Faculty leaders want UCSC to reverse policy of arresting tree-sit supporters

A small group of professors sympathetic to the demonstration's goal of opposing the university expansion plans are willing to get arrested for hoisting pumpkin pies, chicken salad and other "conspiratorial" items to tree sitters, which UCSC administrators say are "aiding and abetting" illegal activity that has created unsanitary and unsafe conditions.

Even faculty opposed to the 10-week-old tree sit say the university's recent arrests of tree sitters and supporters -- the first since the protest's opening day on Nov. 7 -- aren't the best way to deal with dissension, especially on a campus founded on activist principles of teaching social justice. Several faculty leaders are working behind the scenes to convince the administration to reverse its course of arresting demonstrators and supporters.

"From November through the winter break, the administration took a very hands-off viewpoint of the entire thing -- that strategy was working quite well," said earth and planetary sciences professor Quentin Williams, who is president of the Academic Senate. "While I completely understand why they're doing what they're doing, I would have pursued their earlier strategy."

University police arrested physics professor Zack Schlesinger after he supplied food to the demonstrators Dec. 21, then named him as a "co-conspirator" with eight other defendants in a civil complaint designed to shut down the protest. Officers have since arrested two nonfaculty supporters and used pepper spray against a large group that tried to send up food up the trees, where at least four squatters remain.

Lawyers for the defendants have argued that tree sitting and supporting the demonstrators are First Amendment rights. Politics professor Michael Urban agrees, saying his choice to feed the tree sitters should be protected.

Urban says he received a phone call from a university official Jan. 10 warning him that he had been spotted in a photograph posted on an activist Web site documenting the tree sit. The photo showed Urban delivering pumpkin and pecan pies to demonstrators on Christmas Day -- an act he defiantly repeated last week by delivering chicken salad, though he was not arrested.

"It was an absolute clear threat," Urban said of the call, during which he said the university official mentioned Schlesinger's arrest and added, "We don't want anything like that to happen to you."

Urban said, "It smells to me of a kind of authoritarianism. This simply underscores the importance of protecting one's rights."

UCSC spokesman Jim Burns said he had no knowledge of the call, but said any communication like that would be protected by personnel privacy restrictions.

Burns said the university has not launched a campaign to target specific professors suspected of "aiding and abetting" the protest, but said administrators have clearly warned the whole campus through e-mail and other venues the demonstration is an "illegal occupation" that has disrupted classes and created a hazardous situation that puts climbers and pedestrians at risk.

Burns has resisted characterizations that the university shifted from a passive policy of making no arrests until the winter break that began Dec. 14, which is the same day it filed its civil complaint asking for a temporary injunction against the protest. The university has said it will add other tree sitters or supporters to the lawsuit, but as of Friday had not named Urban or any new defendants.

Rebecca Connolly, a Watsonville attorney retained by the university to pursue the injunction, declined Friday to say whether others arrested at the site or even seen aiding the tree sitters would be added to complaint. She cited "legal strategy."

University police have not arrested everyone known to have brought food to the site, Burns said, because officers are part of a small force that cannot respond to every non-emergency incident, and security guards hired to watch the site 24 hours a day -- at a cost of at least $75,000 for two months -- are not authorized to make arrests.

Williams, the faculty leader, said he believes most of the professors on campus disapprove of the tree sit, mostly because demonstrators allegedly left trash, feces and urine at the site after abandoning a parking lot that acted as their headquarters until Dec. 14.

"If these people fall out, they will go to the morgue," he said. "If they knock a thermos off their platform and someone beneath, that would be a severe injury."

Still, Williams and other faculty leaders are trying to convince administrators to devise a new strategy for dealing with professors who support the demonstrators' opposition to a biomedical facility proposed for the tree-sit site and other expansion plans that allow for 5,000 more students by 2020.

"While I don't endorse the actions the university has taken, I understand them," Williams said. "I understand why they want it to stop. The tree sit, I know, is costing the university quite a bit.

But, Williams said, "As chair of the Senate, I don't like to see faculty getting arrested."

Williams said it would be inappropriate for him to issue a blanket statement recommending professors stop bringing food to the site.

"Faculty make their own decisions and they deal with their own consequences," he said.

Williams said UCSC can't summarily remove a tenured faculty member for supporting the tree sit. Removing a professor is "very complicated," he said, and even serious criminal convictions require a university process before termination could take place.

The university is pursuing only misdemeanor charges against those it has arrested at the site, except for one man not affiliated with the campus who was allegedly carrying two knives at the tree sit when arrested Jan. 5. He was charged with a felony count for the weapons.

"There is always tension between some faculty and the administration around protests," Williams said, adding that part of the university's responsibility is to teach students how to "protest and make your views known appropriately. With nonstudent protests, with some sense, faculty lose their pedagogic role," he said.

Feminist studies professor Bettina F. Aptheker, a nationally known social activist who supports the tree sit, disagrees.

"My point of view is it is a legitimate form of civil disobedience," Aptheker said of the demonstration. "[The tree sitters] are seeking an open dialogue around the Long Range Development Plan, which we have not had. I welcome that."

Aptheker said she brought demonstrators coffee and pumpkin muffins last month, adding, "They were very grateful." She was not cited or arrested.

Aptheker said she and other faculty "are seeking to talk with key administrators about the situation." She declined to identify or say how many professors agree with her or what form their resistance to the university might take, but said the university's policy of arresting demonstrators and supporters "is just going totally in the wrong direction.

"Trash is hardly an excuse for saying this is not a legitimate form of civil disobedience," she said.

Burns, the campus spokesman, acknowledged faculty may have a diverse range of opinion about UCSC's tactics but said most professors favor an end to the protest.

"It's entirely possible there are members of the Senate that do not support the approach the university has taken," Burns said. "There is no doubt that there is a larger number who do, especially people who work and do research in that area of campus."

Chemistry professor Theodore Holman, whose office is in the Physical Sciences Building immediately adjacent to the tree-sit site, said the demonstration has been a health hazard.

"They came in and flushed all the feces and urine down our toilets -- the bathroom stank to holy hell," Holman said of the tree sitters. "We've had lot of vandalism of our building."

Still, Holman said, "I don't think the university is responding in the right way. I don't appreciate them citing Zack [Schlesinger]."

As chair of the Senate's Faculty Welfare Committee, he wants to work with administrators to devise a different strategy because, he said, more arrests seem to create more momentum for the demonstrators. "Maybe if we just ignore them they will all go away," he said.
Contact J.M. Brown at 429-2410 or jbrown [at] santacruzsentinel.com.