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The assault did not come out of the blue. For some years, students’ rights have been under attack, with the administration prohibiting demonstrations and cultural activities. Students have been tried and punished, and leaders of university unions have been fired. All of this has been carried out in the name of the “smooth functioning of the university.”

After the attack of June 9, the students shut down one of the main avenues on the campus and held an assembly of close to 2,000. On the following day, some 400 USP professors met and voted unanimously to demand the resignation of the rector.

Indeed, when Dent riffs on materials science, he can make it seem a stepping stone to omniscience. “If you sit in any particular room or anywhere on the planet and you look around you and you see every single material, I know exactly what it’s made of, I know how it was made, I know why it performs the way it does, I know how to change its performance if I want to. Nothing around me feels alien to me because I know what it is.” Dent’s take on the wonders of materials science may seem more megalomaniacal in tone than Miodownik’s holistic sensibility, but it is no less stimulating.

2) I can’t think of a sound way to preferentially recruit great higher education teachers in an institution that’s building a lot of new capacity. It’s a really fundamental problem: great teaching doesn’t offer the same kind of external record that research or publication productivity does. If you, hypothetical president trying to direct a flagship teaching institution, had the budget to hire 40 new tenure-track faculty whose positions you defined expressly as teaching positions, where you expressly wanted great teachers who were intellectually lively but were indifferent to their research productivity, how could you do that?

The university's new president, Jon Whitmore, has stated that he hopes San Jose State can avoid layoffs; he is making a fine semantic distinction. Though lecturers number over half the faculty, and though many have taught at the university for 10, 20 or more years, the faculty contract defines them as "temporary" employees.

• Do more with less, do less with less, and finally do nothing with nothing. These are the steps of diminishing returns that started with the advent of the modern research university.

Occupying students have faced harassment and intimidation, with the police being called onto campus several times throughout the action.

Management initially refused to let students return to the occupation if they left to get food and water.

These tactics are a clear break from the negotiations that other university managements have had with their students in occupation.

These included gathering almost 1,000 signatures on a petition to give to the principal demanding that the university supports the DEC appeal, that it divests any shares it holds in the arms trade and terminates research contracts and grants with arms companies.

Higher education in America is stratified in ways that reflect and perpetuate the social hierarchies of American society.