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Britain’s Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, seem likely to sweep into power in Britain next spring, and today a London newspaper is reporting that they may bring with them a doubling of tuition fees for British university students.
Undergraduate fees in Britain are currently capped at £3,225 a year, about $5,100, but the Tories’ chief higher education official was quoted this morning as saying that he’s open to raising that cap to as much as £7,000 — more than $11,000. Such an increase would dwarf even the massive hikes that are currently being proposed in the University of California system here in the United States.
The center-left Labour Party has led Britain’s government since 1997, but recent polling has shown a strong and relatively stable lead for the Conservatives. By law, new parliamentary elections must be held by June of next year.
This spring, the city Providence, Rhode Island announced plans to impose a $150 per semester tax on students attending the city’s colleges and universities, and now the city of Pittsburgh is moving in the same direction.
The Providence student tax is still working its way through the Rhode Island state legislature, along with a companion law that would allow the city to impose some direct taxes on private universities.
That companion bill reveals the motvation behind these new laws — to go after students if you can’t reach the universities themselves. Major private universities have enormous power, and they benefit from huge tax breaks. Taking them on directly is tricky, and carries potential bad consequences, so Providence and Pittsburgh are hoping students present a softer target.
October 14 update: See the comments to this post for a more detailed discussion of the pros and cons of the student tax.
Nearly three hundred Berkeley students kept the campus’s Anthropology library open from its scheduled closing time on Friday afternoon until 24 hours later, in protest of a new policy closing campus libraries on Saturdays.
Eighty students stayed overnight in the library, and they were joined by others in the morning. Some of the group studied, while others held teach-ins on the campus budget during the day on Saturday.
There are more than twenty libraries on the Berkeley campus, and administrators have eliminated weekend hours for at but two of them as a cost-saving measure.
October 13 update: Good on-the-scene report on the library takeover from Alternet. Here’s a taste:
What characterizes this movement (or maybe, what characterizes this as a movement), is the readiness of students, staff, and faculty to mobilize, as well as a diversity of tactics and strategies, coming from a myriad of organizations, bodies, coalitions, and mutually interested individuals who may be involved in none of those at all. This is the face of a new student movement, a movement invested in our spaces of learning, and one which demands to control the terms and conditions of our education.
Here’s a story with a happy ending.
Two weeks ago, Jacob Miller, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, was arrested on campus. His crime? Chalking.
Miller, along with a number of other students, had been writing slogans and drawings on the university’s sidewalks in chalk to promote a rally protesting the commercialization of higher education. A university employee called the police, and Miller was arrested for criminal damage and disturbing an educational institution.
The two charges were each class one misdemeanors, and carried a combined maximum penalty of a year in prison and $5,000 in fines. Miller had been identified through video surveillance footage.
The arrest sparked a huge uproar on campus. The following weekend a group of students began buying sidewalk chalk in bulk and handing it out by the bucketful on campus. Early on Monday morning a Poli Sci major named Evan Lisull was was arrested for writing the slogans “Chalk is Speech” and “Freedom of Expression” on campus sidewalks.
Lisull’s arrest seemed likely to escalate the situation further, but instead it brought the university to its senses. On Monday afternoon UA president Robert Shelton instructed campus police to drop all charges against the two students, and declared that the university would no longer treat chalking as a criminal matter.
UA said at the time that it would in the future handle chalking complaints “as possible Code of Conduct violations through the Dean of Students Office,” but soon it was in full retreat, announcing this week that chalkers would not face disciplinary consequences of any kind.
Chalk one up for … well, you know.
FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — is on the right side of the issues a fair chunk of the time. Their (right-wing) politics aren’t mine, by any stretch, but when they’re beating the drums for freedom of expression and due process on campus, they’re doing important work.
I just wish they could do that important work better.
Here’s the latest example. Back in early August, Professor Thomas Thibeault of East Georgia College was called to the office of EGC president John Bryant Black. By Thibeault’s account, Black demanded that he resign from the college that morning, and threatened to make public Thibeault’s “long history of sexual harassment” if he did not.
