiots.

* * *

But if we are down to two police injuries, what is the evidence that Deltopia was a riot or "civil unrest" in which a mob turned on cops, in KEYT's tag line?  Let's try the video evidence.

The main local news archive can be found on KEYT's URL "Thousands Riot in the Streets of Isla Vista".  There are six Live Shot clips at the heart of the action that run from 11:00 pm to 12:17 am. The crowd seems to come to a couple hundred at its largest. It appears to me to range from 95% to 100% male.  The sequences begin with a stop sign being uprooted, and over the course of the clips, two stop signs are waved around, a small white station wagon is shown to have been trashed (off camera),  a mattress is passed around and then lit on fire, and a few bottles are thrown in the direction of the police. KEYT got third-year UCSB student Montana MacGlachlan on the phone while she was hiding out with ten other people in a garage. She said, "most people are just trying to get home safely" (Live Shot 2, 2:00).  She didn't think I.V. residents were involved in the vandalism:  "we don't intentionally ruin where we live."

The correspondent named Derek reported that the stop signs were used to thrash the white "minivan" and that two officers were hit with objects.  He also said that "the people involved in this activity" from time to time throw something "in the direction of law enforcement and don't care where it goes." (Live Shot 4, 3:00 on).  This seems like a good description of the desultory action.

KEYT anchor C.J. Ward try to drum up interest by saying,

I've seen old film of the riots from the 70s when they burned down the bank, but I've never seen anything like this . . where you seen them literally shut down Isla Vista and have to call in the SWAT team and the dogs. This is just crazy to see what is going on right now " (6:00 . . .)

But there was more action in the commentary and reminiscing that in the video.  The video is lousy--an unchanging shot from well to the rear of the action--and it shows the crowd shrinking steadily over the course of the hour. By midnight there may only be two dozen people left, some obviously drunk and most appeared to qualify as what I.V. residents call "randoms."

After midnight (Live Shot 6, 8:20), things perk up when KEYT's Derek says, "We're getting shot at right now."  But he means getting shot at by the police.  "I'm getting shot at by pepper balls and by rubber bullets. The police have really come in full force and I'm definitely not in a safe space by now."  He leaves, and the video image disappears in a cloud of tear gas.  The story there is a lack of safety caused by a police offensive.  But KEYT ignores this and starts replaying earlier footage of the crowd not long after 11 pm.

Quite a bit of amateur video wound up on You Tube, most of it apparently shot by I.V. residents. The Daily Nexus coverage included a typical example that runs nearly 7 minutes. The video shows one or two dozen police around a police truck facing off against the same number of young men out in front of a larger crowd spilling over from a party into the street.  As the video begins, a couple of men are pushing a dumpster into the street--probably Del Playa--and a few others are getting plastic trash bins. One gets thrown towards the cops.  Two blue plastic bins are pushed on their side blocking the street, and then a third is pushed in to join the others. At around 1:20 the police order the street group to disperse, but most people aren't involved in the bin pushing and may not feel like the police are talking to them. Three minutes in there are a half-dozen bins and two or three dumpsters in the street, creating a no-man's land between the police line and the dozen or so people who've been involved in creating this semi-blockade. Around 5:05 the police fire tear gas. Thirty seconds later the street is empty.  The gas drifts up to the balcony where the video is being filmed, and amidst various exclamations the video ends. Another, longer video shows what may be a separate incident or the same incident shot from further down the block, in which the crowd is larger, and parts of it at various points shout "fuck the police." Although a larger number of people are involved, they are keeping their distance.  There is no physical contact or even proximity between the police and the crowd. 

Loudlabs does a little better with audio and visual effects. There are students coughing on teargas and decent shots of the police doing their best to maintain ever-popular visuals of red and lavender emergency lights illuminating drifting clouds of tear gas.  I lean in when a "fuck-the-police" chant starts at 6:10. I lean back when it dies out at 6:18.  People are just standing around, apparently enjoying talking to each other and perhaps not wanting to miss whatever happens.  But nothing does. The same goes with another shorter clip--no conflicts with police. There's a longer video from within the crowd itself: a sheriff line is visible.  At 5:36 some UCSB police ride in from behind the crowd on bikes, and they are cheered.  At 7:45 the sheriffs declare an unlawful assembly. The cameraholder retreats, and the rest of the video is shot from behind. There's no sign of conflict or of fighting with the cops.  A helicopter flies by like a slow-moving meteor. There are fireworks for a minute.  Cars try to park or drive down the street. 

* * *

By far the best witnessing came from UCSB students who wrote columns and editorials about their experiences--or who in some cases wrote to me. Senior Alexa Shapiro spoke for many when she described a not particularly fun ordeal trying to get back to her apartment.  She encountered, block by block, "more tear gas, more running crowds, and more impassable streets"; their progress was interrupted repeatedly.  The implication was that the police pressure on crowds to clear the streets actually made the streets more congested, at least for a time, and stirred up unpleasant confusion and fear. 

Similarly, senior Jay Grafft, who shared Ms. Shapiro's (and many many UCSB students' ) dislike for Deltopia overall, reported from his frontline position on Del Playa:  

That night, S.W.A.T. patrol vehicles were racing up and down right in front of my driveway, while behind my backyard glass bottles and flashbangs were being flung through the air. Whenever I stepped outside, I would either immediately start choking on tear gas, or be [asked] to return to my house by an armed paramilitary officer. I realized that, by that point, the cops really didn’t have a clue as to who was part of the riot or not, meaning that anyone could present a potential danger . . . 

Del Playa resident Sean Carroll also assigned a disruptive role to the police:

From my perspective, those walking up and down the street didn’t seem that out of control; I’ve seen the same sketchy fuckfaces our community loathes on normal weekend nights acting way more disrespectful. I didn’t see a single fight during Deltopia. I don’t doubt there were a few, but as someone who goes out three or more nights a week I’m fairly used to drunken aggressive idiots getting into it. So it seemed pretty unusual to walk from party to party during the day and early evening and not come across any—during Deltopia, no less.  

The point being that, leading up to the riot, the crowd on DP was not some mob causing problems. The daytime tens-of-thousands had thinned out, and the amount was pretty normal sized for a Saturday night. Why were there officers dressed in riot gear and armored vehicles in I.V. all day? What did the police think would happen when they decided to charge down DP at 10 p.m., clashing with people who had been drinking all day?  

If you search “Deltopia 2014” on YouTube, my three-minute video documenting the riot is one of the first to pop up. And you know what it shows? The riot started AFTER the cops lined up with shields and an armored vehicle. It shows a select few individuals (read: fucking dipshits) throwing bottles, yelling “Fuck the police” and inciting more to join. And above all it shows that with tear gas and fear, the cops chose to abruptly stop Deltopia exactly when they wanted to do so. By blockading DP right where the 66 and 67 blocks meet, police ensured that anyone and everyone walking in that direction would have run into it. It was only a matter of time before some sketchy fools would react. 

In my discussions with students, I heard variations of this same story.  In most cases, they assign the police a leading role in the escalation.

I received another eyewitness account that focused on the "riot" as a police-knucklehead co-production.

I wasn't there for the beginning of the civil unrest (which occurred at around 9:30), but I went out to Del Playa and Camino Pescadero a little before 11, after DP had been shut down by the officers. In terms of "real contact" between the students and officers, I saw none in the beginning. The officers were enforcing the "no man's land" between them and the students- anyone who attempted to bridge the gap and advance toward the officers were usually turned away by rubber bullets. The closest I saw to a student getting near the officers was when some people pushed out a large trash bin into the no man's land (as it rolled through the crowd they almost ran over a seemingly really drunk girl who had been knocked down to the ground by it). It was an effective barricade for a while, but they fled after some tear gas. After most of the mayhem had ended, around 1:30, there was a police vehicle, with 4 armed mounted officers on back in riot gear, slowly rolling down Pescadero (presumably to flank the few remaining students), and after a few bottles were thrown at the truck they fired a bunch of shots then turned to drive fast down Trigo. . . . 

In terms of rioting directed at the officers- I think its impossible to quantify exactly what the rioters were there for, what they were opposing (if they were opposing anything at all) or why many of them chose to stay in the area and engage the officers, from a distance, with their presence. At the peak of the unrest, from where I was in the crowd, some people were yelling for a charge, others were trying to cool everyone down, some were laughing and continuing to party in the streets, and others were just destroying things. And, not to mention, that a lot of the people there were sort of apathetic bystanders watching everything play out. At the time I thought it was an incredibly free moment. The officers were so concerned with vacating the crowd that they weren't policing anything occurring within and around it. I also talked to a few AS Execs about how closing down DP forced students into the riot zone (some were immediately pushed out, in droves, to the edge, and others congregated there because they couldn't  access their homes in the blocked off areas), but they disagreed that the students were completely restricted.  

Several students thought the police used excessive force.  Here's a description of one from a female resident of Del Playa.

I live in the middle of the 66 block and witnessed the entire event.  I’m sure you know that police officers were assaulted (which I never think is right).  However, I wanted to let you know that I watched the police exercise brutality on civilians as well.  After the tear gas had cleared the crowd off of the street, I watched officers shoot at my neighbor’s balcony (in which they hit students inside of their own home and broke windows).  I also watched a couple, who hid in my yard when the tear gas hit, try to walk home but instead, they were confronted by three cops each who in turn severely beat their legs down with sticks, held then to the ground, and insisted on arresting them.

