From Reclamations:
Violence and the University: An Open Letter regarding the Friday Night Events at UC Berkeley
By: Daniel Perlstein
Beyond any wider implications, acts of violence necessarily diminish the university, discouraging the free exchange of ideas, which ought to be our defining characteristic. Nevertheless questions of proportion and degree matter. While all acts of violence diminish the university, differences in how and how much they do so ought to influence our responses.
With many people having little more than news reports of events at the Chancellor’s residence on which to base their impressions, I realize that my comments might seem to indicate a lack of common decency or at least an incredibly bad sense of timing, but as I will try to explain, I believe that the university administration not only set the stage for a violent turn in protests by acts which have repeatedly raised tensions and undermined belief in its good will, but actually engaged in most of the violence that has occurred.
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