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

Berkeley blooming on graduation weekend

This weekend the campus was teeming with gowned, graduating students in their tasseled caps, and a seemingly endless procession of families taking full advantage of the photo ops by The Campanille, Sather Gate, and Sproul Hall.

Both the weather and Berkeley's front-yard gardeners cooperated ... the town was abloom on Commencement Day 2014:

Nice. And a great excuse to take my new point-and-shoot out for a test-drive.

Congratulations to the class of 2014....


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Graduations at UC Berkeley, Class of 2012
Advice to a new student at Cal
Flowery front yards in Berkeley

Transit

I rode my bike home from a post-work swim on Tuesday, taking my usual route. There was something unusual about the evening, however. With about an hour left until sunset, Venus was transiting the sun. I was wishing I'd planned ahead, but I hadn't: no pinhole projector, no "eclipse glasses," I was out of luck.

But wait! There on the corner of Fulton and Stuart I came upon an unexpected and welcome treasure: a fully equipped neighbor!

In their front yard, a couple I'd never met before had set up a pinhole projector using a camera tripod and a pair of binoculars to focus an image on a sheet of white foamcore. The foamcore was mounted on a small easel. "Can you see it?" I asked as I braked to a stop. They generously stepped aside so I could look for myself ... and there it was, clear as sunlight, a tiny black dot crawling across Sol's disc. Even better? They had a pair of "eclipse glasses," and permitted me a direct look. Three and a half hours after the photo in this post, taken in Minneapolis at 6:01 Central, Venus had moved diagonally down and to the right; but you get the idea, just about exactly.

Eerie. As in, chills up and down the spine eerie.

Not that the visual was anything intrinsically spectacular ... big orange circle, little black circle ... but knowing what I was looking at, knowing that it was a sight that will not recur in my lifetime (or yours if you're reading this the week it's posted!), knowing that the little black dot is a planet -- a planet! big! almost as big as Earth! -- really did give me chills, the sort that come when workaday preoccupation falls away and the scale of life, the universe, and everything becomes clear.

As I looked at Venus silhouetted against the sun through my neighbors' dark glasses, Scott Walker was holding onto his governorship in Wisconsin and Orly Taitz was going down to well-earned defeat in California. My apocalypse-facing blog post of the day before -- Human are like rats and cockroaches: the coming feudalism -- was clocking through its thirteen-hundred-somethingth page view where I'd cross-posted it on Daily Kos. A colleague's wife, who has worked at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab for many years, was recovering from brain-surgery -- three weeks ago she had a seizure out of the blue and was diagnosed with stage 3 brain cancer. My mind was cluttered with ephemera about a grant proposal due in the middle of the month, a proposal that, if funded, will define my work life through 2014 (and keep me up more than a few nights if past performance is any indicator of future results). Earlier in the day I'd prepared a short story manuscript for e-publication (more on that in a week or two). The drain was running slow in our bathroom sink.

All that while the planet Venus made its stately way across our common sun, getting right smack between where we live and where our local star burns.

Bear with me as I digress further still.....

The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa is a bit of clay about 6-3/4 x 3-5/8 inches now housed in the British Museum. About twenty-seven hundred years ago, a scribe in Nineveh copied some astronomical records onto this bit of clay. At the time those records were already a thousand years old -- about the span of time between now and the Norman invasion of England back in 1066. The clay tablet records observations by Babylonian astronomers about where and when the planet Venus traveled through Babylonian skies over the course of twenty-one years. Nineveh, you may recall, was a city in what is now northern Iraq. It is best known to westerners as the "exceedingly great city" featured in the Old Testament book of Jonah, a city chock full of wickedness, spared divine destruction when its citizens repented. It happens I have a tenuous connection to scholarship of cuneiform tablets, grounded in a technologist colleague's involvement in a project to help Near Eastern Studies scholars at Berkeley and elsewhere to use social networking algorithms to map people and their social, familial, and professional relationships described in cuneiform corpora -- a mode of study called prosopography ... I gave a talk to a small workshop of cuneiform scholars in March 2010 about what the technology project I work on might do for them, eventually.

Is everything connected, or what?

So I've got all this time and space, transits and orbits, statewide elections and home plumbing problems, ancient history and present illness -- all these telescoping perspectives whirling around in my head as I'm straddling my bicycle, staring wonderstruck at the small black circle superimposed on the big orange circle.

A sound track is called for. And what does the internal DJ queue up?

Nope, not Smashmouth. Good guess, though.

Would it mark me as of a certain age, and a certain sort of sentimentalist, if I admitted it was Joni Mitchell's The Circle Game? 'Cuz, um, it was.

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

If nothing else, Tuesday evening proved I'm capable of thinking about something other than the end of the world, even if I do think about the end of the world more often than some.

Life's like that.


Thanks to Tom Ruen for the photo of this week's solar transit of Venus he posted to Wikimedia Commons; and to Fæ for the image of the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa. And to Joni Mitchell, which goes without saying.


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Graduations at UC Berkeley, Class of 2012

The middle of May is among the best times of year in Berkeley, especially for those with a relationship to the UC campus here (I'm an alumnus and an employee). Sitting in a favorite cafe this weekend, just across the street from Sproul Hall, I watched a parade of begowned graduates and their loved ones enjoying a celebratory pre- or post-ceremony meal or drink. Call me a sentimental fool, but the evident pride of families and friends of the graduates makes my eyes well up.

