Editorial: Napolitano responsible for regaining student trust after protest comment

By Editorial Board

Last week, University of California President Janet Napolitano expressed an insultingly cavalier attitude toward student protesters at the UC Board of Regents meeting, endangering her already precarious relationship with a distrustful student body and toppling her carefully crafted image as a concerned and understanding administrator.

Now, it’s Napolitano’s responsibility to mend fences, preferably by putting away her tepid apologies and proposing a series of real protections for student protesters at regents meetings.

In the midst of protests against the proposed tuition hike, a hot mic caught Napolitano murmuring to UC Board of Regents Chair Bruce Varner that they didn’t “have to listen to this crap.” When news of her gaffe began to spread, Napolitano made a lukewarm and rather confusing apology to students at the meeting, saying that she “was caught on a mic with a word that was unfortunate.”

There are almost too many problems here to list.

Not only did Napolitano reduce the real concerns of student protesters to “crap,” she made a disturbing declaration that she did not have to listen to them speak. If the UC President is not required to listen to students at a public meeting that acts as an avenue for them to make their concerns known, when exactly is she supposed to listen?

Napolitano’s comment is in line with a pattern of troublingly overblown administrative reactions to student protests at regents meetings. University police arrived to the regents meeting Wednesday in full riot gear and threatened the 30 students with arrest if they did not leave the building. That kind of gross overreaction to a small group of students making a scene at a regents meeting exacerbates student perception that the regents are not interested in listening to their concerns.

Moreover, Napolitano’s apology should hardly be dignified with the use of that word – her phrasing was the exact kind of windy rhetorical jig one would expect from a practiced politician required to admit to wrongdoing but trying to dodge blame.

She owes us more than that.

If she’s concerned with rebuilding trust, Napolitano has a long road ahead of her. But she can begin by proposing a series of immediate changes to the way the regents handle student protests.

To start, the regents should offer longer public comment periods to ensure that everyone gets an opportunity to speak; they should not remove protesters from meetings unless the protest has lasted for several hours, threatening their ability to hold the meeting; and they should not be allowed to leave the room through student protests simply because they do not feel they have to listen. Perhaps most importantly, the regents should make sure that UCPD is handling crowd control correctly, following every guideline that came out of the Reynoso report after the UC Davis pepper spray incident.

To make matters worse, it was clear at the meeting that Napolitano has made little progress creating tenable solutions for the UC’s financial woes. Napolitano and Gov. Jerry Brown updated the regents on the progress of their two-person committee, tasked at the last board meeting with creating solutions to the UC’s funding problems as it faces yet another tuition hike. They said the committee will not be making recommendations for several months. Napolitano said they might have something to bring the regents “hopefully, some time in the near future, without putting a date on it.”

It’s rather audacious of the UC president to say that she does not want to hear students protest their rising tuition even as she fails to bring concrete solutions to the table.

Napolitano entered her tenure as UC president on rocky terms with students in the system who were concerned with her track record in the Obama administration and with the circumstances of her appointment.

She’s worked hard to overcome that initial mistrust, but this comment threatens the progress she’s made – not because the word was “unfortunate” but because it betrays a troubling sentiment.

[Source]: Daily Bruin