Students rebel against hostage-taking in California's higher ed war

I stopped by Wheeler Hall this evening, crossing from the NW corner of the Berkeley campus where I work to look in on the building occupation that began yesterday evening, following a UC Regents committee vote to hold students hostage in a war between California Governor Jerry Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano (who is also a former governor of Arizona, 2003-2009; and former head of the Department of Homeland Security, 2009-2013). It's a war of Titans (remember Cronus, the leader of the Titans? the one who ate his children?).

Here's how the L.A. Times told the story on Tuesday, in an editorial titled A battle for UC's soul:

At issue is whether the 10-campus system will continue to rank among the nation's premier research universities, drawing top students and the best professors from throughout the world, or whether it will slowly shrink its ambitions, becoming a more utilitarian institution that concentrates narrowly on moving students to their bachelor's degrees and into the workforce quickly and efficiently.

UC President Janet Napolitano says that she will ask the Board of Regents to approve the tuition increases Wednesday, although they would not have to go into effect if the the state provides better funding. Gov.  Jerry Brown, who opposes the tuition hikes, points out that he is already planning on increasing the state's contribution 4% a year over the next two years, though he wants to tie those increases to some major changes. Among his suggestions: more online courses, heavier teaching loads for professors, reductions in nonessential research, the admission of a smaller proportion of freshmen and more community college transfers, so that the state can educate college students more inexpensively for their first two years.

The editorial goes on to lay out:

• the economic case for investment in the University of California (for every dollar invested, California's gross state product increases $10, according to a 2011 report commissioned by the UC Regents);
• the precipitous drop in state contribution to the UC budget, without adequate restoration of funding as the economy has recovered from the crash of 2008;
• a finding by the Public Policy Institute of California that the university's tuition increases have not been driven by inappropriate or lavish spending, but by state disinvestment in higher ed;

It then concludes with support for UC President Napolitano's plan to hold students feet to the fire until the state coughs up funding to maintain its preeminent public university system.

Ouch.

Students bussed in from all ten UC campuses to protest adoption of this plan to hold them hostage, but the UC Regents committee charged with making the decision voted on Wednesday to make Napolitano's threat real (the full board ratified the committee's decision today). Last night, seeing the writing on the wall, Berkeley students began an ongoing occupation of Wheeler Hall in the heart of the campus; students at UC Santa Cruz are occupying the Humanities 2 building; CNN is also reporting protests at UC Davis and UCLA. Photos are being tweeted from around the state hashtagged #fightthehike.

My read: this is going to be a complicated conflict to narrate through the filter of mainstream media. There are no clear heroes or villains. Governor Brown wants to fight tuition hikes, but he wants to do it by turning California's higher ed treasure into a diploma mill. UC Pres. Napolitano wants to preserve the value of the university she heads, but she's prepared to throw students off the cliff to get her way (not to mention that her moral authority to lead UC is worse than questionable, as students across the state have been arguing since her appointment to the role).

In the wake of Germany's decision to offer free university education to all -- even international students -- I'd like to see UC students call for the same here in California. Do I think that's an achievable demand? Not in the near term. But it calls for a remaking of the world as we have come to know it, and that's what these times call for.

Longtime Daily Kossack Don Mikulecky quoted Peter Kropotkin in a thoughtfully angry (and underappreciated) diary yesterday:

Think about what kind of society you want to live in and then demand that your teachers teach you how to build that society.

Right on the mark...



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
UC Berkeley's anti-apartheid movement: setting the record straight
The Occupy Movement and UC Berkeley's Free Speech Monument
When authorities equate disobedience with violence
Chancellor Katehi, Athens Polytechnic, and ... Janet Jackson?
Paying what things cost



Thanks to Brittany M. (@belitebrite) for her image of the Wheeler Hall occupation at Berkeley on 20 Nov 2014. Thanks also to Falcorian for the image of Wheeler Hall: "Wheeler Hall--UC Berkeley--Panoramic". Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wheeler_Hall--UC_Berkeley--Panoramic.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Wheeler_Hall--UC_Berkeley--Panoramic.jpg