You never know in particular cases, but we who work on the campus are keenly aware that more than one in four of our undergrads are the first in their families to earn a four-year college degree. That's a big deal when those first-in-families are attending a university that stands among the most highly ranked in the nation by all manner of measures, an R1 institution whose faculty win well over a half-billion dollars in research funding year after year.

Being a part of a world-class campus that each year launches thousands of smart and hard-working students into the rest of their lives is arguably the most profound reward of working at UC Berkeley. It's the reason many of us work at Cal. Even among staff who don't teach classes, what they say about teachers holds true for many, perhaps for most of us: we're not in it for the income, we're in it for the outcome.

This year a member of my own family is graduating from UC Berkeley; I'll attend her department's ceremony on Friday. My first-cousin once removed -- the daughter of my first-cousin -- she is not the first in her immediate family to graduate from a four-year college ... but I'm here to tell you, in words that don't capture the half of it: she's smart, talented, and energetic. I am just about bursting with pride for this poised young woman's accomplishment, and I have it on good authority that her parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents are too.

Congratulations to every one of UC Berkeley's Class of 2012. We're counting on each and all of you to help lead the way, however uncertain, to a better world.

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Paying what things cost

I'm going tell some stories. They're not long enough to have titles, I don't think, so let's just call these their headings:

• Grocery bags
• A top-tier university's e-mail system goes kaput
• Dirt
• Black Friday, or the Ghost of Christmas Futures

What these stories have in common is their bottom line: paying what things cost.


Grocery bags

San Francisco passed a law in 2007 that prohibits large supermarkets from using plastic grocery bags. The idea was to encourage folks to bring reusable bags to the store with them. This would help the city to do its share to reduce the resource-costs inherent in manufacturing plastic bags, and reduce the environmental damage plastic bags cause. But instead of bringing their own reusables from home, a lot of people who shop at large supermarkets have chosen to let the supermarkets pack their groceries in paper bags.

So San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi proposed another law -- set to be voted up or down this week, but in the event deferred until early next year -- to prohibit all retailers from using plastic bags (with a few exceptions for raw and fresh food), and to charge customers at all retail outlets in San Francisco a small fee for bags of any kind. Again, the idea is to reduce environmental damage caused by plastic bags, and encourage customers to use and reuse shopping bags.

As Dave Lewis, Executive Director of Save The Bay, wrote in Sunday's SF Chronicle:

These changes are good for businesses, which will no longer be expected to give away a product for free; bags will become an item for sale, just like a carton of milk.

Why is it a good idea for bags to be an item for sale? Lewis argues:

Bay Area residents use an estimated 3.8 billion plastic bags per year and discard more than 100 plastic bags per second. The average use time of a bag is only 12 minutes, but once in the environment, plastic lasts for years. Plastic trash entangles, suffocates and poisons fish and wildlife, including sea turtles, birds and marine mammals. It smothers the bay's wetlands. These bags are one of the most common items retrieved at coastal cleanup events on the bay and ocean shoreline.

So there's a cost to using plastic bags. Similarly there are costs to using disposable paper bags (costs to retailers who supply them, and in terms of wood, water, toxic chemicals, and energy used to manufacture them). These costs are obscured by the illusion to retail-customers that they're free. Mirkarimi and Lewis want to get the illusion out of the picture, and for people to pay what bags cost.

Not everyone agrees with this line of reasoning. The shrillest windbag who publishes regularly in the SF Chronicle wrote an op-ed on Sunday titled "Where windbags dare to outlaw plastic bags." Unfortunately, and as is often the case, there's nothing in Debra Saunders' piece that rises to the level of reasoned argument. It's all spinning in circles ... there would be little point to quoting Saunders. But if you're looking for an alternate opinion, have a read. It's a free country, or so they tell us.


A top-tier university's e-mail system goes kaput

UC Berkeley has been suffering a relentless series of e-mail system outages for about a month. I know, not the end of the world in the grand scheme of things, but you wouldn't know it working in the campus central IT department (which is, as it happens, where I work). The UC Berkeley e-mail system, CalMail, hosts 70,000 e-mail accounts, and forwards messages for twice that many more alumni. Faculty, staff, and more than a few of the institution's 35,000-or-so currently enrolled students depend on CalMail every ding dang day.

How did it come to pass that an enterprise IT organization of some hundreds of employees at (arguably) the top-ranking public university in the nation let it's e-mail system go kaput? Here's my boss's boss's boss's boss, Associate Vice Chancellor & Chief Information Officer Shel Waggener, on this topic, from his update to the campus of 30 November:

CalMail supports 70,000 accounts over 100 subdomains for students, faculty, staff, emeriti, and retirees, and also provides forwarding services for 140,000 alumni, handling more than 3 million messages a day. The current environment is five-years old and is reaching its normal end of life. The hardware was scheduled to be replaced this year during a normal refresh cycle; however the replacement is expensive (over $1M) and with the acceptance of the OE Productivity Suite project, as well as the strong interest in external services such as Google and Microsoft, the decision was made to pursue those options rather than investing in a platform we would only be shutting down in the near future.

"OE" is "Operational Excellence" a fix-your-budget product that Berkeley (and other campuses and for-profit companies) bought into on the advice of consulting firm Bain & Co, at a cost that substantially exceeds the replacement cost of hardware referenced above. Part of what "Operational Excellence" decision makers are recommending to mitigate campus budget woes is that we outsource e-mail. This idea has been in the works for a while, and I'm betting it's going to happen. The company to whom we will eventually outsource this critical bit of infrastructure has not yet been selected, as far as I'm aware.