Thibeault refused to resign and was escorted from the campus, under threat of arrest if he ever returned. In the two months since, Thibeault says, he has not been given a hearing, been permitted to defend himself against the sexual harassment charges, or even been told what exactly he’s being charged with, despite the fact that Black convened a faculty committee to investigate him.
This is seriously screwed up. If Thibeault’s version of events is true (and neither Black nor EGC have publicly disputed it), the EGC administration has behaved shamefully — attempting to bully him into resigning with vague and ominous threats, then refusing to allow him a timely opportunity to be informed of, and respond to, the charges that have led to his removal from the classroom. Bravo to FIRE for shining a light on this situation.
…And that’s where I stop praising them. Here’s why.
Two days before Thibeault was brought into Black’s office, he attended a faculty training session on sexual harassment, where he made some remarks from the floor. In FIRE’s gloss, “he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, ‘what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?’ ”
FIRE sees this as “Kafkaesque irony,” saying that “Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out — at a sexual harassment training seminar — that the school’s sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused.” But Thibeault’s own account of his remarks makes it clear that FIRE’s summary of his comments is woefully inadequate.
Here’s how Thibeault himself describes the “scenario” he presented at the sexual harassment training:
Last week two students were talking to me in the hallway after class. One student said that she didn’t want to go to a professor’s office because he looked down her cleavage. The woman was wearing clothing that was specifically designed to draw attention to her cleavage. She even sported a tattoo on her chest, but I didn’t get close enough to read it. The cleavage was also decorated in some sort of sparkly material, glitter or dried barbecue sauce. I couldn’t tell. I told the student that she shouldn’t complain, if she drew such attention to herself. The other female student then said, and I hope you’re not offended by her actual words, ‘if you don’t want anyone looking at your titties, I’ll lend you a T-shirt. I have one in the truck.’ The first student then said, ‘No. I’m proud of the way I look.’ I left the conversation at that point.
Let’s break this down, shall we?
- A female student told Thibeault that another professor’s habit of staring at her breasts made her uncomfortable.
- Thibeault told her, in front of another student, that she had no right to complain because she was dressed provocatively.
- A week later, Thibeault recounted this story to a large group of faculty members at a public meeting, complete with identifying details of, and gratuitously offensive comments about, the student’s appearance.
- To top it all off, he presented the student’s complaint about the other professor as an example of a “ridiculous” sexual harassment charge.
According to the EGC faculty handbook, by the way, “conduct of a sexual nature” that “has the purpose or effect of … creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive academic environment” is sexual harassment.
FIRE has all this background. But they chose not to mention it.
And this is why I find FIRE so frustrating. It’s not “Kafkaesque irony” that Thibeault was hauled in to the president’s office on a sexual harassment complaint two days after the training. It’s not ironic at all. It’s not even surprising. By Thibeault’s own account, he made wildly inappropriate sexualized comments to a female student, told that student that it was her own fault if a professor leered at her while she was wearing a low-cut top, and then shared this anecdote at a faculty meeting in a bizarrely insulting way. (Barbecue sauce? Come on.)
I don’t know whether any of this is actionable as sexual harassment. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what Thibeault’s history is, or whether the university’s claims that he has a “long history” of misbehavior have any merit at all. As I said at the top of this post, I’m inclined to believe that Thibeault has been treated unfairly, and that EGC has violated his right to academic due process.
But this whole incident serves as yet another reminder to me that when I see a piece on FIRE’s site, I can’t just take their analysis and run with it. I can’t even assume that they’re presenting the basic outline of the story in a fair and complete way. I have to research and fact-check the whole thing from the beginning. And because they break so much news — because they are out there digging these cases up — I have to ignore their stuff if I can’t find independent corroboration of their claims.
Because they just can’t be trusted to tell a story straight.
And that sucks.
Note: As I indicated above by linking to Thibeault’s statement at FIRE’s website, and again by saying that “FIRE has all this background,” FIRE did post that statement as a PDF document, and link to it from other documents. I never intended to suggest otherwise, and I’m happy to make that clear.
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