Around a dozen students protested the presence of the U.S. Marines and Raytheon, a missile producer, at the job fair on Tuesday morning at the UC Santa Cruz Stevenson Event Center.
One protester who wished to remain anonymous said they protested in response to the UC Berkeley police brutality on the Nov. 9 Day of Action.
“Today Berkeley decided it’d be a day of action and asked all UCs to do something, and we decided to do this,” he said. “If military recruiters get kicked out, the whole [job fair] gets shut down.”
Event organizer and Career Center director Barbara Silverthorne cited the 1996 Solomon Amendment, which allows the Secretary of Defense to deny federal grants to institutions of higher education if they prohibit or prevent on-campus ROTC or military recruitment, as the reason for having the recruiters stay in spite of the protests.
UCSC alum Marine recruiter Lieutenant Colin Campbell was not bothered by the protest.
“It’s kind of sad,” Campbell said. “It doesn’t really affect us, but it’s not the troops’ fault the decisions that are made.”
As the students linked arms and wound their way through the room chanting, “No Recruits, No Troops, No Wars,” Silverthorne of the Career Center called the UC Santa Cruz Police Department.
Around six police officers arrived, and some took pictures of the protesters.
“We took pictures just to show the actions that were being taken on both sides,” UCSC police chief Nadar Oweis said.
