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If you thought the end of the school year meant no more grass-roots student agitation until fall, you thought wrong. Not gonna happen. Not this year. Yesterday students in California and Wisconsin, two of the country’s most active states, held targeted protests, and there’s more on the horizon.
In California, students at UCLA staged a campus march and sit-in to protest plans to suspend free tutoring services at the university’s Covel Commons. The group, who had timed their action to get noisy only during scheduled breaks between final exams, met with a vice chancellor and took steps to keep the pressure on in the weeks to come.
More on what’s happening in Wisconsin later today…
Stockton, California resident Kenneth Wright says a team of federal agents sent by the Department of Education busted down his door without warning yesterday morning, handcuffing him in the back of a cop car for more than six hours. And, he says, it was all because his estranged wife defaulted on her student loans.
The feds, meanwhile, deny that the raid was conducted over a student loan default, but confirm that the squad was sent by the DOE. The department’s Office of the Inspector General, a spokesperson says, “conducts about 30-35 search warrants a year on issues such as bribery, fraud, and embezzlement of federal student aid funds.”
A Republican-backed voter ID bill, one of the most stringent in the nation, passed Wisconsin’s State Assembly last night. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where it seems assured of passage.
Wisconsin is one of a long list of states considering similar legislation this year. Though voter fraud in Wisconsin is minimal — sources say only twenty votes were cast illegally in the state’s most recent election — the law would impose new barriers to voting among students, the elderly, and the poor, all of which are traditionally Democratic constituencies. At a time of massive budget cutbacks, moreover, the legislation carries an estimated $7 million pricetag.
One last-minute change to the legislation makes its aims crystal clear — though it was originally drafted to be implemented next spring, supporters rewrote it to take effect immediately on passage … just in time, in other words, to be deployed in the upcoming special elections which will decide the fate of state legislators targeted for recall over their recent budget votes.
Nearly a dozen students occupied a portion of the Rutgers administration building overnight in defiance of an administration that cut off their access to food and water yesterday evening. The group was able to sneak supplies in via a makeshift pulley system, and say they have no intention of leaving until their demands are met.
The group is demanding that Rutgers’ president endorse a tuition freeze, that new scholarships be put in place for underprivileged and first-generation students, that transcript fees be eliminated, and that the university increase “support for the rights of ALL University affiliated workers.” In addition, the group is calling on Rutgers to implement a new shared governance structure for the university. (A detailed explanation of the demands can be found at the above link.)
The occupiers have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and the For Student Power blog has been liveblogging their action since yesterday afternoon.
This story is the best short introduction I’ve yet seen to the “New Badger Partnership” — University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin’s proposal to split Madison, the UW flagship, off from the rest of the University of Wisconsin system.
Martin’s plan, negotiated in secret with Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor Scott Walker, would lop $125 million off of UW Madison’s budget, but give it far more operational flexibility on issues ranging from how to spend state money to how much to charge for tuition. The plan, opponents say, is a recipe for privatization of one of the nation’s great public universities.
The plan needs to be approved by the Wisconsin state legislature, and the prospects of that seem have dimmed recently — battles over the state budget and collective bargaining have battered the governor’s standing in the state, and it’s not clear that his party has the stomach for another big fight. Opposition to the plan from the university’s system-wide board of regents is a further barrier to its adoption.
But even if the plan is dropped from the current budget, it’s sure to return in the future, and its prospects are being watched closely by higher education advocates and analysts all over the country. At a time when the principles that have governed public higher education in the United States for generations are increasingly under fire, the fate of the University of Wisconsin is sure to have implications from New York to California and beyond.
Students who oppose the New Badger Partnership will be holding a mock auction of Bascom Hall, the UW Madison administration building, this afternoon, with more actions planned for the rest of the week. I’ll be following the story here, so keep checking back.
studentactivism.net 
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