Cal Berkeley advisor Carol Crist, who had hoped to stop the refs from UCLA’s move, passed a reporter as she left the meeting immediately after it ended. She said, “I have nothing to say.”
“He wasn’t there for me,” said Lark Park, one of the five umpires who voted against approval, but declined to elaborate. Lieb believes that those who opposed the deal did so for philosophical reasons. “Some people felt it would be better to put the genie back in the bottle and try to get UCLA back in the Pac-12 is my guess,” he said.
That the vote took place on the UCLA campus, at the Luskin Center, which is crammed next to the football team’s practice fields and basketball arena, the historic Pauli Pavilion, may have seemed symbolic—but it was serendipitous. A special meeting to discuss HSC matters was earlier scheduled for Wednesday.
For a process that has taken longer than many referees—and UCLA, the Pac-12, and the Big Ten—anticipated—it was only fitting that Wednesday’s meeting overcome its unexpected setbacks.
The meeting was adjourned for two hours by the demonstrators representing Academic workers strike, who twice interrupted him by chanting, sitting on the ground and refusing to leave until the police handcuffed and removed them. Wednesday marked a month since the start of the strike, which has affected some 48,000 workers across the sprawling university system.
In all, 14 protesters were arrested for trespassing on Wednesday.
Several hundred protesters, including a man playing the accordion, carried sit-down signs, chanted and paraded in lines around the Luskin Center which was surrounded by temporary chain-link fencing and barricaded by police and campus security guards.
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