Translating from spin-speak, what the excerpted quote boils down to is the following: we figured we'd operate e-mail for tens of thousands of users on a wing and a prayer while we figure out what's next, in order to save a million bucks.

How long will what's next take to come about? Factor in negotiation, selection, and contract review. Then there's the transition, which will not be a flip-the-switch kind of an operation. I'm guessing a year or two. So if the hardware on which CalMail runs "was scheduled to be replaced this year" and we've got 1-2 more years to go, we're talking two or three years on a wing and a prayer. And, as we know from the message excerpted above, five years is "normal end of life" for equipment of this sort.

Gulp.

Was it necessary to take the risk our IT organization took? To run a core service that everyone at UCB depends on to accomplish their work, on hardware 50% beyond its normal lifecycle, to save a million dollars? (For reference, the total campus budget -- not just IT but the whole shebang -- is $1.8 billion annually.)

So was taking that risk a poor decision?

Well, you know, the buck stops where the buck stops, and I'm sad to say that no matter how many executives were involved in the decision to squeeze the life out of CalMail hardware, our IT organization is going to be explaining and apologizing for some while to come. In the meantime, we look like cr*p.

But ... hang on a minute ... that business about the buck stopping? That's the core problem, isn't it?

With state contributions to higher ed dropping to historic lows as a percentage of operating budget, the bucks are stopping in California when it comes to supporting universities. And skyrocketing tuition being charged students and their families isn't making up the shortfall.

What's an Associate Vice Chancellor & CIO to do if he can't afford to pay what it actually costs to run e-mail for 70,000 people at a top-tier university?


Dirt

Among the deepest observations I've come across about paying what things cost comes from Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Jackson wrote an essay in a book called Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies, a volume I've blogged about recently (in relation to Occupy Wall Street) and will undoubtedly cite again. Jackson's essay is titled "Think Like a Prairie: Solving the 10,000-Year-Old Problem of Agriculture." The author takes the long view, you see. Like many others in this slim volume, this single essay is worth the price of the book.

Here's a summary of Jackson's essay in a few short paragraphs:

Topsoil is the medium in which plants grow, including plants that humans cultivate (a.k.a. agriculture). Topsoil includes elements like calcium, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, and trace minerals that are essential nutrients for plants. These are, in Jackson's phrase, "ecological capital." The elements that comprise "ecological capital" are gradually and naturally leached further and further underground by the flow of water, through topsoil and into aquifer and oceans; over time, the elements and minerals are leached out of the reach of the roots of plants that need them.

How does this perfectly natural process get 'reversed' so that plants can continue to live here on Planet Earth? Wes Jackson quotes Arnold Schultz, emeritus professor in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley, on the topic: "Well, this is a dynamic planet. It keeps recharging itself through geologic activity." That is to say, what goes down gets spit up ... by volcanos and earthquakes and the like.

That's well and good, but we humans, who have been growing plants for about 100 centuries (a blink in time on a geological scale), are using up topsoil faster than it is being recharged through geologic activity. The biggest environmental problem associated with agriculture is, Jackson asserts, the loss of topsoil: "except in major valley systems such as the Indus and the Nile, soils soon wear out [...] [I]n North America's upper Midwest, the largest region of the world's best land, many areas have lost half of their topsoil in just a century and a half of farming."

Wes Jackson doesn't just identify problems, he identifies solutions.

What his solutions boil down to is farming organized around bioequilibrium, which means recognizing that the energy input into agriculture (to make up for the loss of topsoil, generally by importing soil and minerals from elsewhere) has a significant cost ... and if you put that cost on the books, it makes sense to invest in modes of agriculture that don't deplete topsoil nearly so quickly. Jackson's organization, The Land Institute, is all about figuring out how to make agriculture work in bioequilibrium -- socially, economically, and politically.

That is, Jackson and his colleagues are trying to figure out how we can pay, season by season, what it actually costs to grow and consume what we humans grow and consume.


Black Friday, or the Ghost of Christmas Futures

On 25 November 2011, the outdoor clothing company Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the NY Times. The whole ad is available as a PDF linked from the company's blog post of the same date.

It was a smart piece of advertising, and told some important truths. Excerpting:

Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet. [...]

Environmental bankruptcy, as with corporate bankruptcy, can happen very slowly, then all of a sudden. This is what we face unless we slow down, then reverse the damage. We’re running short on fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, wetlands – all our planet’s natural systems and resources that support business, and life, including our own. [...]

There is much to be done and plenty for us all to do. Don’t buy what you don’t need. Think twice before you buy anything. [A]nd join us in [...] reimagin[ing] a world where we take only what nature can replace.

It's an ad, right? These people are out to sell product?

And yet.................


A last word from my grandteacher

I've studied Tai Chi Ch'uan for some years. Back in the late 1980s, when I was new to the practice, I attended summer workshops with my teacher's teacher, Lo Pang Jeng, or "Ben Lo" as he encourages Americans to call him.

Ben worked us hard. You wouldn't necessarily think all those graceful, flowing movements you see people performing in parks are physically demanding, but the practice in Ben's lineage is oriented toward the martial aspects of the art and it's grueling. In his day, Ben was a taskmaster. Especially at those weeklong summer workshops.

