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Hundreds of UC students gathered last Thursday on the campus of UC Riverside to confront the state university system’s governing body, the Board of Regents, over on-going tuition hikes. During a limited public comment section at the beginning of the UC Regents’ finance meeting, students strongly shared their harsh criticism. Eighteen students then shut down the meeting with a sit-in, arms linked. In the style of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the students overwhelmed the meeting by reading from a letter which criticized the Regents, saying “[w]e have lost faith in the regents’ ability or desire to serve our needs and we will voice our dissent.” The students want the Regents to demand more money from the state to keep state funded education affordable and accessible. The meeting eventually reconvened and while the Regents did discuss alternative revenue sources for the University, they only briefly mentioned a single tax initiative. A majority of students were left outside the meeting, facing off with a large number of police officers. According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise 100 University police officers and nearly 100 officers from the Riverside Police Department and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department were on the scene, keeping protesters away from the building. Three people were arrested. Police fired pepper balls, paint guns and used batons against the students. Videos taken by students at the protest have proliferated online, showing injuries to those attacked. After the meeting ended at the Riverside campus, about two hundred remaining protesters attempted to block the Regents from leaving. Eventually the Board members were escorted out by police along an alternative route. The day’s events are only the latest in a series of confrontations that UC students have organized against university officials, which have been marred by police violence. A protest late last year on the UC Davis campus ended with peaceful protesters who were sitting down with armed linked, being pepper sprayed in the face by a police officer.

Uprising correspondent Natalie Yahr was at UC Riverside for the Regents meeting and she files this special report, the first half of which includes the public comment section, followed by the protests outside the meeting.

Natalie is a UC Davis alum and the producer of “Whose University?,” a radio documentary about how we think about our public universities. It’s got elephants, vampires, money, blood, and even a double-decker bus.

Click here to listen to it: http://www.localdirtradio.com/2010/06/whose-university.html