I wrote back to her to ask whether she meant that she had herself seen police officers being assaulted.  No, she answered:

I watched the whole scene outside for about two hours and I never once saw any students or visitors attack the police. Although I live a little further down from where the “riot” began on the 67 block, I did not see any civilian attack a police officer or throw anything their way.  All I saw were kids being scattered from the tear gas, kids hiding in my front yard (and in my neighbor’s), kids being arrested if they happened to be seen on the street, and my neighbors, who had all been at home on their second story balcony, being shot at with rubber bullets.  (I also had at least one police officer--who was unprovoked--point a gun up at my second story balcony the entire two hours).

This student concluded,

it was in no way a riot but instead, one single action (the kid who swung the bottles at a police officer on the 67 block), a fury of excitement from the crowd (who ripped out stop signs etc), and then really aggressive behavior by law enforcers. 

By early this week, there were at least as many reports of police brutality against bystanders as of verified injuries to police officers.

*  *  *

The narrative that now makes the most sense to me is as follows.  Prior to the Edwards Incident, Deltopia 2014 had seen one act of serious violence--a stabbing in which the suspect was immediately captured by police--but for an event with 20,000 participants was otherwise going pretty well.  Then the 17-year-old Mr. Edwards, involved in some kind of scuffle, hurt an officer with his backpack.  A call went out of officer down.  This made the crowd seem more hostile to at least some of the police, which increased an "us-against-them" mentality (h/t Phil). The initial police surge to help their fellow officer created anxiety and confusion in the crowd. Officers from outside agencies arrived, so there were not only out-of-towners among the partiers but out-of-towners among the cops. The police settled on an "unlawful assembly" strategy that committed them to clearing the streets.  They did not try to stop specific acts of vandalism like the stop sign uprooting or the attack on the white car. They decided instead to get rid of the crowd as a whole: hence the flashbangs and tear gas, the shooting of rubber bullets at people not in the main crowd, and the rousting, arresting, and allegations of the isolated beating of people well away from the action and of rubber bullets fired into apartment windows.  The police were not in fact attacked, though they were sometimes engaged--apparently always at a distance--by individuals.

I use the term "police occupation" to describe this situation in which the police decided not just to contain and arrest the disorderly and the violent individuals, but to purge everybody and retake the streets.   A problem with this strategy is always that it implies--indeed creates--collective guilt.  It also commits the police to the use of at least limited force against bystanders and not just against the small number of actually disorderly or violent people. The introduction of large numbers of police with helmets, weapons, and armored vehicles into the streets means "riot," even if there is zero resistance--or isolated and half-hearted resistance as in this case.  When the action is over, to help people ignore the active police role in co-creating the "riot" itself, and to marginalize the video of street clearing and occupation and the reports of brutality that surface later, police spokespersons committed themselves to a riot narrative that is still working to justify any use of force--or retroactive surveillance--as thrust upon police by a mob.

The Sheriff's Department embedded the collective guilt of UCSB-IV in the media coverage, as I discussed in Part 1.  They continue to lump major violent crimes together with minor incidents. In one (misdated) press release, they created a line-up of three Deltopia arrestees.  The first, a non-student, is accused of the attempted murder of a Rhode Island man who was visiting his brother in Isla Vista.  The second, UCSB student Otis Washington, is charged with "vehicle tampering and resisting arrest." The third, UCSB student Tomas Delaveau, is charged with "battery on a peace officer" for allegedly spitting on one.  This incongruous group is made even stranger by what we do know about Mr Washington's case: he is on film explaining to KEYT news (at 2:00) that he had jumped on his friend's car to dance, his friends then said "let's go let's go we gotta get out of here," so he started running: "I guess that initiated some type of response in the police so they all tackled me from different angles."  Why did the sheriff's office present the the car dancer and the spitter along with the knife assailant? It only makes sense as part of a campaign to present everyone at Deltopia as part of a dangerous riot spinning out of control.

This description, however, isn't supported by the evidence. We should reject the Sheriff Department's and the media's storyline that, in my terms, "UCSB Deltopia Party Becomes Riot: Student Attacks on Police Continue for Hours." That's not what happened.  The more accurate headline for this event is the other one I proposed: "Police Shut-Down of UCSB Deltopia Party Sparks Some Resistance: Officer Was Injured During Arrest."  This second narrative also has the benefit of avoiding the collective slander of IV-UCSB. It might also prompt an independent review of police conduct and policy in Isla Vista, which I now believe is necessary.

In Part 3, I'll look into Deltopia's background and some related undergraduate educational issues.