In his mid-eighties now, Ben is still going strong, his posture upright, physically vigorous and mentally sharp. This is a very good advertisement for something he has told students over and over and over again after making us work until we ached.

We'd be gasping at the end of thirty or forty minutes of holding difficult postures, sweat streaming, trying to massage the burning cramps out of our legs. Ben would survey the tormented objects of his instruction, laugh, then do his best impersonation of a man broken by age: hunched over, making painful, halting progress as he pushed an (imaginary) walker. Then Ben would stand erect, and look around at we suffering young folk. Merrily, in his thick Chinese accent, he'd admonish us:

You can pay now. Or you can pay later.

Those are the choices.




Thanks to Akshay Mahajan for the image of a garbage dump in Phnom Penh; to Amber Case for the image of a server room after a fire at Western Washington University; and to Matthew Felix Sun for the image of his painting At Home.



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Chancellor Katehi, Athens Polytechnic, and ... Janet Jackson?

In a post of Tuesday titled Athens Polytechnic comes to UC Davis, John Quiggin cites a report published in February of this year that became the basis to abolish a law establishing "university asylum" in Greece. Until it was abolished, university asylum restricted the ability of police to enter university campuses in that nation.

No matter what an American thinks of such a law, or its abolition -- whether or not said American knows much about the social and political context in which a "university asylum" law was established in Greece (I don't) -- it's got to catch your eye that one of the authors of this report from the International Advisory Committee on Greek Higher Education was Linda Katehi, currently the Chancellor at UC Davis.

Yes, that UC Davis, the campus on which police doused sitting, unarmed, non-violent students with pepper spray late last week.



This came to my attention Tuesday via Facebook posts from people with whom I am or have been associated at UC Berkeley, as colleagues and/or as fellow-activists. I've seen it a few places since, but not in mainstream media. Co-authorship of the report is not listed on Chancellor Katehi's on-line CV, but that document appears to predate publication of the report. Blackout? Could people who care about news possibly think this is unimportant? Is the story a hoax? I'm guessing no, yes, & no, respectively, but YMMV.

Katehi's co-authorship of the report on Greek universities takes on startling significance when considered beside her tearful apology on Monday for UC Davis police officers' shocking misuse of this "defensive weapon" (a description of pepper spray given by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, according to yesterday's SF Chronicle).

Look at what the report to which Chancellor Katehi contributed, says:

The politicizing of universities -- and in particular, of students -- represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic. This contributes to the rapid deterioration of tertiary education.

I don't read Greek, so I didn't even open the MS-Word document copy of the original report linked from Quiggin's blog. The translated excerpt given above was provided by "a Greek friend" of Mr. Quiggin.

Another translation, also linked by Quiggin, was posted in April to Blogspot. The presentation in that post is poor, with some of the letters blacked-out by what looks like a wonky Blogspot theme, but the same sentence translated by Quiggin's friend can be recovered. I recovered it (just a bit of copy paste, nothing sneaky). The two data points, combined, give me some confidence that the translation is accurate. On notthemajorityopinion.blogspot.com, the sentence is translated as follows:

The politicization of the campuses -- and specifically the politicization of students -- represents a beyond-reasonable involvement in the political process. This is contributing to an accelerated degradation of higher education.

So.

Wow.

Politicization of students, citizens of their own nation, degrades higher education?

Really? In Greece? The cradle of democracy?

In Athens? Where Socrates held forth to his students, one of whom was Plato?

Should the students known as "The Greensboro Four" from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina have stayed in their dorms studying in 1964 rather than sit at a Woolworth's lunch counter where they were 'forbidden' to sit so that their courage could give a critical boost to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement? Would the authors of this report have had students sit out protest against the Vietnam War? Would they have had the South African high-school students who rebelled against that nation's apartheid regime in 1976 remain at their desks? Would they have had Chinese students who turned out by the tens of thousands in Tienanmen Square in 1989 remain docile in their classrooms?

The politicizing of universities -- and in particular, of students -- represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic. This contributes to the rapid deterioration of tertiary education.

And this from a Chancellor whose tearful apology of Monday referred to the Athens Polytechnic uprising of 17 Nov 1973 -- with apparent respect, as a bid for cred to her university's students, it seemed? A university-based uprising that resulted in a military junta piloting tanks -- tanks! -- onto campus to enforce the junta's rule ... when Katehi was a student at that university???

Okay, I've never even visited the country as a tourist, but I'm willing to allow for the possibility that my media-filtered perception could be true. Maybe it is the case that Greek politics get really volatile really quickly ... but still. Was Chancellor Katehi leaking crocodile tears on Monday? Or was she realizing how far she'd fallen from where she'd once been?



This is a campus leader whose co-authorship of the report of the International Advisory Committee on Greek Higher Education suggests pretty clearly that she doesn't believe students on a university campus have any business mixing education and engaged citizenship (a.k.a., political involvement). Not any longer she doesn't, whatever her position might have been in 1973.

How far is it from Katehi's current political position to setting campus policy that directs campus police to meet campus protest with disproportionate force?

It's almost enough to lead a person to theorize conspiracies.

Is she the Chancellor her tearful speech suggests? Or is she a reincarnation of Janet Jackson? Not the Janet Jackson who was the victim of wardrobe malfunction. I'm talking about the Janet Jackson of 1986. The Janet Jackson who sang I wanna be the one in control...






