Saying no to Napolitano

ON FEBRUARY 13, Janet Napolitano, the new president of the University of California (UC) system, visited UC Berkeley, the last stop on her "listening and learning" tour of all 10 campuses in the UC system. At every step of the way, she has been met with student dissent.

At Berkeley, the Students of Color Solidarity Coalition (SCSC) organized a spirited rally of a few hundred people. During the rally, 11 students occupied the Blum Center, where they stayed for 26 hours while others supported them from the outside.

The grievances against Napolitano are numerous. As governor of Arizona, Napolitano invoked the federal 287(g) program for Maricopa County, which covers the Phoenix area--this allowed police officers to be trained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to harass, racially profile and arrest undocumented immigrants. Later, as head of the Department of Homeland Security, where she was ultimately responsible for nearly 2 million deportations, Napolitano supervised the "secure communities" (S-COMM) program, which only further facilitated the ability of local law enforcement officers to act as deportation agents.

Now, she has taken the helm of California's flagship university system, where an estimated 900 undocumented students face a new threat.

In addition to drawing attention to Napolitano's immigration policies, SCSC is also focusing on the undemocratic process by which Napolitano was appointed. Despite her total lack of an educational background, she was tapped by the UC Board of Regents, the ultimate administrative body for the top public university system in the world.

The decision by SCSC to occupy the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies allowed the group to make connections to the continued privatization and militarization of the university system. The Blum Center, named after a UC regent, prides itself in training students to "become agents of change in the struggle against global poverty," but in reality, it is plays a part in creating the global poverty it claims to struggle against.

Blum has a history of conflicts of interest when it comes to the center's mission. As SCSC pointed out, "Blum owns the equity management firm Blum Capital, which has massive investments in the companies that do all of the construction at the UC." So it is probably no surprise that "UC Regent Richard Blum was central in proposing Janet Napolitano" as UC president.

AFSCME Local 3299, which represents the UC service workers, recently won an historic agreement with the UC management for its service workers. However, just a few years ago, ICE agents arrested Jesús Gutiérrez, one of Local 3299's activists--showcasing the direct effects that Napolitano's policies had on the UC community.

The action at Berkeley has been part of the statewide resistance movement against Napolitano, organizing under the banner of "No2Napolitano." Students, some of whom have bravely revealed themselves as undocumented, are showing their will to take a stand and fight back.