All I can say is, thank God it's not Kent State. This recent bout of protesting and police brutality is scarily reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the vast overreaction on the part of the National Guard to the protestors at Kent State University in 1970—they shot at unarmed students, eventually killing four.

Luckily, the conflicts at the University of California, Davis and Berkeley didn't escalate to this sort of a scale, but the reactions of the police to nonviolent protestors at the campuses seems somewhat similar.

First of all, we need to understand why, exactly, students are protesting.

According to a recent Huffington Post article, the students at UC Davis were upset about a proposal to raise in-state tuition to over $22,000 by 2015. The current in-state tuition costs around $12,000. Bob Ostertag, a faculty member of UC Davis, reported that many of his students believe that if the proposal passes, their families would have to pull them out of school.

While this in itself is a disturbing thought, the real fear-inducing part of the story was the reaction on the part of the university's administration and the campus police to the student protests.

UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi called in the police to evacuate the approximately 200 students who were peacefully protesting in the quad—sitting on the ground, linking arms.

The police's reaction? Use pepper spray on the seated students. In a similar situation at UC Berkeley a few weeks ago, police used batons to hit non-violent protestors at Occupy Cal.

What were the students doing to warrant such abuse?

While the students had continued protesting despite the warning from university administrators that the police would force an evacuation, the response was disproportionate to the situation.

If UC Davis really felt an evacuation was necessary, then why the aggressiveness? If the students were peacefully sitting down, without potential harm to themselves or others, why couldn't the police, equally as calmly, simply arrest the students without resorting to violence?

According to Ostertag, "Many, many times, I have seen police treat protestors who sat and linked arms when told they must disperse or face arrest as a very routine matter, the police then approach the protestors individually and ask them if, upon arrest, they are going to walk of their own accord or if not, the police will have to carry them."

What was wrong with this method? The students were not doing anything to warrant such a reaction from the police.

My best guess is that if the police had peacefully, as Ostertag said, asked the students to come with them and then resorted to "carrying" the protestors—carrying, not harming—the students would have reacted accordingly. After all, the students knew that UC Davis was sending for the police; the students understood that they had a chance of being arrested.

What they didn't know was that they were putting themselves in harm's way in the process.

And then why was such an evacuation necessary?

The university could just have easily attempted to sit down with some of the student leaders, tried to gauge the student reaction to the proposed tuition hikes and understood exactly why the students were protesting, without resorting to the police.

According to Ostertag, this is exactly what the administration at Columbia University did three years ago in the face of a similar situation.

The university met with the students to have a dialogue about their grievances. The protest eventually disbanded peacefully without police intervention. Diplomatic negotiations are possible and a great way to avoid bringing in the police, unless absolutely necessary.

The bottom line is that the involvement of the police was used before it was justified. Bringing in the police should be a last resort—one used only if the protestors are potentially harmful to themselves or the community or if every other option has failed. In both cases, the situation failed to deserve such a response.

It's great that the situation didn't deteriorate into the Kent State violence of the 1970s. While there were blows, the situation did not reach the level of gun violence. And yet, if we've come so far, how is it that the police are still using brutality on peaceful, non-violent protestors?

When the students refused to move, they could have been treated civilly and arrested in a manner that recognized their rights as citizens.

The bottom line is that the escalation of the situation could have been avoided, not only if the police had restrained themselves, but also if the administration had, rather than turn to force, decided to sit down and have a dialogue with its students.