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When authorities equate disobedience with violence

Much has been written about the Occupy movements in San Francisco's East Bay Area, but I think there's still room for further exploration of the core principles at stake in the relations of government (broadly speaking) to the Occupy protests. I'll frame this exploration with a remarkable stream of morphing statements emanating from the office of UC Berkeley's Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau.

Many readers will already have seen on YouTube video showing riot-geared UC Police (UCPD) striking and swinging at unarmed, non-violent students on Wednesday of last week (9 Nov 2011). Frankly, I find this video almost unwatchable, but if you haven't seen it or its cousins yet, I'm afraid you should.

I wasn't at the scene of these beatings, so I'll defer to UCB Professor Celeste Langan, of the English Department, to contextualize the video. From her 13 Nov blog post Why I Got Arrested with Occupy Cal--and How:

The organizers of Occupy Cal asked those who were willing to stay and link arms to protect those who were attempting to set up the encampment; I chose to do so. I knew, both before and after the police gave orders to disperse, that I was engaged in an act of civil disobedience. I want to stress both of those words: I knew I would be disobeying the police order, and therefore subject to arrest; I also understood that simply standing, occupying ground, and linking arms with others who were similarly standing, was a form of non-violent, hence civil, resistance. I therefore anticipated that the police might arrest us, but in a similarly non-violent manner. When the student in front of me was forcibly removed, I held out my wrist and said "Arrest me! Arrest me!" But rather than take my wrist or arm, the police grabbed me by my hair and yanked me forward to the ground, where I was told to lie on my stomach and was handcuffed. The injuries I sustained were relatively minor--a fat lip, a few scrapes to the back of my palms, a sore scalp -- but also unnecessary and unjustified.

In shocking contrast, here is Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's initial description of what went down on Sproul Plaza, excerpted from e-mail sent to all faculty, students, and staff on 10 Nov 2011 (emphasis added):

We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control. [...] It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers' efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

There is no telling what the Chancellor was thinking. He was in Asia, distant from events, necessarily relying on his subordinates in the administration ... who seem to have misled him. Nonetheless, Birgeneau's equation of "linking arms" with "not non-violent" acts is a statement of principle, not an analysis of the events of 9 Nov. It is hard not to hold him responsible. Professor Langan takes the Chancellor to task eloquently on this point in the blog post from which I quoted, above.

Law Professor Jonathan Simon comments on this type of absurd equation of peaceful protest with criminal violence, in relation to Occupy Oakland and Occupy Wall Street (at Zuccotti Park), in his blog post Governing the Occupy Movement through Crime (also cross-posted as a UC Berkeley hosted post on politics and law):

In many cities, including most prominently Oakland and New York, tent encampments on public spaces by the Occupy Wall Street movement have been cleared in early morning raids by police (read about the Oakland situation here). This time, at least, police violence seems to have been minimal. But what is regrettable is the use by city leaders of the lame excuse that "crime" problems necessitated the end of the encampments. It may be that the Occupy Wall street movement must generate new meaningful actions to build its momentum, but the claims that the encampments were generating unacceptable levels of crime is both false and reflexive.

To the latter point first. The gist of the argument behind this blog, and the book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, is that political leaders facing a chronic legitimacy deficit since the late 1960s have frequently used protecting citizens from crime as the least problematic way of justifying the exercise of power.

I think that this business of beating non-violent protesters to protect (other) citizens can be boiled down to a simple sound byte: across the political spectrum of elected and appointed officials in the United States, from former POtUS George W. Bush to, in last week's unfortunate missive, Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau, authorities want us to believe that disobedience and violence are the same thing.

If this weren't a family blog, I'd say f*ck that sh*t.

When Chancellor Birgeneau returned from his trip to Asia, he wrote to the campus again. Four days later he'd begun to spin a very different tune. From his e-mail of 14 Nov to the campus community, excerpting for the sake of brevity:

[...] it was only yesterday that I was able to look at a number of the videos that were made of the protests on November 9.  These videos are very disturbing.  The events of last Wednesday are unworthy of us as a university community. [...]

Most certainly, we cannot condone any excessive use of force against any members of our community. I have asked Professor Jesse Choper, our former Dean of Law, and current Chair of the Police Review Board (PRB) to launch immediately a review of the police actions of last Wednesday and Thursday morning.  [...]

We believe that we can best move forward by granting amnesty from action under the Student Code of Conduct to all Berkeley students who were arrested and cited solely for attempting to block the police in removing the Occupy Cal encampment on Wednesday, November 9.  We will do so immediately.

I believe that as a campus community, we can and must join together and focus on our common goals - inducing the state to reinvest in public education, working to repeal Prop. 13, finding a way to reverse Prop. 209, and instituting reforms that will help California regain its status as the door to the American Dream through public higher education. [...] We share the aspirations of the Occupy movement for a better America.  I am confident that as a campus community we will find a peaceful and productive way forward.

As a watcher of Berkeley campus politics from my student days in the late 1970s through now (I am currently a staff employee at Cal), let me assure you that this is an extraordinary reversal for a Chancellor. Amnesty for student protestors is not granted easily or arbitrarily on our campus, or by this administration. I would not like to be the idjut who told Birgeneau-in-Asia that matters were so dire that he ought to conflate violence with peaceful civil disobedience. He's got to be pissed that he was forced to pull such a clumsy about-face. Maybe not as pissed as Professor Langan or student and community activists, but plenty angry nonetheless. Perhaps the object of his ire is UC Police Captain Margo Bennett, who emitted this same absurdity to the SF Chronicle in advance of Birgeneau's e-mail. Or perhaps she was toeing a line drawn by the same administrator who misled the Chancellor. We may never know.

