Save the UC three!

THREE UC BERKELEY students are facing semester-long suspensions and permanent marks on their academic records for doing something that is and ought to be a treasured part of the school's history: peacefully protesting a war. –That's right: the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement is cracking down harshly on protesters against the war in Iraq. There's no logical reason for the severe sentences meted out to Snehal Shingavi, Rachel Odes, and Michael Smith, and the administration ought to overturn them.

As Helen Christophi reports on page 12, the three students were among 119 arrested last March during a sit-in at Sproul Hall. That's an administration building, so no classes or exams were interrupted. In fact, peaceful sit-ins at Sproul and other administration facilities are something of a UC tradition – they happen fairly regularly and are rarely punished by anything worse than a citation from police (that's usually dismissed) and possibly a letter of admonishment from the school.

Instead, this time around, dean of students Karen Kenney decided to single out Shingavi, Odes, and Smith, who happened to be among the key organizers of the protest, for some of the harshest sentences the school has given out to protesters in years. In fact, protesters who occupied – and did serious damage to – Barrows Hall, an academic building, in 1998 received nothing worse than admonishment letters.

It's hard to understand why UC even considers it necessary to discipline students who did nothing worse than take over an administration building for a little while. This is a college campus. Nobody was hurt. No damage was done. Nothing even remotely essential to the operations of the educational institution was seriously disrupted. Overall, organizing the protest was probably as much a learning experience as anything the three will ever get in a classroom.

But if there has to be some form of discipline, suspension and permanent demerits are way, way too harsh. The three students have appealed, and UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Berdahl should simply void the severe sanctions before this further damages the reputation of a campus that is rapidly turning away from its storied history as a center of creative dissent and academic free speech.