Last November, we and our friends clutched each other in hope, as an orange blast exploded into pain. With the release of the Reynoso report, the world was told what we already knew: there was no legal basis for the suppression of Occupy UC Davis at all. The administration, with a harsh paternalism that demands absolute control, and a fear of resistance that demands silence and stillness, did not ask whether a law had been broken that November, but asked what laws could be used to halt our dissent. The events in November were a disgusting example of police misconduct, but there is no proper way to stop dissent.

As the images of Lieutenant Pike shot across the globe, it became belatedly clear to the administration that pepper spraying seated students was not a good way to defuse resistance. Instead, our movement has since then been continually monitored and spied on, continually threatened and intimidated with any laws and university bylaws the administration can think of. And now twelve people, half of them those same students who were pepper sprayed in November, are being charged with conspiracy and facing eleven years each in jail. They are accused of doing exactly the same thing as those students who were pepper sprayed: sitting in the wrong place. Further, one of those twelve was recently expelled and only reinstated after the backlash of an angry sit-in and the intercession of his lawyer. The frantic need to stop dissent drives this legal action no less than the physical repression in November. These charges are an abuse of the legal system and a waste of our county’s already limited resources, but there is no proper way to stop dissent.

We will not be intimidated. We are the students, staff, and faculty of a university paid for by public funds yet increasingly run to increase private profit. One in twenty U.S. residents over the age of sixty five is still burdened with student loan debt. One in twenty people has gone through their entire life up to retirement, giving a portion of their earnings to a bank in exchange for something that is supposed to be a state-provided service. Today, total student loan debt stands at over a trillion dollars—a sum larger than total consumer debt. Unless we can stop it, this debt is our future. Our wages will belong to the bank until the day we die. As the student debt bubble expands and our prospects for employment collapse as quickly as the banks are rescued with federal funds, the possibilities of our lives collapse toward an infinitely shrinking horizon.

Those who throw their own bodies before the workings of the private university and its repressive apparatus do so out of equal parts hope and desperation. We want a future where we can be free of the burden of debt, where we can be free of an endless cycle of payments and dependence where money flows from those who are in need to those who have plenty. We want a future where education is a public good, not a private commodity. We want a future where we escape as much from the coercive clutches of the banker as from the foul orange haze of pepper-spray and the devastation of the law.

In the aftermath of the April 3rd events in Santa Monica, justifying the pepper spraying of a massive crowd that included a four-year-old child, the President of Santa Monica College stated in the guilt-free tone so typical of college administrators that, “unfortunately, a number of bystanders…were affected.” The strategy of arresting demonstrators has been no less arbitrary and indiscriminate than the use of chemical agents and police force. In a culture of repression, what is important is that there is punishment; who is actually punished is secondary. The arbitrary charges against a few highlight our collective precarity. We are all on trial. The University has turned yet another weapon against those who oppose the agenda of privatization. We will define the limits of this weapon through the actions we take in response. If we turn away, it is only a matter of time before we ourselves will be cut down. If we stand and face them, if we make this attack unacceptable, then it will be unacceptable.

We all know that banks love students. Banks love student loans, the only kind of debt you can’t default on. People over 60 owe $36 billion in student debt, total student debt exceeds $1 trillion. Banks foolishly believe that these loans will all be paid back, and in this hope have created financial instruments that further profit from these loans. It is not going to work, but banks will still take plenty from us because, if we do not pay in cash, our wages, health care, and social security (should we have any of the three) will be garnished.

Last year, UC Davis and US Bank entered a relationship. The deal was that US Bank would provide some money each year to UC Davis, an amount based on how many students opened up accounts with US Bank, in exchange for Davis leasing an office to the bank in the Student Union and issuing new student ID cards, ones with a US Bank logo, that could be used as debit cards. This is a deal that benefits both sides, US Bank gets a captive group of possible customers and UC Davis gets some cash. The only people who do not benefit are the students. The logic of privatization is most clear when a student ID card is branded by its corporate sponsor. The money paid by US Bank to UC Davis is simply tuition by another name. Rather than call it tuition, they call it rent. But for US Bank this money is profit from student debt and for the University it is the financial benefit of privatization. It is a vicious cycle. The UC raises tuition forcing students to take on more debt, and students purchase more debt a portion of the profits of which go to the University. No one can be unclear about what this means, this University is not a site of disinterested learning or even one of strategic consideration of how to get the right degree for a future, well paid job. No, the University is a place to accumulate debt, to sell the value of future labor. The students are not the driving intellectual and cultural force that will graduate to participate in a thriving economy, they are wage slaves who will be deprived of much of their future wage in order to earn the right to a wage.

Protest of this deal met with what seemed like administrative silence. Unlike the notorious pepper spray incident of November 18th, no spectacular violence occurred—until the last two weeks.

At this point, the University announced that it had referred six cases to the Yolo County District Attorney, who increased the number to twelve cases. These individuals were to be charged with twenty one misdemeanor counts, adding up to a possible eleven years in prison.

This tactic is being used at Berkeley as well as elsewhere: retroactive criminalization. Truly the banal violence of the courts system. No batons, no pepper spray, just letters in the mail and time in prison. This type of violence cannot be photographed and circulated on the web to raise ire. But this violence is, in many ways, more terrible than the physical violence of the riot cops.

In the process of privatizing public education, the University will have to enforce its policies with the means available to it. For the past several years this has predominately meant riot cops. Now the use of courts has increased in this mix. As a friend said, it is like that show Law and Order was all about fucking over students.

We have to understand that this level of repression is serious and heavy handed. So frequently I am asked by friends, why do you think the UC is so treating protestors so harshly? To be frank, I think it is because the University may better estimate our power than we do. This question assumes that the protestors can not really end the process of privatization (or even reverse it), and so draconian repression is excessive. Let us challenge this assumption. Perhaps this repression is because we are potentially so powerful, because the University accurately estimates our potential power. Let’s actually be that powerful.