On Tuesday (15 Nov) Occupy Cal called a general strike and a day of "Open University" instruction, in which professors and grad students were encouraged to hold their classes en plein air. Thousands of people turned out for discussions on Sproul Plaza, a "convergence" at noon (pictured in my photos here in this post, props to the band in the one a couple of paragraphs up for their punk-rock rendition of Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind). This mass of protestors held an afternoon march through downtown to Berkeley City College. Back at Sproul in the evening, a large general assembly voted to re-establish the encampment on Sproul Plaza. Then Professor Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, gave the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture to at least 5,000 peaceful attendees -- some put the crowd as high as 10,000. (It was not Reich's strongest speech, but that's another blog post; see his 6 Big GOP Lies About The Economy on YouTube for Reich at his finest.)

But what I really want to circle back to is the email message -- a third one now in the course of five days! -- sent by Berkeley's intrepid Chancellor at 5:07 pm on the day of the general strike, Tuesday. In its entirety this time:

To the Campus Community:

We all share the distress and anger at the State of California's disinvestment in public higher education.

IN THE SPIRIT OF TODAY'S DAY OF ACTION, I AM URGENTLY CALLING ON THE POLITICAL LEADERSHIP FROM SACRAMENTO TO COME TO CAMPUS TO ENGAGE WITH ME AND STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES IN A PUBLIC FORUM TO DEBATE THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION.

The issues require bold action and time is short. I will inform you of the time and place as soon as possible.

Robert J. Birgeneau,
Chancellor 

The all-caps are his.

Yes, the Chancellor is calling for a forum and a debate. It's not a "radical" tactic by any stretch of the imagination; but the call is in keeping with an academic milieu, with his leadership position, and with Birgeneau's 2009 call in the Washington Post, co-authored with Vice-Chancellor Frank Yeary, for deep recommitment to public higher education, funded by the Federal government.

Let's hope also that his latest call for "bold action" signals the Chancellor's reassessment of his absurd conflation of disobedience with violence, of five days before.

Related posts on One Finger Typing:
The Occupy Movement and UC Berkeley's Free Speech Monument
Bioneers and Occupy Wall Street
Birth of a movement?

Henry IV and Berkeley G.O.P.'s 'diversity bake sale'

I was out of town last week when the student group Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) hosted their so-called "Diversity Bake Sale." You might have heard about it via Reuters, the NY Times, FoxNews, the LA Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the U.K.'s Telegraph, or NPR ... or just about any other media vehicle you might track. If you missed the story, the gist is this:

To protest California's SB 185, currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature or veto now that it has passed both the state Assembly's and Senate's scrutiny, the BCR sold cupcakes and cookies priced on a sliding scale. As the NY Times reported the Facebook announcement of the event, "the group listed the price for a pastry at $2 for white students, $1.50 for Asian students, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women of all races were promised a 25-cent discount."

The intention, say campus Republicans, was to satirize differential treatment (cupcake prices, university admission criteria) based on race. Get it?

As one student put it in an Associated Press video posted to YouTube, "I think they're kind of missing the point."

SB 185 amends Section 66205 of California's Education Code such that "the University of California may, and the California State University may, consider race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin, and household income, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions, so long as no preference is given." The purpose, as the bill states, is to "enroll a student body that meets high academic standards and reflects the cultural, racial, geographic, economic, and social diversity of California."

For more, follow the links given above ... there's little need to repeat last week's news blitz.

I'd heard rumor of BCR's planned event before I headed north to Ashland, Oregon, where I'd reserved tickets for an adaptation of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid, followed by Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV and Julius Caesar. (I blogged about the two Shakespeare plays in advance of seeing them, in Shakespeare, power, theme in literature a couple weeks ago.)

The news went national on my way up Interstate 5, and caught up to me at the breakfast table at the McCloud River Inn, a sweet B&B at the foot of Mt. Shasta. I mentioned to other guests at the inn that I hail from Berkeley, and conversation turned to that morning's NY Times article on the bake sale brouhaha. (It's the 21st century. There's no such thing as "getting away," am I right? The fellow who'd read the article was an alum, and lives in Marin. He and his father were up north to fish for trout.)

I caught up with a fraction of the story's coverage after returning home, and am a little amazed at the extent to which, as that unnamed student on Sproul Plaza said, "they're kind of missing the point."

Yammerers who rail against consideration of factors aimed at balancing "high academic standards" with selection of a student body that "reflects the cultural, racial, geographic, economic, and social diversity of California" ignore fundamental truths that have a great deal to do with university admissions, including these two:

(1) there's no such thing as an objective assessment of merit; and,
(2) the present is the leading edge of what's gone before, a.k.a. "history"

Does the first need explaining? Does anybody out there really believe that high school GPAs and standardized tests are anything but a crude measure of a narrow subset of the constellation of skills, strengths, and motivations that qualify a person to engage in a course of post-secondary study, or that predict success in the endeavor?

