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Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi told graduate and professional students Thursday night (Dec. 1) that she will redouble her advocacy for more funding for higher education.

Katehi also said she would step up her outreach to donors and enlist parents to contact their legislators to push for more state funding.

The chancellor’s remarks came during a town hall sponsored by the Chancellor’s Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Board and hosted by Lisceth Cruz, the graduate student assistant to the chancellor and Graduate Studies Dean Jeffery Gibeling.

Nearly 90 people gave the chancellor a polite reception during the one-hour, 45-minute town hall in 66 Roessler Hall.

At a meeting one night earlier in the same lecture hall, the Graduate Student Assembly voted down a call for Katehi's resignation but passed a motion to censure her in connection with the campus Police Department’s response Nov. 18 to a tent encampment on the Quad — arresting 10 people and using pepper spray on 11 nonviolent protesters.

The GSA minutes indicate the censure motion passed by a vote of 41 to 24, among the GSA’s voting delegates. Katheryn Kolesar, the civil and environmental engineering student who serves as the GSA chair, described the censure as “basically a statement of disapproval of the way things were handled … a reprimand of a public official.”

The events of Nov. 18 “showed everything that I have worked against my whole career,” Katehi said in her opening remarks Thursday night, noting her intention never to do anything to harm students.

At her third town hall in 10 days, Katehi outlined the five investigations into the pepper-spraying incident while also emphasizing the need “to look beyond to the real reasons that led us here”: the difficulties of staying in school in the face of rising tuition and mounting debt, and then finding a job when so few are available.

In other words, students are having a hard time reaching their dreams, she said.

Not only that, said Miles Prince, but the university is having a hard time living up to its public-school promise of accessible education. Further, he said, law students are having a hard time committing to public service — which is why many of them come to King Hall in the first place.

Tuition costs 'unsustainable'

Prince, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UCLA and is now a first-year law student here, said his experience as a professional student “has been, by far, the most personally unsustainable.”

He pointed to the law school’s professional degree supplemental tuition of $31,218 a year, on top of regular tuition and fees that all students pay. The law school supplemental tuition is up from $18,439 three years when Katehi started at �ٺ���Ƶ.

“This is not to suggest it was your leadership that caused such a steep hike,” Prince said, “but rather to call attention to the need for your leadership to not only fight any future fee hikes, but to begin to return professional student tuition on this campus to a sustainable and accessible level.”

Otherwise, he said, more and more law school graduates will continue to forsake public service for the private sector — defeating the whole purpose of a public professional school.

“These are the issues that brought students to the Quad on the 18th,” he added. “And their resolve in the face of the police use of force by chemical weapons illustrates how truly severe these issues have become.”

Katehi reiterated her commitment to enacting reforms to make UC Davis a safe place for free speech, for living and learning, for discussion and dissent — and setting an example for the nation.

“I truly believe that what is going to define us, is not that event, but the ability to move forward,” the chancellor said.

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