Nine students were arrested Thursday after leading a protest
inside the UC Board of Regents meeting and refusing to exit the
room when police officers tried to remove them.
The student protesters ““ who were from UC Santa Barbara
and UC Santa Cruz ““ attended the regents meeting at UCLA as
representatives of “Fiat Pax,” which defines itself as
a coalition aiming to “demilitarize the UC” and whose
membership includes University of California students, faculty and
staff opposed to the UC’s management of nuclear
laboratories.
The UC currently manages two nuclear labs: the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National
Laboratory.
The UC has managed Los Alamos, the lab responsible for the
nuclear bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima, since its inception in
1943. The Department of Energy recently opened the management of
the lab up for a bid process due to security problems at the
facility, but after a lengthy process it remained in the UC’s
hands.
The UC is currently bidding for continued management of
Livermore.
The regents meeting came to a halt when students in the audience
began clapping and Darwin BondGraham, a UC Santa Barbara graduate
student, announced that the meeting was being disrupted in order to
prevent the regents from discussing the status of these labs.
Among chants of “UC, nuclear free,” regents
evacuated the room and police officers were called in to remove the
students.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding on this board about
what these labs do,” BondGraham yelled above the chants.
“We demand severance and withdrawal from the
laboratories.”
When told they had to leave the room, the students sat down on
the floor and continued chanting. In order to remove the students,
UCPD officers handcuffed them and dragged them from the room.
The students were held in custody for an hour and a half before
being released.
“(This protest) may not have been effective in changing
the regents’ minds, but our last option is to make a serious
visual impact,” said Carleigh O’Donnel, a third-year
global studies student at UC Santa Barbara who came to support the
coalition.
Other protesters agreed the only way to gain the regents’
attention was to take drastic measures, since they were cut off
during the morning’s public comment period. Members of the
public are given a minute to speak, in accordance with
regents’ meetings guidelines.
“Our main goal was to disrupt the meeting,” said Ben
Sellers, a third-year UC Santa Cruz music student.
“We’re the students. We should decide if we should be
involved in the university’s association with nuclear
laboratories.”