Limits inherent in these quantitative measures is the reason that selective institutions of higher ed consider other factors than the numbers on a transcript or a College Board scorecard. By way of example, let's take a look at Harvard University, a selective institution of higher ed if ever there was one. On Harvard's admissions site, as many ambitious high school students and their parents already know, are a few paragraphs describing "What We Seek." Here it is, as it appeared on Harvard's web site yesterday afternoon:

Applicants can distinguish themselves for admission in a number of ways. Some show unusual academic promise through experience or achievements in study or research. Many are "well rounded" and have contributed in various ways to the lives of their schools or communities. Others are "well lopsided" with demonstrated excellence in a particular endeavor—academic, extracurricular or otherwise. Still others bring perspectives formed by unusual personal circumstances or experiences.

Academic accomplishment in high school is important, but we also seek people with enthusiasm, creativity and strength of character.

Most admitted students rank in the top 10–15 percent of their graduating classes, having taken the most rigorous secondary school curriculum available to them.

A lot of wiggle room there, eh? And why is that? Because the folks at Harvard University know better than to rely on narrow, fantastical conceits like objective measures of merit. In the real world it's complicated, as a wealthy and well-known Harvard alum put it on his social networking platform once upon a time.

As for the second fundamental truth? History?

Here's a passage from one of Shakespeare's history plays, 2 Henry IV, one of the works I happened to see performed last week. In the Elizabethan theatre at Ashland this passage struck me as a dead-on description of why it's ridiculous to pretend that an applicant for college admission exists in a social and historical vacuum. From OpenShakespeare.org, this is Henry IV speaking on his deathbed to the soon-to-be-crowned Henry V, his son. Apologies to the Bard for paring his poetry in order to make a point:

God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee it shall descend with bitter quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth.
[...] and now my death
Changes the mode; for what in me was purchased,
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the garland wear'st successively.

Nobody succeeds solely on individual merit. Not Prince Harry, nor any of the 142,235 Fall 2011 applicants to the University of California. We exist -- and are nourished, or not -- in a social milieu. In the quoted passage, Henry IV, who deposed his predecessor in order to ascend to the throne of England, explains to Hank, Jr. that possession of the crown for which Henry IV cast aside, imprisoned, and (it is thought) starved Richard II, will appear to be the new normal when it passes in peaceful lineal succession to his son.

The prince replies to his father:

My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be [...]

Um. Really? Daddy stole the crown, passes it to his son, and now Junior owns it 'honestly'? Sure, Harry.....

It's a messier and less precise business to weigh the lives of young commoners than it is to study and cite the much-told histories of monarchs. But that's the messy, imprecise task of university admissions officers. And those admissions officers would be making less-informed decisions if they were not allowed to consider applicants' origins in a culture that has accrued centuries of advantage to individual members of social groups based on factors that have nothing to do with intrinsic, individual merit but everything to do with social milieu -- "race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin, and household income" would be some of these factors.

"Indeed," says Harvard's admissions web site, "the Admissions Committee may respond favorably to evidence that a candidate has overcome significant obstacles, financial or otherwise."

It's complicated.

Whatever the intentions of the yammerers, reductive demands to narrow university admissions criteria boil down to maintaining historical advantages conferred on or seized by groups, not earned by individual merit.

Elizabeth Warren, candidate for the U.S. Senate in the state of Massachusetts, spoke brilliantly on the absurdity of G.O.P. 'gimme, it's mine, I earned it' politics -- of which this diversity bake sale kerfuffle is but a sad and pathetic variant -- a couple of weeks ago. Here's the quote, or watch the video below:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody! You built a factory out there -- good for you! But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory [...] because of work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific [...] God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Whether it's wealth or it's great grades in high school, the BCR and the party with which they are affiliated are missing the point in a big, big way. Sorry, Republikidz: you can't sell your cupcake and eat it too.







Thanks to Lobsterthermidor via WikiMedia Commons, for the contemporary image of Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry IV) as he claims the throne of England in 1399.

Advice to a new student at Cal

A woman with whom I went to high school sent a note the other day via Facebook. Her son had just been accepted to UC Berkeley; freshman admission decisions were posted a few days before. It's no mean accomplishment to gain admission to Cal, and my former classmate has good reason to be proud. Her son is "thrilled" and was watching my correspondence with his mom "with a big smile on his face." He has every right to be proud too.

But in her role as a mom my classmate also expressed concern about the potentially overwhelming size of the public university for which I work. (She herself studied at Stanford, a perfectly respectable little university, about which I will make no disparaging remarks ... that would be childish.)

She asked my advice about how her son ought to "navigate" the school in order not to find himself lost among the tens of thousands of students. That's a good question. So -- as an alum, a community member of several decades, and a campus employee -- I offered two pieces of advice. Now that I've had a few days to ask around about the question, I've appended another to the end of this post.


-- Two Pieces of Advice --

Find small communities

Here's the thing about big schools: nobody knows everybody. Nobody does everything. What people do occurs in communities of common interest and activity. Ditto for who people know.

A new student might be fortunate to fall into friendship with people living in his or her freshman dorm; if s/he's really lucky, s/he'll become good pals with a roommate. There's easy, instant community. Works for some, not for all.

There are plenty of other possibilities. Maybe my friend's son will pledge a fraternity. That's never been an interesting possibility in my world, but ... different strokes. As it happens, a mutual high school friend of mine and the mom who wrote last week attended Cal and joined a sorority. It wasn't what you might think: there are plenty of Greek houses beyond the Animal House stereotype. Our mutual friend loved it. She's still great friends with some of her sorority sisters, women she makes a point to see every year, more than a quarter century after we graduated.

