It’s a strange day at the University of California. On its impeccable Los Angeles campus, the one that always has freshly cut grass and perfectly preserved Italian neoclassical buildings, everything on Thursday morning looked more like a set than a real university. The bustling campus that houses 30,000 undergraduates, another 12,000 graduate students and 4,000 professors was clearly divided into two parts. Its core, the central courtyard called Royce Hall, where in the early morning the police had entered in force to evict the students and arrest more than 200 of them, was abuzz. It was full of objects, garbage, with graffiti on some buildings and armored, only accessible to those who cleaned it. Walking away was something else. Everything other than the central area of UCLA was empty, with hardly any students, staff or tourists, regulars of the area. As Paloma Casteleiro, a postdoctoral researcher from A Coruña and one more member of university life for four months, commented, these days the area seemed “like in the time immediately after Covid.” Semi-active, empty, calm, but tense. Only a couple of unexpected guests came to break the silence: the thunderous helicopters—both from the news and the security forces—that, fixed in the air, pointed tirelessly at the UCLA grounds.
This mini-city of 170 hectares woke up on Thursday with the hangover of detention and with classes, after the cancellation on Wednesday, held remotely until Monday. What happened was obvious. The Royce, the main courtyard around which the complex is organized, dawned completely fenced and with graffiti on some of the buildings that shape it. It was completely impossible to access it from any point. The security personnel – some regular at the university; another, as they themselves commented, hired specifically for the occasion – did not even allow them to climb the stairs and stand on the edge of the fence. In front of a poster Divest Now —Disinvestment now: one of the student requests is that those who contribute funds to the universities (companies, donors) stop contributing their money to the Israeli cause—a security member commented sardonically: “They cannot pass, unless “They want to help as volunteers in the cleanup.”
Cleaning tasks lay ahead. On the one hand, administrative and security personnel were dismantling the remains of the camp that had been in the Royce for almost a week. Cardboard, wood, banners, protective glasses, gloves, masks, yoga mats, umbrellas and beach umbrellas (used for protection and to put a roof over the camp), hundreds of items of clothing, thousands of water bottles… Lots of objects were scattered around the campus, especially around the hall major. The staff tried to collect and clear areas, and after that, clean and sweep to try to return everything to a certain normality. Meanwhile, the surrounding areas were quiet, with a few runners taking advantage of the empty campus and a couple using the grass to take family photos for their son’s fifth birthday.
On the other hand, groups of volunteers (both students and service staff or teachers) tried to collect some of the clothes, blankets, mats… that had accumulated to reuse or donate them, some of them stated, who preferred not to give their Names. Most were covered with masks.
Casteleiro, 29, from A Coruña, decided not to go to campus on Thursday. Although she could, her laboratory is there; The university had asked them through emails to step onto the facilities as little as possible. A computational optical microscopy researcher, she has only been at the university for four months, but after spending almost a decade in Atlanta, what happened does not surprise her. “The United States is not a country that doesn’t care about what happens in the world. Especially in universities, where there is a lot of movement, a lot of mobilization. Furthermore, the United States is involved in everything worldwide, it gets into all the trouble,” she reflects.
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She, who belongs to the union of postdocs (as postdoctoral researchers are called in slang), has decided not to participate in the protests, mainly due to visa issues: if she is detained by the police, something that can happen simply if she appears at the camp, she runs a high risk. of losing the papers that allow their stay. “The university was very motivated to make the protest peaceful, they couldn’t call the police,” she explains. Hence, she was partly surprised by what happened early Thursday morning, when security forces violently evacuated the campus and detained dozens of students.
“Even if they did not agree, from the university they always stated that they were not going to oppose the protests,” explains Javier González Vaz, 27 years old and from Lepe (Huelva). He has been at UCLA for a couple of months, where, also as postdoc and as part of the union, works on complex research on immunotherapy in cancer, especially in solid tumors. With a degree from the Autonomous University of Madrid, a master’s degree from the Complutense University and a doctorate from the University of Navarra, it is his first time outside Spain, and this is the last thing he expected to find, he says: a shielded campus loaded with calls. “I don’t know the profile and age of those protesting, there is no one I know who has found themselves in this situation,” he explains. “It may be that I have only been here for a short time, but I prefer not to position myself without fully understanding the sensitivities.”
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