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UC Davis student protestors have called for a campus wide strike Monday November 28th, the day of a scheduled UC Board of Regents meeting. The call was made yesterday after Davis set up tents near the spot of the now-infamous pepper spray incident. A protest against fee hikes at the UC Davis campus last Friday erupted into violence when a group of students seated peacefully on the ground were pepper-sprayed unprovoked by a police officer named Lt. John Pike. A video of the incident has gone viral and generated a ground swell of support for the student movement that is organizing under the banner of the growing national “Occupy” movement. However, students and faculty at California state campuses have been politically active on the issue of budget cuts and fee hikes for several years now. Justifying the unprovoked pepper spray attack, UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza said that her officers were “cut off from their support” – however videos of the incident prove otherwise. Pike and Spicuzza have both been placed on administrative leave. UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi has also come under fire over the incident with a petition calling for her resignation garnering over 50,000 signatures. At a press conference to respond to those calls, Occupy Davis activists staged a protest during which the Chancellor refused to leave her building for hours, giving the impression that she was being held hostage. After hours of persuasion by students that she would not in any way be harmed while leaving, she walked out with escorts while rows of silently seated protesters watched and photographed her. Katehi has taken responsibility for the incident of police brutality saying “I am deeeply saddened that this happened,” but has so far refused to resign. UC system President Mark Yudof has also weighed in saying he was appalled by the images of police brutality on campus. Yudof has called for a meeting of all ten of the UC’s Chancellors to “ensure proportional law enforcement response to nonviolent protest.” However, neither Katehi nor Yudof have responded to the political demands of students and faculty that public higher education in California continue to remain accessible to the majority of Californians and that faculty stop being furloughed or endure pay cuts. Yudof has proposed tuition hikes of between 8-16 percent every year for the next four years so that by the year 2015, UC students will be expected to pay $22,000 a year. The California State University system is facing similar hikes and faculty pay cuts which have generated similar protests from students and faculty.

GUEST: Joshua Clover, English Professor at UC Davis, present at last Friday’s protest, Michael Jilio-Ryan, a UC Davis student who was arrested on Friday

Find out more at www.occupydavis.org.

Watch a video of the pepper-spraying cop here: