The Shock Doctrine Goes to College

This March in Davis, California, eleven students and one faculty member were issued letters from the assistant district attorney of Yolo County charging us with twenty-one misdemeanors each: twenty counts of sitting (“obstructing movement”) and one of conspiracy to sit (“conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor”). The Banker’s Dozen are alleged to have caused the permanent closure of the campus US Bank branch: earthly representative of the university’s celestial bargain with for-profit enterprise, and of the credit-fueled education bubble that weds students to crushing debt burdens. The university, for the moment still led by Linda “Pepper Spray” Katehi, had forwarded the charges; six of the dozen were also recipients of the administration’s tender mercies last November, when the chancellor earned her nickname.

Some see in this a war of maneuver between university and bank, currently bruiting high-stakes countersuits against each other. Or a bid for leverage against the civil suit, filed by students pepper-sprayed in November, in which the university stands to lose big. Others express disbelief that the peaceful political protest alleged at the bank should be prosecuted in the criminal courts, on the county residents' dime. And still others wonder at the suggestion that a dozen members of the scruffy, do-nothing liberal elite put to flight an office of the fifth-largest commercial bank in the nation.

Read on...