Ignacio Chapela's last class

I think it is important to emphasize that Professor Chapela has very strong support from people in the biology and environmental sciences departments. In fact, during conversations with other students in these departments, I haven't encountered anyone who isn't on his side. I have suspected that to an outsider it might seem like Chapela is really some sort of eccentric radical who is making a big fuss, but that the university might have a legitimate reason to push him out, but everyone I have spoken to within our field is aware that Ignacio Chapela is a great professor, with great teaching skills, and Monsanto was not able to criticize the results of his study, about the distance that pollen from transgenic corn was able to drift and interbreed with native corn strains in Mexico. They just disagreed with his policy recommendations in the discussion section of the paper he did with graduate student David Quist.

The tenure justice committee http://www.tenurejustice.org wanted to emphasize that the university decided late Tuesday to call a press conference regarding cleanup efforts at the polluted Richmond Field Station/Campus Bay at 10am Thursday, right at the same time of this protest. This would serve to dilute coverage of both events.

During his last class, outsiders has been invited to sit in. Chapela has a very verbal (as opposed to visual) and interaction teaching style. He invited students to report on news stories that could relate to environmental issues from the international press. Then he did something of an open-mic, where he read passages from three books, and mentioned a lot of others. Chapela stands out as having particularly broad interests, often venturing outside of the narrow topic at hand. This is particularly clear when you have a normal conversation with him. He is one of those people who speaks several languages and is able to recommend book titles and he can cook and sing and play guitar.

Several other professors made statements in his classroom at the end, and then the crowd regrouped outside, and marched towards California Hall.
There was a list of very notable speakers in front of the administration building. A professor of biochemistry since 1952 lamented how the university has really changed recently with the decrease in state support, and increase in costs paid by tuition and corporate funding. Whereas earlier, the university was clearly indebted to think of public interests in the choice of research topics and service, they are now pressured to produce results for private donors. Pr. Carol Merchant, a big name in philosophy of science in environmental science spoke as did a number of other faculty. The chancellor wouldn't come out of the building to accept letters or address the crowd.

If one reads into the tenure process which can be a bit flexible and political when a candidate might be near the cut -off point, it is fairly clear that Chapela has all of his evidence and points lined up very well for his lawsuit.