Bright and early on the morning of January 19th, a contingent of 40 student and faculty representatives from UCSD boarded a bus provided by the SDFA and headed out to join the protest against the UC Regents meeting at UC Riverside.  Profs. Ivan Evans and Luis Martin-Cabrera were there to represent the SDFA.

Students were particularly incensed by the Regents’ continuing attempts to raise tuition and fees and repeatedly condemned plans to “privatize” the UC.  They did a superb job in forcing the Regents to acknowledge their presence and demands. Tense confrontations with scores of baton-wielding police units drawn from three different areas (UCR, Riverside and Moreno Valley) ensued outside the building in which the Regents were meeting, while a helicopter circled overhead.

Late in the afternoon, after approximately 500 students had blocked off roads leading away from the building in an attempt to flush out the Regents, a brief altercation with the police erupted. At least one student was shot with a “paint ball” weapon but was not seriously injured. By now it is clear that the Regents will be dealt with like hunted quarry on each and every UC campus they visit. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the Regents Meetings for 2012 will be held at UCSF–which has no undergraduates and sits at the apex of an urban hill that is inconvenient to access and easy to seal off.