DAVIS: Violent confrontations between police and protesters at two University of California campuses have drawn a new cadre of students into the Occupy Wall Street movement and unleashed what some historians call the biggest surge in campus activism since the 1960s.
While Occupy Wall Street protesters have a broad set of grievances that include income inequality and perceived corporate greed, many students have more specific concerns: soaring tuition, campus budget cuts, and fear of heavy student loan debt and lack of job opportunities upon graduation.
Student protests related to these issues have broken out sporadically on US college campuses over the past few years, but the Occupy protests and the police response to them - have swelled the ranks of campus activists in recent weeks.
A crowd of about 2,000 students, professors and parents held a rally at UC Davis on Monday and called for university Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign after police last week pepper-sprayed students sitting passively on the campus quad.
Video of an officer spraying an orange-colored pepper spray directly into the faces of cross-legged students circulated heavily on television and the Internet, prompting outrage as well as a wave of cartoon parodies.
"We didn't really know what it was until we actually were here on the quad (quadrangle) seeing fellow students getting maced," said John Caccamo, an 18-year-old biology student at UC Davis. The campus, near Sacramento, is not known as a hotbed of activism.
"This is the first time in the 11 years I've been here that students have said - 'Wait a minute, I need to wake up to where I am and what's going on,'" UC Davis art professor Robin Hill told Reuters at the Davis rally.
At UC Berkeley, a cradle of 1960s student activism, students and faculty members were hit with nightsticks earlier this month when campus police moved to break up an Occupy encampment.
The president of the 10-campus UC system, Mark G. Yudof, said he was "appalled" by the Berkeley and Davis incidents and has hired William J. Bratton, former police chief of New York and later Los Angeles, to lead an investigation.
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