ally, we didn't want to see continue. And so rather than engage in further confrontation, it was better to just step back, wait, hope for the better as the evening wears on." She broadly smiled as she praised the restraint shown by the police, all in the service of student safety.
Why was UCSC so unbending?
Meanwhile, the police tactics touched off a firestorm of controversy among students and faculty, who called the pain compliance holds akin to torture and charged that police had resorted to needless brutality and excessive force in making arrests.
Why had UCSC been so unbending about a Tent University on campus? Rutgers University had cooperated with their Tent University. UCSC has enough land for camping. It's the largest UC campus in California.
UC Code 57 on campus is a carbon copy of the City of Santa Cruz camping ordinance, which is directed against homeless people. Both outlaw the act of sleeping between 11 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. and the use of blankets. Setting up a campsite is illegal 24 hours a day. But at UC, it is also illegal to sleep in your vehicle from dusk to dawn and the cost of a ticket is $162.
With 3000 homeless people in Santa Cruz County and only 40 emergency shelter spaces, enforcing the camping ordinance is unethical given the human suffering this causes. The Tent University students intuitively understood this economic injustice. But for the UCSC administration, it only heightened their fears.
Irwin said: "There was a wide advertisement for a 'Y'all Come! It's gonna be a real occasion!' As I was down at Tent University earlier, even when there was productive discourse, there were a number of members of the wider community whose agendas are unlikely to be those that are necessarily in sync with that of our own campus community."
The idea of the students intermingling with people who were not under the control of the administration certainly was

unpopular. But the idea that homeless people might come up and set up a tent on UC property was unthinkable!
An unknown percentage of UCSC's student population are homeless. "I'm a woodsie," one girl told HUFF. "That's a student who lives in the woods." She had her "backpack nearby and said she camps in a different spot every night.
With tuition costs rising each year, fewer students from poor backgrounds are even able to enroll. Diversity enrollment is at an all-time low since the founding of UCSC in 1965. Tent University addressed all of these issues, as well as low wages for university workers compared to the cushy salaries of the administration. Surely Chancellor Denice Denton did not want these issues aired at the base of her campus.
Double-speak and police brutality
In Orwellian double-speak, Irwin lamented, "Our hope was this was to be a -productive conversation and a real opportunity for students, faculty, and members of the community to come together in a productive way and discuss issues that people care about. But it seems that there appears to be an interest in other kinds of approaches, ones that are not acceptable."
That dialogue was what Tent University had been advertising for weeks that they wanted to build, and they were right in the middle of those productive conversations when Chancellor Denton's riot cops arrived. From 9:45 p.m. until after midnight, the cops painfully and slowly extracted student after student until they had arrested and physically carried all 19 to waiting police vans.
Students said they were kept from a bathroom for seven hours. "And they made this big deal about our lack of sanitation!" one of the students arrested said.
Students understood clearly that their peaceable assembly was met by sheer police brute force. Some students were shoved or poked with batons. One student, Sasha, was clubbed just above his

May 2005