"Pepper Spray Outrage."

UC—Davis feels the pain, after a viral video shows a campus police officer spraying students with pepper spray as they were seated on the sidewalk, as if they were some pesky weeds growing between the cracks and he was wielding the Roundup.

Penn State University Professor John McCarthy, "who has written extensively about campus protest and about police response to protest... said that campus police should first err on the side of permitting protest."

But if there is a need to clear a space, the standard response in a situation such as that at Davis, in which students are threatening no one, is to issue a warning and then to remove students one by one. Pepper spray would never be used in such a situation, he said.

Was there some idea that physically manhandling the students would have looked worse? I think we've learned that it doesn't!