UC President Napolitano says regents don’t need to hear protesters’ ‘crap’

As student protesters interrupted Wednesday morning’s UC regents meeting, university President Janet Napolitano had a tart reaction that she probably thought was private.

“Let’s go. We don’t have to listen to this crap,” she said to UC regent Chairman Bruce Varner, who was sitting next to her at the meeting in San Francisco. With all the chanting and yelling in the room, few others probably heard her at the time, but her comments were caught on a UC video stream of the meeting that is posted on the regents’ website. (The incident occurs around minute 51.)

A group of about 30 students had started chanting loudly and some stood up on chairs and stripped down to their underwear or exercise clothes to symbolize what they said was having to give the shirt off their back for higher tuition. After police warnings, they left the room and no arrests were made.

After making that remark, Napolitano and most of the other regents left the hall during the protest and resumed the meeting after things quieted down.

Steve Montiel, a spokesman for Napolitano, said he would not comment on the substance of what Napolitano said in what he described as “a private moment” with Varner. But Montiel noted that the noisy chanting and disrobing by the protesters interrupted the meeting and delayed discussions of several important issues.

The video was first posted on sfgate.com.

Twitter: @larrygordonlat