Yep. I'm that old.

Anyway. More possibilities:

Community can be found in all manner of places, not just among people with whom one lives. Maybe my friend's son will get involved in campus politics, or national politics, or international politics, or Berkeley city politics (which often pass for international politics in the news media). Maybe he'll audition for an a capella group, or play intramural sports, or join the University Symphony Orchestra or a Jazz ensemble, or learn to play the carillon mounted in our Campenille. Maybe he'll worm his way onto the staff of the Daily Cal or the Heuristic Squelch (Cal's humor magazine) or contribute to the Berkeley Fiction Review or Berkeley Poetry Review. The Cal Corps Public Service Center offers opportunities to tutor kids in public schools in the East Bay, challenge poverty, and get involved in the Peace Corps among dozens of possibilities rife with opportunities to form community with undergrads committed to working for a better world; over 4,000 students volunteer in any given year according to the campus Facts at a Glance web page.

The big picture? Come fall term, the campus will be his oyster.

My friend's son and every other incoming member of the class of 2015 should think about how to factor life outside classes into a well-rounded schedule. With a bazillion options out there, the first extracurricular groups and activities a new student explores won't necessarily be the one s/he chooses to stick with. So my meta-advice on finding small communities is this: it's important to feel free to change your mind. You're in college to explore. Don't let anybody stop you!


Go to office hours

I was not a joiner as an undergraduate. Yes, I made friends, mostly through the good luck of who ended up on my dormitory floors the years I lived in Putnam Hall ... and there were friends of friends too. But I took almost none of that advice about finding groups and activities when I was enrolled at Cal. I studied. Frankly, I was something of a nerd, what can I say? Books are still my friends!

Importantly, though, I did go to my professors' office hours. A lot.

Here's the thing, which kind of shocked me at the time: most students didn't visit their professors even though all comers were welcome. Were my classmates intimidated? Too busy partying? Did they fail to get how valuable an opportunity we'd been granted to spend time with smart and articulate faculty?

Beyond the shock of realizing most undergrads didn't bother with office hours, it shocked me to discover that professors and graduate teaching assistants were hungry for students who wanted to talk about the subjects we were studying. Now, mind you, this is not the same thing as students who want to talk about how they deserved a better grade on that paper, or about precisely which material would be tested on a midterm exam. No. The faculty were not so eager to help students limit studying to a lazy minimum. The faculty were and are teaching because they're truly, seriously, deeply into their fields. They want to talk about their work.

For example:

I took a creative writing course from the late poet Thom Gunn, then a craggy middle-aged man who came to class in a leather motorcycle jacket and spoke with a soft but assured British accent. I didn't know much about who he was when I signed up for the course. At the time, there weren't many creative writing courses on offer in the English department, even for students in the major. He was teaching one of them.

Partway through the term I figured I'd look Professor Gunn up in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I found his work in a section that began on page 2,483 of my edition, deep into the "still living" section of the tome. I was puzzled by some of the references in Moly, a poem written from the perspective of one of Odyssesus' shipmates in Homer's epic, whom Circe has transformed into swine.

So I showed up one day during Gunn's office hours and after a bit of small talk told him I wanted to ask a few questions about his poems. To my deeper-than-Moly puzzlement, he expressed surprise -- and clearly felt flattered -- that I'd bothered to seek out his work and read it attentively. He was warm and forthcoming, and eager to talk about language and resonance in poetry.

I'm not sure I appreciated what a rare and fine experience that was until years after the fact, but I sure am glad I put myself in its way.


-- And another thing --

I had brunch with a first cousin and his daughter over the weekend. The daughter, my first cousin once-removed, is a junior at Cal. She's studying art practice. When she's not buried in projects and papers, she's a nimble conversationalist in wholly enjoyable coffee klatches at a café we both like, across the street from the campus. I told her about the friend whose son will arrive as a freshman in August, and asked what advice she would give from her perspective.

I was gratified to hear that my own suggestions seemed on the mark to a current student. And then my cousin recommended something I didn't know about: Freshman Seminars. From the program's website:

UC Berkeley’s Freshman and Sophomore Seminars provide an unparalleled opportunity for faculty members and small groups of lower-division students to explore a scholarly topic of mutual interest together, following an often spontaneous flow of dialogue and interchange in the spirit of learning for its own sake. By taking a seminar a student becomes an active member of Berkeley’s intellectual community. [...] Students are encouraged to choose their seminars based on the pull of intellectual curiosity, a desire to explore enticing and even unfamiliar realms.

Not something we had when I was in school (the program started in 1992). Back in the old days, freshmen and sophmores longed wistfully for the day we'd have enough units to be permitted to enroll in upper division courses, which is where seminars offered escape from lecture halls filled with one or two or five hundred fellow students. Yes, we had small discussion sections led by graduate student teaching assistants, and some of those were terrific ... but it would have been double-plus-terrific to interact with faculty around a seminar table instead of via binoculars and the post-lecture scrum around the podium.

Thanks, cousin, for the tip.


So in summary:

1. Seek out your communities.
2. For the love of knowledge, visit your professors during office hours.
3. Don't miss your chance to enroll in a Freshman seminar.

Welcome to Cal!




Thanks to "Introvert" and WikiMedia Commons for the image of the UC Berkeley campus, circa 2005.