"The photo above shows one of the few remaining tents on the UC Davis Quad, just 60 feet from the spot where campus police pepper sprayed a dozen students and catapulted this campus into the stratosphere of global celebrity last November.
The irony of the message "No Cuts" [to education] (spray-painted by the student demonstrators three months ago) and the torn tent (vandalized last week) is not accidental.
The tear in the tent is indicative of a deeper, bloodier cut that goes all the way to the bone of this campus and to the marrow of the entire university as a public institution. Within three days of the pepper spraying campus administrators were crafting their message around the phrase "a need for healing." While university administrators have tried to keep the wound "protected" to speed the recovery, the current conditions are more like remission than real recovery. This ambivalent, if painful, response to the conflict was noted by Chancellor Katehi herself in a 12/09/11 Huffington Post article where she summarized what she had heard in the many campus forums, as ranging "from those expressing anger and sadness about the incident itself to repeated comments that we cannot let one highly regrettable event define a great public research university."
After enduring for months, the few tents left on the Quad have a forlorn look. They are no longer "policed" and apparently no longer "Occupied." They stand out like a string of stark question marks about their own importance: "What, after all, was the great danger they once posed? How was that danger so clear and present that police were sent in to take them down the day after they went up?"
The public outcry over the pepper spraying may have died down to a muffled muttering. But the promises from the chancellor that there would be a speedy and thorough investigation -- now nearly four months old -- are not forgotten. They hang over this campus like a dull, gray, slowly fading, cloud. The investigative commission under former Justice Cruz Reynoso has repeatedly postponed the date when its findings will be issued and has already acknowledged that no information from the primary perpetrators -- Police Chief Spicuzza and Lt. Pike -- would not be included, due their personnel rights as university employees."