Unless you live under a rock, you have seen the Pepper Spray Incident at UC Davis as well as the scores of the Pepper Spray Cop memes. Yes, I do have another meme of my own of this horrifyingly casual display of arrogant authority. Memes help cut the tension and technical people do have a warped sense of humor…..
* Dandelions think they are flowers until someone tells them they are a weed…….
The video is disturbing and compelling There is the officer, strolling along the row of seated students – as innocent as dandelions* – spraying Round-Up on the weeds in the garden of UC Davis. There are the students, reeling in horror, pain and disbelief. The nonchalant attitude of the officer stuns the sensibilities of all but the most cold-hearted person. It has occurred to me that this video reveals something deeply troubling both within our society as a whole and within the University system in particular.
We don’t care about our young people – this much is plain to see. I could go on and on about the future that has been devised for them - a destroyed environment, a corrupt and self-serving political class and the economic injustice that is driving the Occupy movement. But many others are doing that work and my particular area of concern is the University System and what the Pepper Spray Incident says about the sorry state of affairs for young people pursuing what we have told them is their ticket to a better life – a college degree.
Student unrest in the UC System is driven by impending tuition hikes of possibly 81%, draconian budget cuts that absolutely affect the quality of education the students receive and by the police brutality inflicted on their fellow students at the UC Berkley Occupy Movement. At WellSpring, I spend my days surrounded by young people who are frustrated and disgusted by a university system that is failing them but afraid to speak out for fear of jeopardizing their fragile and perilous futures. Everyone knows trends start on the West Coast and migrate slowly towards the backwater that is Florida. What I see in that video are young people, finally losing their fear and exercising their freedom to air their grievances, because what, after all, is the definition of freedom?
The University system does not care very much for our young people either; students – and undergraduates in particular – see it, know it and are sick of it. If we cared, we would not saddle them with enormous amounts of student debt in order to receive an increasingly irrelevant education that in no way prepares them for the challenges of the 21st century. We would put a stop to cattle-car style education that packs hundreds of students into memorize-and-regurgitate classes that mostly test their ability to game the system and get out. We would hire instructors who actually WANT to teach young people instead of regarding them as weeds in the sweetly-scented garden of university research.
The Walk of Shame video is so compelling - I feel a surge of pride in the young people at UC Davis for having the courage of their convictions throughout the protests that both preceded the Pepper Spray Incident as well as in the volatile aftermath. The casual disregard shown towards the students in the Pepper Spray video gives a face and a place to the casual disregard the University shows for the young people it is charged with educating on the whole. The self-serving instinct to protect itself at all costs is laid bare in this incident. As the students shout at the officers that day “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” it is apparent that they already know it is not them. For all the lofty talk and slogans like “Students First”, universities could give a rat’s-ass about undergraduates and their very legitimate grievances over the impoverished future we have devised for them. The Big Lie – that a 4-year degree is a ticket punch to a great job and the pathway into the middle class - is unraveling right before their eyes as more and more students realize that their cattle-car courses and memorize-and-regurgitate programs of study leave them unprepared to enter the workforce yet saddled with enormous debt that they may never be able to repay. They are mad as hell and now they are doing something about it. The silent faces and peircing eyes that watched UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi as she walked to her car that night are watching us all – wondering, waiting to see what we will do next. There is not much distance between spraying and shooting and they know it. They are no longer afraid.
