First came the video of campus police jabbing students with batons at UC Berkeley, and then, less than two weeks later, pepper-spraying them at UC Davis.

To many academics, it was an outrage. On late-night TV, California once again became a national joke.

"When they say Berkeley is crunchy," comedian Stephen Colbert said, "I didn't realize they meant the students' rib cages."

As student anger over tuition increases and spending cuts spreads throughout the state this fall, a university system steeped in the tradition of the Free Speech Movement is straining under its weight.

"They act like they don't know how to deal with student protests," said Robert Cohen, a New York University professor who co-edited the book "The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s." "To see police beating kids up, I think it's embarrassing for the university."

On Monday, as UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi apologized for the pepper-spraying of students on her campus, UC officials ran damage control.

"We cannot let this happen again," UC President Mark Yudof told the chancellors of the UC system's 10 campuses in a teleconference Monday, his office said.

Meanwhile, Sherry Lansing, chairwoman of the university system's governing board, said in a video on Facebook that UC would "immediately begin to develop system-wide procedures to ensure that students can engage in peaceful protests."

A common element of the Berkeley and Davis incidents was that both involved tent encampments, a feature of a broader Occupy movement that at times has been intertwined with student protests. Katehi said on KQED's Forum on Monday that she wanted the tents removed "for health and safety reasons."

"The group that set this up was not UC Davis students," she said. "They had individuals that were not affiliated with the campus."

Overnight camping is prohibited by UC Davis policy, but the administration could have overlooked it.

"Police officers make decisions every day about what's important and what's less serious," said Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "They overlook things. So if you have a minor trespass that's not creating an obstruction or interfering with other people, the best choice is to let it go."

Katehi herself suggested a similar sentiment last year, as she prepared for a student demonstration in the wake of the arrest of 53 UC Davis students at a protest the previous year.

"They want to be arrested. They want to be on CNN," she said at the time. "We don't want to get there. We would like to keep it as low-key as possible, allow the students to express their concerns and then hopefully go home."

Andy Fell, a UC Davis spokesman, said Monday that Katehi only wanted the tents removed, not the protesters.

"We have free speech on campus," he said. "But there are also regulations on time, space and manner."

For UC, it has always been a difficult balance. It was almost 50 years ago that UC students, protesting the prohibition of political activity on campus, staged sit-ins at Berkeley at the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. Clark Kerr, UC's president at the time, negotiated with demonstrators and kept police out, but in December 1964, Gov. Pat Brown ordered them in.

Brown lost his re-election campaign two years later to Ronald Reagan, who promised amid ongoing student protests to reform a university he called a "hotbed of communism and homosexuality."

Years later, after thousands of students protested across the state in September 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger met with UC students and spared higher education from additional spending cuts. His administration credited the students in part for his desire to increase funding for higher education after reducing it significantly the year before.

In the current spate of unrest, Gov. Jerry Brown, Pat Brown's son, has kept silent.

Unlike Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, who said he was "appalled at the apparent use of excessive force by the UC Davis police force at a peaceful student demonstration," or Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, who called it "outrageous," Brown has issued no comment.

Nor would he address the Occupy movement when he was asked about it at a news conference last month. "You know, I don't want to step on my story at this point," said Brown, who was announcing a pension proposal.

The Democratic governor is currently vacationing out of state. Brown spokeswoman Elizabeth Ashford said Occupy protests are local matters best handled by local agencies.

John Searle, a philosophy professor who was the first tenured faculty member at Berkeley to join with students in the Free Speech Movement, said the baton and pepper-spray incidents look "terrible on TV." But unlike student protests in the 1960s, he suggested they might soon blow over.

"I don't think it's a major event of any kind, because objectively, nobody was killed, nobody was hurt and no major disruption of university activities occurred," he said.

But Jasper Cooke, chief of police at Augusta State University and a member of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators' governing board, said UC may have a more fundamental problem.

On many campuses, he said, the police are part of a "close-knit community."

"The point that I try to stress with my folks is that if you treat everybody that you're dealing with like they're your son or daughter, then even in an ugly situation you're making the right decisions," Cooke said.

From the video at UC Davis, he said, "I just don't see a lot of that bubbling up, that warm fuzzy campus police, campus community type of atmosphere."

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Call David Siders, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1215. Bee researcher Pete Basofin contributed to this report.