WA 2016 Week 15: UC Davis Wants Some Scrubs

Weekly Whaaa…?

Radical Librarians #radlibchat

This week, the Radical Librarians hosted a chat with April Hathcock.

UC Davis wants some scrubs

UC Davis paid consultants at least $175,000 for attempts to scrub the Internet of links about their pepper spraying of nonviolent student protestors.

someones going to write about how UC Davis quest to scrub the internet of pepper-spray is great ex of why we need web archiving, yes?

— Chris Bourg (@mchris4duke) April 14, 2016

As Chris Bourg points out, this is an excellent example of why web archiving can be useful.

Infrastructures of Student Engagement & Dissent

Having proudly graduated from University of California, Riverside for both undergrad and an MA in English, I believe it’s paramount to keep the student protesting history readily accessible. This type of involvement in democracy is both healthy and necessary. Similarly, we need to keep the history of administrators’ attempts to quell this type of involvement readily accessible.

As just one of many examples, UC San Diego’s Che Cafe is a continually imperiled student-run space that provides both institutional memory and an infrastructure of student-led agitation for better governance of the UC system.

Students also produce disorientation guides that reframe, question, and contest official rhetoric about institutions and the goals of education. Here’s links to a few disorientation manuals:

You can read the plain text of a 2010 UC Berkeley Disorientation Guide at archive.org.
Here’s a 2011-2012 UC Santa Cruz Disorientation Guide as a pdf file.
Here’s another UC Santa Crus Disorientation Guide, from 2009-2010.
Campus Activism has a great roundup from different years & campuses.

Revolting Librarians

In keeping with this theme of dissent, it’s worth linking to Revolting Librarians and Revolting librarians redux : radical librarians speak out as instances of dissent within librarianship. I’d love it if someone were to do a sort of “history of critical librarianship,” and I certainly expect these books would play a role.