Author Archive

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) this week introduced the Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act of 2010, a proposed federal law that would require American colleges and universities to enact rules against the harassment of their students by students, faculty, or staff. The bill is named for a gay Rutgers student who killed himself this September following a campaign of online harassment by his dorm roommate.

The Clementi bill would mandate that all higher education institutions receiving federal funds create policies for the reporting, adjudication, and punishments of acts of harassment, as well as anti-harassment programs on campus. It specifically targets harassment “based on a student’s actual or perceived race, color, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion” and gives specific attention to internet-based harassment.

In addition, the bill would authorize the Secretary of Education to award grants to institutions in support of anti-harassment campaigns on campus.

The text of the bill can be found here, on Senator Lautenberg’s website.

The regents of the University of California approved an eight percent hike in undergraduate student fees yesterday, as expected. The tally was 10-5, with student regent Jesse Cheng and California’s Lieutenant Governor among those voting in opposition.

Yesterday’s hike is the fourth in three years at the university, and it brings total fees to more than $12,000 — a 224% increase over the last decade. Just one regent voted in opposition to last year’s fee increase.

Also on the regents’ agenda yesterday were the approval of a number of new administrative hires. One of those, a vice chancellor at UC Davis, is slated to receive an annual salary of $370,000 — a $142,600 increase over that of his or her immediate predecessor in the position. In addition, this hire will receive a signing bonus of some $111,000.

Update | One more thing I forgot to mention — the regents also formally changed the name of UC’s primary “fee” to “tuition,” abandoning the longstanding but increasingly preposterous fiction that UC is tuition-free.

A few moments ago, I replied to a commenter on my Huffington Post piece about yesterday’s incident in which a University of California police officer pointed a gun at a group of student protesters with the following:

Ultimately the issue here isn’t this one officer’s actions. That wasn’t the focus of my essay, and it’s not the focus of my concern. The issue is the University of California’s systematic undermining and marginalizing of legitimate student protest, and the radicalizing effects that this strategy has had on activists and campus police alike.

Yesterday five UC students were threatened with arrest for chalking on their campus. Today several UC students were cited for putting up posters that included an image of the officer who drew his gun yesterday. Is this a sane way for a university to behave? Is this an approach to legitimate student protest that makes any sense at all?

I say it’s not. I say it’s dangerous.

Once again, as I have so many times in the last twenty-four hours, I find myself saying something I can’t believe I have to say: Chalking your campus to announce an upcoming event is a legitimate form of expression. Putting up caustic satirical posters criticizing university policies is not a crime.

California residents oppose fee hikes at the state’s public colleges and universities by a two-to-one margin, according to a new poll, and 57% believe that state spending on public higher education should be given a boost.

The poll, released yesterday, found that 62% of Californians oppose raising tuition in the UC and Cal State systems and the state’s community colleges, with just 35% supporting such increases.

Nearly half (49%) of all respondents said they would be willing to pay more in taxes to support higher education in California, up eight points in just a year.

The poll was conducted in late October and early November, before the University of California and California State systems announced plans to raise fees for the 2011-12 academic year. The UC Board of Regents will be voting on an $822 fee increase later today.

For nearly two years now the University of California has been criminalizing peaceful student protest. University officials have arrested activists as they slept quietly in a campus building, resting after a day of hosting workshops and seminars during a pre-finals study period. Campus police have used batons and tasers and pepper spray on protesters who meant them no harm and posed no physical threat. The university has distorted and abused its student conduct policies, deploying judicial sanction to suppress lawful dissent.

And all the while the dismantling of public higher education in California has rolled on. The state’s governor and legislature have at times responded to the activists’ passionate defense of their institution, but the institution itself has not.

The administration of the University of California has hollowed out the space at the heart of the university where productive dialogue and robust disputation should reside. They have thwarted students’ efforts to devise a creative, productive response to the current crisis, to build common cause in the shaping of the educational community. (The faculty, meanwhile, have mostly stayed silent and disengaged.)

And now a campus police officer has drawn his gun and pointed it at students who, seeing no alternative, were — in the words of Berkeley’s own son — putting their bodies upon the wheels and upon the apparatus, trying to make it stop.

The chief of the UC San Francisco Police Department says the students took the officer’s baton. But video footage shows that officer standing alone, apart from the crowd, letting the baton fall from his own hand as he draws his pistol. She says that a student beat the officer with that baton. But video footage of the five-second scuffle that preceded the officer’s act shows no such beating. She says someone yelled “take the gun.” But video footage shows no such aggression in the moments before the gun was drawn, just confusion that turned to shock and fear as the weapon appeared.

And yet the chief of the UC San Francisco Police Department says the officer who drew his gun and pointed it at a group of rowdy but fundamentally non-violent student protesters showed “great restraint.”

Forty years ago, in the spring of 1970, law enforcement agents twice opened fire at angry student demonstrators on American college campuses — first at Kent State University in Ohio, and then, ten days later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Six students were killed. Twenty-one others were wounded by gunfire. One remains paralyzed to this day.

In the wake of those killings Richard Nixon appointed a presidential commission to study the crisis in the nation’s universities, and when that commission published its report a few months later, it called the Kent State and Jackson State shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” A nation “driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth,” the commission declared, “is a nation on the edge of chaos. A nation that has lost the allegiance of its youth is a nation that has lost part of its future.”

California in 2010 is not Ohio or Mississippi in 1970, of course. Two years ago I would have scoffed at such a comparison.

I’m not scoffing today.

Today I’m worried. Today I’m sad. Today I’m angry.