The statement continued:

Several students and staff were stalked for a period of time after leaving a meeting with the Chancellor. Many students and staff who are supposed to work in Mrak no longer feel safe. Staff and student workers have been also filmed without their permission. For the sake of the daily operations of UC Davis, we call upon the Mrak Hall protesters to move their protest to a location that does not lead to these aggressive disruptions of UC staff and student work spaces in case they have plans to continue this protest.

Again, I suspect my threshold for what constitutes “stalking” is higher than that employed by the authors of this letter. What’s beyond dispute is that a group of protesters followed Katehi and a small group of students and staff she was speaking with across campus, filming them without their consent, snarking at Katehi, making her companions visibly uncomfortable—as almost anyone would have been in similar circumstances—and coming off … well, you can judge for yourself.

This was petulant and self-indulgent. It was an excuse for two or three activists to peacock and self-aggrandize. The fact that it was posted publicly, as if those who took the footage thought it reflected well on them even in hindsight, astonishes me. The female activist who shouts her head off across campus, literally serenading her chancellor with insults, claims at one point that she is being silenced!

But the part that struck me most is when, at roughly 6:25, one of the student activists reacts to the apparently unplanned arrival of an adult black male, who is friendly toward Katehi, by accusing the chancellor of “doing what they usually do, which is grabbing a person of color as a shield—that’s a tactic that the chancellor likes to use.”

This for merely talking to a black person who approached.

That activist couldn’t see the black man as an autonomous subject—only as a white person’s prop. The offensive jump makes sense within a highly stylized ideology wherein Katehi is “the oppressor” and all black people are “the oppressed.” By that logic, the only possible reason she would be doing something as enlightened as cordially interacting with one of “the oppressed” is if the black man was functioning not as a person, but as a “prop” and a “tactic,” never mind his agency.

The whole encounter is dripping with dehumanization.

It’s ironic, this recurring feature of campus protests: Time after time, activists wield phone cameras, intending to publicly discredit any adversary who lets so much as a “microaggression” slip. And in doing so, they inadvertently reveal prejudices that spring predictably, though quite unintentionally, from flaws in their belief system.

The statement opposing the occupation of the administration building concluded as follows:

The administration has also committed to addressing conflict of interest issues more transparently. Beyond this, what is the real goal of this protest? Day by day more staff and students are harassed as they merely commute to their offices to do the work that supports the primary mission of this institution: teaching, research and public service. We feel that this protest has lost its purpose and is dividing the campus community. The protest has fostered a hostile climate on UC Davis campus. We want to see a united campus and not a divided campus. The reality is that Chancellor Katehi’s resignation will not solve the problems of privatization. The tactics of the protesters to aggressively and abrasively silence other students, staff and faculty with whom they do not share the same opinion is hypocritical, abusive and contrary to the ideals of our institution, which fosters free and open debate. We call upon the Mrak Hall protesters to ‘walk the walk’ and engage the broader campus community in a dialogue on the legitimate issues of transparency, privatization and reform. By dialogue we do not mean acquiescing to the Chancellor’s or Regents’ opinion. Rather, we would like to encourage the protesters and the rest of the campus community to have a constructive dialogue in an environment that is not hostile, aggressive and threatening to those with whom they do not share an opinion.

Notice that the activists are being accused of fostering “a hostile climate,” of acting to “silence” students, staff, and faculty—the very transgressions that loom so large on college campuses because of the ideology advanced by other social-justice activists.