The UC Berkeley Chancellor called Trump’s threat to deprive the school of federal funding “ill-informed” during his first public speech since the riots last week.
“It seems to have been ill-informed,” said Dirks. “It’s fairly well-established that some of the tweets that come out of the White House these days are based on things seen on certain kinds of news sources — whether television or perhaps even Breitbart — and I don’t think the real news got out.”
Chancellor Dirks addressed the identity of the rioters.
“It’s very clear to us there was a group that came in from the outside,” explained the Chancellor, referring to the rioters. He proceeded to describe the perpetrators as masked and bearing weapons like M-80s and Molotov cocktails.
“At the moment, we actually don’t know who those masked individuals were,” he said. “To the extent that we’ve been able to secure anecdotal information about this, we believe they were outsiders. Maybe there were some members of the community who were part of that. We will try to find out and we are looking into it at the present time.”
“This is Berkeley and we have protests and we encourage protests,” he continued. “But we had absolutely no idea that the event would be disrupted effectively by an armed and highly trained group that was committed to closing the event down.”
“We’re a university. We’re not the national guard,” said Dirks, also detailing that the black bloc had apparently not been at previous Yiannopoulos events.
“We knew that if we went out into the crowd with the intent of making these mass arrests, it would have escalated the violence that was out there and people would have really gotten hurt, seriously hurt.”
“I don’t think we’ve been tarnished at all,” said the Chancellor, addressing the school’s reputation. “In fact, I’ve been hearing from people across the country that we have indeed honored our tradition and have been exemplary in terms of our commitment to freedom of speech.”
Dirks blamed “political agendas that have no particular regard for the evidence that is part of this or any of the facts and truth that surrounds it” for misrepresentation of the riots.
The UC Berkeley Chancellor also said that he, along with several other university presidents, called for Trump to repeal his executive order on immigration.
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