The Los Angeles Times Misses the Point
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau announced he was resigning yesterday and I know I speak for a fair number of students, faculty and staff in saying "Good riddance." But you would never know that faculty had debated a vote of no confidence in Birgeneau's during recent months or that student government was presently having a similar discussion if you read the Los Angeles Times : Birgeneau, whose annual salary is $436,800, presided over the highly political campus during an uptick in protests over tuition hikes. In November, the Occupy movement erected a tent city on campus and student demonstrators contended that UC police brutally used batons to evict them. There is no need to frame the UC police brutality as an unproven allegation. There are lots and lots of videos of what happened : police beat up students and professors before a tent city was ever even erected (and they beat students the same way two years before in 2009, it's a pattern). One ...